As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable.

This role goes beyond the US State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information; it includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured.

It also includes the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.

• READ MORE: Global Sumud Flotilla urges probe of US complicity in members’ abduction and torture by Israel
• Kidnapped Kiwi Gaza flotilla detainee condemns brutal Israeli torture

The US-funded ‘torture ship’
The vessel at the centre of many severe abuses, including systematic torture and sexual assault, was a converted naval landing craft that participants have come to call the “torture ship”.

The vessel is the INS Nahshon, built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding (a subsidiary of Bollinger Shipyards) and fully financed under the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme.

Delivered to the occupation navy in 2023, this ship was used as a floating prison during the illegal April 29 and 30 interceptions off the coast of Crete, where at least 30 participants were injured severely enough that they had to be taken to the hospital.

Brutality inside ‘The beating container’
During the vessel’s deployment, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container.

Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalised each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” said humanitarian activist Yassine Benjelloun, who was also tasered multiple times.

“What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Megan Marie Dominguez, a US activist, was thrown into the “beating container”, struck with sufficient force to render her nearly unconscious, then passed to a second set of soldiers armed with tasers and what she describes as “other toys to beat people up with.”

Dr Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on board, described a medical situation unprecedented in her professional experience.

She documented:

• 35 participants with fractures, including broken ribs, shoulder dislocations, and humerus fractures.
• Severe head injuries, concussions, and eye/ear trauma.
• At least two individuals forcibly injected with unidentified substances that left them drowsy and disoriented.
• 14 cases of sexual assault, as well as the systematic, deliberate removal of Muslim women’s hijabs.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” said Dr Jihan. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and the most horrible feeling that I have.

“It was so devastating.”

Dr Jihan: ‘I was punched, kicked and choked” by the Israeli military Video: News Straits Times

American munitions used against civilians
The weapons deployed on board were also American-made. Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI).

These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.

A structural policy of complicity — the weapons.
The ship. The diplomatic silence. None of this was accidental. Former US State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest over US arms transfers to Israel, is unequivocal:

“Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorised by law.

“INS Nahshon’s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.

“When this sale was authorised, US officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform. The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 [in which 10 Turkish people were killed by Israeli forces], but is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse — whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

This is not an isolated incident or the failure of a single administration; it is a structural, bipartisan commitment by the United States government to prioritise its strategic relations above the protection of its own citizens and its own laws.

By using a separately constructed, “broken” vetting process, the State Department routinely circumvents the 1997 Leahy Law, which strictly prohibits US military assistance to foreign units credibly accused of gross human rights violations like torture and rape.

While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the US government continues to look away.

Demands to the United States government
The israeli regime continues to commit genocide using US-built ships and US-made weapons.

The torture of US citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional US support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access.

The Global Sumud Flotilla calls on the United States government to take immediate action:

• Open immediate hearings into the deployment of FMF-funded military assets, including INS Nahshon, against US citizens.
• Suspend all arms transfers to the israeli regime pending that investigation.
• Enforce the Leahy Law without exemption or special processes for the regime.
• Provide a full accounting of every consular and distress request filed by families of detained participants that was dismissed or ignored.
• Investigate the use of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) munitions, produced under Department of Defense (DOD) contracts, against unarmed civilian humanitarians.
• End unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.

The empire’s war on activism and journalism continues to escalate as the Trump administration targets leftwing streamer Hasan Piker and antiwar activist Medea Benjamin for the “crime” of bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba.

This is yet another act of aggression in the same onslaught that has seen inconvenient truth-telling and expressions of moral clarity attacked and undermined throughout the Western world at every juncture in recent years.

It is not separate from the persecution of Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

It is not separate from the steadily increasing escalations of internet censorship we’ve seen in the wake of Gaza, Ukraine, covid, January 6, the 2016 US presidential election, and any other excuse the imperial narrative managers could find.

Taking medical supplies to pediatric hospitals in Cuba is now a crime? Saving the lives of babies is a crime? This administration is beyond grotesque. https://t.co/xsvQGEYzb8

— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) May 24, 2026

It is not separate from the Trump administration’s efforts to deport non-citizens for criticising the state of Israel.

It is not separate from the efforts to stomp out pro-Palestine protests and university campus demonstrations.

It is not separate from the arrests of activists in the UK on terrorism charges for saying the words “I support Palestine Action”.

It is not separate from activists facing criminal charges for saying “From the river to the sea” in parts of Australia and Germany.

It is not separate from imperial efforts to crack down on BDS activism and outlaw boycotts of Israeli products.

It is not separate from Israel’s ban on foreign press from entering Gaza, nor is it separate from Israel’s systematic extermination of Palestinian journalists within Gaza.

It is not separate from the artificially manufactured hysteria about “antisemitism” in Western society and the efforts of Western governments to silence criticism of Israel in the name of protecting Jews.

It is not separate from Israel’s massive increase in its hasbara budget this year and the armies of paid trolls we’ve seen swarming online discourse.

It is not separate from the nonstop barrage of imperial propaganda we see every day from the plutocratic press justifying every war and slandering every dissident.

It is not separate from the way imperial oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison buy up news outlets like The Washington Post and CBS and social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter in order to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts, and votes.

It is not separate from the way tech platforms have been manipulating algorithms to hide dissident sources of information from the public and using bogus “fact checking” firms to suppress unauthorised facts.

It is not separate from government secrecy measures which forbid the public from knowing what their rulers are doing, and which aggressively punish anyone who tries to reveal inconvenient facts.

the american govt would rather try to criminalize delivering aid to a country we’ve starved, than punish the epstein class. https://t.co/h19HPsOc9m

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) May 24, 2026

The empire is waging a relentless war on intellectual clarity and on moral clarity, because truth and morality are its enemies.

They do not want us to have unobstructed vision, lucid minds, functioning empathy centers and well-formed consciences, because if we did, we would instantly dismantle the empire brick by brick.

This is why they go after anyone who tries to expand the consciousness of Western society using activism and journalism. In an empire built on lies and fuelled by human blood, telling the truth is seen as treason and doing the right thing is seen as insurrection.

The only sane response to such a dystopian situation is to join in the revolution. Help spread unauthorised ideas and information. Take action to spread awareness of the abusive nature of the empire. They’re trying to keep it all in the dark, so we need to bring it all into the light.

They wouldn’t be fighting so hard to suppress truth and compassion if it didn’t present an immediate existential threat to their power structure.

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.

Kudos to the returning Australian pro-Palestinian flotilla activists for not simply focusing on their mistreatment at the hands of the Israeli Defence Force but for acknowledging the suffering of Palestinian prisoners.

“What got me through is thinking about coming home, and now I’m home I can’t stop thinking about my brothers and sisters that we left behind, still in the clutches of the Israeli military, police and prison guards, who take so much pleasure in inflicting pain and suffering,” said climate activist Violet Coco as she stepped off the plane at Melbourne Airport.

“There are still almost 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held hostage in Israel’s prison system, hundreds of whom are children, some as young as two.

• READ MORE: Israel’s arrogance is becoming the evidence in the case against it
• Gaza freedom flotilla – reluctance of the West to protest Israel’s thuggery enabled the abuse
• Uncertainty persists as Trump says Iran deal not ‘fully negotiated’
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

“Israel wants to shame us but we are not ashamed, the shame is Israel’s, that they would tarnish their souls with such calculated cruelty.”

Fellow activist Gemma O’Toole also said the mistreatment of the protestors should not distract from the suffering of Palestinian prisoners.

“I gather there’s a lot of attention being paid to the Ben-Gvir video, which is just so insane to me,” she said, referring to a video posted by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir showing the detained activists with their hands tied and foreheads on the ground.

‘Heart broken for Palestinians’
“What you saw in that video is this [infinitesimal] amount of what we actually went through. And then to think that’s what they do to predominantly white people when they’re being held relatively to account, there’s so much attention being paid to that,” O’Toole said.

“My heart is just broken for the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, the global pro-Israel community is apoplectic about The New York Times for Nicholas Kristof’s expose of the shocking brutality being endured by imprisoned Palestinians (Israel is even suing the newspaper).

But, as the returning activists are pointing out, if this is how Israel treats privileged white people protesting you can imagine what they are doing to the brown people languishing in their prisons.

Hard to cry innocent when their national security minister is boasting about Israeli brutality and posting it on his website.

Mark Naglazas is a West Australian journalist specialising in Perth culture and the arts.

• New Zealand flotilla activists’ homecoming

ANALYSIS: By Professor Stuart Rees

If bullies notice that no one intervenes to stop their behaviour, they may interpret such non-intervention as permission to continue bullying.

For years, the same process has operated in relation to the thuggery of Israel’s Netanyahu government, and in that respect, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s abuse of detainees from the Gaza international aid flotilla was no surprise.

Suddenly, even the Australian government — and New Zealand — condemned the abuse meted out to hundreds of humanitarian activists, but that condemnation was too little too late.

• READ MORE: Uncertainty persists as Trump says Iran deal not ‘fully negotiated’
• Other Gaza flotilla human rights reports

The first measure concerns politicians’ and journalists’ reluctance to question Israeli spokespersons’ claims that they and their army operate according to the highest moral standards.

The second concerns the failure to hold Israel accountable to the rules of international law.

This culture of non-accountability, coupled with acceptance of Israel’s false claims, reappeared when 430 sailors from 40 different countries were taken into Israel’s detention, forced to kneel with their hands zip-tied behind their backs while the Israeli national anthem played and Ben-Gvir taunted them.

On ABC television’s 7:30 Report, the Israeli Ambassador to Australia repeated that Israeli forces had boarded the flotilla with “great sensitivity”. He assured listeners there would be no ill-treatment of the detainees.

Litany of Israeli lies
His claims followed a litany of lies.

In the Gaza slaughter, Israeli military spokespersons insisted they would not harm civilians, Palestinians were allegedly not short of food, and the bombing of hospitals, schools and so-called safe houses was justified by claims that these were all sites of Hamas operations.

The adjective ‘Hamas’ is used to stigmatise anyone who opposes Israeli actions.

Ben-Gvir and others labelled participants in the humanitarian aid flotilla “Hamas terrorist supporters”. This all-purpose label apparently explains terrorism, but even regarding a slaughter of innocents in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon, few politicians have asked, “whose terrorism are you referring to?”

Government-sanctioned brutality
Israeli officials claimed that no flotilla detainees were harmed, but a video showed detainees being abused in Israeli captivity, and returning Australian detainees reported experiences of violence and sexual abuse.

The Israeli legal rights centre Adalah reported “systemic violations of due process and widespread physical and psychological abuse by Israeli authorities”.

The same organisation said, “at least three people [from the flotilla] required hospitalisation due to injuries such as rib fractures and breathing difficulties”, each incident raising questions about the Israeli Australian Ambassador’s assertion that Israeli forces showed “great sensitivity”.

It is predictable that governments would be reluctant to ask whether Israel’s attacks on the international aid flotilla could be justified in international law.

In relation to other Israeli killing sprees, governments have treated international law as of no consequence.

The 1948 Genocide Convention identified genocide as a crime and obliged signatory governments to prevent such actions and to punish perpetrators. These obligations have been ignored. Neither has action been taken to obey the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 ruling that Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is illegal and should end immediately.

Israel insists that theirs is a lawful blockade of Gaza, but Western governments, having never used their navies to escort small boat flotillas to the shores of Gaza, have colluded with this claim.

Under what circumstances can a country that illegally occupies another’s waters be entitled to enforce a blockade?

The United Nations has described the Israeli blockade of Gaza as a “direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law”. Don Rothwell, professor of international law at the Australian National University (ANU), concludes “there has been no legal basis for Israel to enforce a blockade off the coast of Cyprus (within 200 miles of Gaza), yet under international law an exception to a blockade exists for the provision of humanitarian aid to a civilian population”.

Western facilitators
Ben-Gvir’s bullying had been practised for years, but who cared if it was exercised at the expense of Palestinians?

Now, however, international human rights activists have been abused. In response, previously silent commentators have rediscovered their principles and expressed outrage.

The chances of that outrage leading to a revival of respect for international law appear to depend on governments admitting that

the Ben-Gvir abuse was a feature of overall Israeli state violence towards Palestinians,

a policy facilitated by Western democracies.

Ben-Gvir’s treatment of the flotilla detainees was the tip of an iceberg. The UN’s February 2026 Report concluded that the Israeli prison system had degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty.

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem published its 2026 paper, “Welcome to Hell: the Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps.”

Abuse of Palestinians, mostly in secret, had been reported but elicited nothing like the outrage expressed about the treatment of the flotilla crews.

The UN reported that as minister responsible for Israeli prisons, Ben-Gvir had institutionalised torture, collective punishment and dehumanising conditions. Abuse of detainees included rape with bottles, metal rods, and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.

Courage betrayed
In total contrast to that bestiality, 430 courageous individuals sailed to Gaza, motivated by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and by feeling betrayed by governments that had not intervened in the genocide in Palestine and stayed silent when Israeli forces boarded the flotilla.

Parents of those detainees have condemned governments for a failure to intervene.

But a failure to stop ethnic cleansing, stealing of lands and eventually a genocide had been underway for years, long before October 2023. Throughout those decades, the victims were a stigmatised “other”, so international humanitarian law could be ignored, and Israel and the US were given assurance that murder and mayhem in Palestine and Lebanon should continue.

Ben-Gvir noticed governments’ collusion with slaughter in Gaza and would have taken silence about the boarding of the flotilla as similar to Western collusion with death and destruction in Gaza, and with silence about the extent of cruelty in Israeli prisons.

Abuse of the gutsy flotilla crews has prompted outrage, but that protest has been far too little and far too late.

In 2015, the John Key government announced a cooperation agreement that would see NZ Aid pay for Cuban doctors to be taught English in New Zealand before their deployment to the Pacific Islands as part of the communist island’s Medical Brigades.

Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that has been under continuous US economic sanctions since 1962, has sent more than 400,000 healthcare professionals to 155 countries over the last six and a half decades.

Since 1960, when an earthquake devastated Valdivia in Chile, Cuban doctors have been on the frontlines of medical emergencies around the globe.

• READ MORE: Other Cuban reports

They were there for the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, in Africa during the Ebola outbreak, in South Africa for the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and Italy during the outbreak of covid.

In any given year the country has had more health professionals working in aid programmes abroad than the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the UK combined.

The National government and Cuba were unlikely bedfellows. The conservative party’s founding constitution in 1936 committed it to combating communism and socialism.

But the communist nation’s medical assistance programme has been a spectacular success when it comes to providing healthcare to those most in need, and the cooperation agreement was a concrete acknowledgement of that.

Soft power, hard currency
Cuba’s overseas doctors programme is both an exercise in what is sometimes called soft power and a source of desperately needed hard currency.

Economists are divided over whether the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency is an “exorbitant privilege” but there’s no debate over the power it gives the US government to inflict economic devastation on its perceived enemies.

Last year, the medical journal The Lancet published an article that found that economic sanctions — the majority being unilateral imposed by the US — had caused more than 560,000 deaths every year between 2010 – 2021.

In total, the study attributes 38 million deaths – half of them children – to sanctions since 1970.

No country on earth has been under US sanctions for longer than Cuba. A 1958 arms embargo was expanded to include all goods four years later.

The laws and regulations governing the embargo have been described as the “oldest and most comprehensive US economic sanctions against any country in the world.”

Cuba not only survived those sanctions, but its commitment to investing in healthcare at home saw it achieve lower infant mortality rates over a sustained period than the US, while matching it for life expectancy.

Massively impressive
To describe that as impressive is to massively understate the achievement. Life expectancy and low infant mortality normally correlate very closely with a country’s relative wealth.

The US’s GDP per capita has been about eight times that of Cuba for decades.

During the Cold War, trade with the communist bloc helped insulate Cuba from the full impacts of the embargo. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the island nation facing catastrophic shortages of oil, food and basic goods.

A deal struck between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, in 2000, to swap Venezuelan oil for Cuban medical professionals was critical to the island nation surviving the crippling US sanctions regime.

That ended with the US’s imposition of a maritime blockade of Venezuela following its “arrest” — kidnapping is a more accurate term — of its president, Nicolas Maduro, in January of this year.

The longest running US sanctions regime in history has become a near total siege resulting in a devastating health crisis.

The UN reports that more than 100,000 patients are awaiting surgeries due to power outages.

“Shortages of electricity, fuel, medicine and medical supplies are severely disrupting emergency care, blood banks, laboratories, immunisation programmes and maternal and child health services.”

Blackouts lasting up to 20 hours have forced hospitals to suspend non-emergency operations. There’s no fuel for ambulances or private cars, so people struggle to get to health services even in an emergency.

Infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 deaths per 1000 live births. At least half of those deaths are directly attributable to US sanctions.

Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Cuba a “severe national security threat” due to its military ties to China and Russia. (The US has around 800 military bases in 80 different countries. Neither China nor Russia has a base in Cuba although both are said to have spy facilities — presumably not unlike the ones the US has in New Zealand and Australia.)

And in an effort to illustrate the “heinous nature” of the Cuban government, the US last week issued an arrest warrant for its former Defence Minister, 94-year-old Raul Castro, for the 1996 shooting down of two civilian planes off the coast of Cuba.

The planes were flown by the Brothers of the Rescue, a group that both rescued Cubans attempting to flee the island and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana.

The then President, Fidel Castro, declared the planes a threat to Cuba’s national security.

Many would take issue with that claim, but it is surely as credible as the US claim that the 57 boats it has sunk in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean since September last year, killing 194 people, were a threat to US national security.

The US accuses Cuba of human rights abuses, including those of medical brigade doctors who it says are victims of human trafficking and forced labour.

This would make Cuban doctors, surely, the only victims of forced labour anywhere to be given a free tertiary education before being trafficked to jobs paying significantly more than if they stayed at home.

(The American Civil Liberties Union has estimated that around 800,000 prisoners in the US produce more than $11 billion in goods while being paid just pennies an hour.)

None of the US’s explanations/accusations can be taken seriously. So, what else could be driving the ramping up of its decades old campaign to topple the Cuban government?

Noam Chomsky called it “the threat of the good example.” A poor country showing it’s possible to redistribute resources and defy Western dominance is simply unacceptable and must be crushed.

One showing that, for a fraction of the cost of what most Western countries spend on “defence,” it can be a superpower in the supply of medical assistance to the Global South is it seems doubly unacceptable.

And then there’s the threat to the bottom-line of US corporations.

ExxonMobil is currently before the courts seeking $1 billion in compensation for the nationalisation of its refineries in 1959.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a US company — Havana Docks Corporation — that claims its waterfront property had been seized by the Cuban government in 1960. It will likely open the floodgates to similar claims.

In 1971, the government commission that first certified that the Havana Dock Corporation’s property had been unlawfully confiscated did the same for 6000 other companies with “legitimate” claims to property worth a combined $1.9 billion ($9.3 billion in today’s term).

Every year for the last three decades, New Zealand and Australia have joined a large majority of UN General Assembly member states in voting for a non-binding resolution demanding an end to the US blockade. (Last year’s vote was opposed by the US, Israel, Argentina, Paraguay, North Macedonia and Ukraine.)

But as that blockade is being tightened to the point of catastrophe, and with the US threating an armed invasion both governments have remained mute.

It’s shameful. Doubly so given that New Zealand’s last National government acknowledged Cuba’s contribution to the alleviation of suffering caused by poverty and scarcity with its cooperation agreement.

The people of Cuba are now suffering unprecedented poverty brought on by scarcity due to an entirely man-made disaster. We know who the culprits are, but not only do our governments remain silent, they continue to be slavishly committed to military cooperation and integration with one of the world’s leading enablers and purveyors of violence.

• Our governments may be silent but civil society isn’t. Here’s a link to an international petition and a NZ one. To keep up with what’s happening in Cuba and solidarity actions in Aotearoa follow the New Zealand Cuba Friendship Society on Facebook.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based freelance journalist. You can follow him on his Substack Towards Democracy.

It’s a sign of Israel’s swaggering sense of impunity, and of the grotesque depravity at the heart of their notions of supremacy, that their soldiers and those in charge of them thought that they could get away with inflicting severe physical abuse on the 430 members of the Global Sumud Flotilla, from 45 countries, who were illegally intercepted at sea, in international waters, and then, over two days, were abused on Israeli ships located nearby.

They were then illegally brought to Israel to face further abuse under the watch of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the terrorist thug serving as the Minister of National Security, who caused global outrage when he posted a video of himself and his soldiers bullying and humiliating detained activists in his custody.

As Reuters reported in an article entitled, “Freed Gaza flotilla activists allege Israeli abuse including rape”, the flotilla’s organisers said that activists released from Israeli custody after being detained “were subjected to abuse, with several hospitalised with injuries, and at least 15 reporting sexual assaults, including rape.”

• READ MORE: ‘More horrific than Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo’: The unsalvageable depravity of Israel’s prisons for Palestinians
• Flotilla activists tasered, sedated, sexually assaulted – Israeli prison service claims brutal abuse ‘justified’
• ‘It’s worse for Palestinians,’ says Australian flotilla activist about Israeli torture
• Shameen Suleman: Outrage over the flotilla activists but where were they for Palestinians?
• Israel’s $700m Hasbara fiasco – how Ben-Gvir’s flotilla abuse video stirred backlash
• Other Gaza flotilla reports

A spokesperson for the Israeli Prison Service stated, “The allegations raised are false and entirely without factual basis”, and Reuters noted that it “was not able to verify them independently”, but why would anyone believe the Israelis, when so many of those released were photographed with visible signs of abuse, including severe bruising, and what appear to be burn marks?

Because the Israelis lied about the evident signs of physical abuse, why is it plausible to suggest that claims of sexual assault, and even of rape, are somehow implausible?

Both have been reported widely in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, and have even been celebrated in the case of five soldiers caught on video raping a Palestinian prisoner in the notorious Sde Teiman prison, who later had to be treated for the most severe internal injuries.

Why, we have to ask, did those directing the soldiers think that they would get away with their actions, when it was obvious that, on their release, the detained activists would be able to publicly show the signs of the abuse to which they were subjected, and, very possibly, would be able to undergo medical examinations to verify the claims by some that they were subjected to sexual assault and rape?

As Reuters described it, “A German Foreign Ministry ⁠spokesperson said consular officials who met German activists on their arrival in Istanbul reported that a number had injuries and were undergoing medical checks”, and stated, “We naturally expect a full explanation, as some of the allegations that have been made are serious.”

Prosecutors investigate kidnapping, torture crimes
In Italy, meanwhile, prosecutors in Rome “are investigating ​the possible crimes of kidnapping, torture and sexual assault and will hear testimony from activists who have returned to Italy over the coming days”, according to an Italian ​legal source.

As Reuters explained, the organisers of the Global Sumud Flotilla “had documented at least 15 cases of sexual abuse, with the worst occurring on one Israeli landing ​craft which had been converted into a makeshift prison with barbed wire and shipping containers”.

There, according to the organisers, they “were thrown into the containers and beaten over the head and ribs.” They also reportedly “suffered multiple cases of sexual abuse, including ‘humiliating strip searches, sexual taunting, groping and pulling of genitals’”, and there were “multiple accounts of rape.”

“At least 12 sexual assaults have been documented on that vessel alone, including anal rape and forcible penetration by a handgun”, the group added.

Sabrina Charik, who helped organise the return of 37 French citizens from the flotilla, told Reuters that “five French participants had been hospitalised in Turkey, some with broken ribs or fractured vertebrae”, and that some of them “had made detailed accusations of sexual violence, ⁠including of rape.”

Reuters explained how Mi Hoa Lee, an activist from Spain, “​said she was forced into the darkened container on the ship, according to a video interview included with the flotilla’s statement.” She said, “Four men started beating me in the face against the wall, and I fell down and then stood up again, again ‌to the floor, ⁠stood up again, and they started tasering me for more than one minute.

In the video, she “point[ed] to her ribcage, hips and back where she said they applied the taser.”

“Then”, she added, “they kept beating me until I almost lost consciousness.”

Two ‘prison ships’
Ilaria Mancosu, an Italian activist, told Reuters that “the flotilla members were removed from their boats to two so-called prison ships”, and that “those put on one of the ships suffered more violence than the other.”

As she described it, “They were locked in a container and beaten by five soldiers, suffering fractures to the ribs and arms. Some had serious injuries to their eyes and ears caused by tasers.”

She added that “they spent two days on the prison ships with no ​running water and used cardboard and plastic to keep warm ​at night, since they had no blankets and ⁠were stripped of most of their clothes.

Once on land they were made to kneel for several hours and kicked and shoved if they moved or spoke. They were then taken to a prison where they were moved from room to room periodically to keep them from sleeping.”

According to Reuters, the Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that he had been in touch with all his EU counterparts “so that there may be a quick ​decision to impose sanctions” on Itamar Ben-Gvir

But the problem with this is that, while Ben-Gvir was swaggeringly and demonstrably the face of this abuse, he is not a rogue element or a “bad apple” but an Israeli government minister who is openly showing the world not only how Israel treats Palestinians, but how, given a chance, it treats anyone, anywhere who opposes its genocidal supremacism in any way.

Andy Worthington is an UK investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. He is an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror”. This commentary was first published on his Facebook page.

Britain. France. Canada. Italy. Spain. Belgium. The Netherlands. Poland. Australia. New Zealand . . .  The European Union. The United Nations . . .

Suddenly they have found outrage because international activists aboard the flotilla were humiliated, abused and tortured by Israeli war criminals under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s prison system.

Ambassadors are being summoned. Statements are being released. Diplomats are demanding “clarifications”.

But where have these governments been while Palestinians endured this for years?

Palestinian journalist Sami Al-Sa’i described being raped by Israeli prison guards while blindfolded and handcuffed, left bleeding on the floor as guards laughed and discussed filming the assault.

As a reminder once again, this is the report prepared by Nicolas Kristof from The New York Times, in which I was one of the speakers talking about my own experience, having been raped by members of the Israeli Prison Service during my detention… https://t.co/TQiqu8GQI2

— سامي السّاعي (@SamiAssai) May 22, 2026

Other former detainees described rape with objects, attacks involving dogs, electrocution, starvation and repeated torture inside Israeli detention facilities. Human rights organisations, UN experts and former detainees have all warned that this abuse is systematic, organised and protected from accountability.

Where were these governments when Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was abducted, tortured, sexually abused and ultimately murdered in israeli custody, with his body still withheld from his family? Where are they while Dr Hussam Abu Safiya and Palestinian medical workers remain detained, abused and denied proper medical treatment?

And now the world acts shocked because foreign activists were finally subjected to a fraction of what Palestinians have endured for decades.

In 2010, israeli forces attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla trying to break the siege on Gaza, killing nine activists before a tenth later died from his injuries.

The world condemned it, statements were made, outrage came and went, yet Palestinians remained trapped under siege while Israeli war criminals continued receiving arms, protection and political cover from Western governments.

To the people aboard the flotilla who were tortured, humiliated and abused while trying to break the siege on Gaza and deliver aid to starving civilians: may you recover safely and may your courage wake people up.

The world saw what happened to you. Palestinians have been screaming about these crimes for years. Credit to @thiagoavila for continuing to expose what so many tried to ignore.

Warning: distressful content!

Those genocidal maniacs RAPED humanitarian activist trying to take food and medicine to children in Gaza! And the worst is that even this they escalate to much worse forms with the 9000 Palestinians in israeli dungeons (almost 400 children)! pic.twitter.com/a0yuMuilvQ

— Thiago Ávila (@thiagoavilabr) May 21, 2026

Summoning ambassadors is not enough. Condemnations are not enough. Expel them. Sanction them. Stop arming them. Stop protecting Israeli war criminals while criminalising activists who try to stop weapons reaching them.

While Western governments choose silence, the British state chooses to criminalise, arrest and persecute activists, journalists, doctors, teachers and humanitarians for standing with Palestine. @Majstar7, @swilkinsonbc, Junaid Mayet, @KarakDesi and thousands more whose only “crime” was refusing to stay silent while Palestinians were slaughtered, starved and abused in plain sight.

My activism is for people. I oppose dehumanisation, torture, rape, abuse and the killing of civilians, no matter who the victim is.

But Palestinians have been subjected to all of this in plain sight while the world chose silence.

Shameen Suleman is a journalist for MENA Uncensored.

ANALYSIS: By Trita Parsi

The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran.

Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner.

Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.

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We should first recognise that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit– the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed.

As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.

Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realise that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.

As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hardliners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness.

Vindicated assessment
In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp.

Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets.

First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.

Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon.

At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.

This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures.

Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use.

Logic straightforward
The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.

Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.

Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.

Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale.

Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be.

Trita Parsi is an Iranian-Swedish political analyst and foreign policy scholar specialising in Middle East geopolitics and US-Iran relations. He is the co-founder and executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Republished with permission.

The eighth floor of the Tempo building in Jakarta became the setting for a gathering rich with meaning.

What brought together community leaders, politicians, academics, religious figures, journalists, and the family of the late Thom Beanal was not merely a book launch. It was an earnest attempt to revisit the essence of struggle, leadership, and hope for the land of Papua.

The event, which took the form of a discussion and review of a three-volume book series on Thom Beanal, opened with greetings in multiple traditions — from an Amungme war cry to salutations representing all major tribes in Papua.

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That gesture alone reflected the very spirit of the man being honoured: a leader who embraced diversity and respected every single man and woman.

The gathering coincided with three historic moments, making it even more significant.

First, it marked exactly 27 years since Thom Beanal, standing before President B. J. Habibie, boldly expressed the heartfelt desire of his people. With courage and clarity, he called for recognition as a nation that wanted to cooperate honestly, peacefully, and democratically.

Second, the event served as a memorial, three years after Beanal’s passing — a man who left a deep imprint on the struggle of Indigenous Papuans.

Third, it celebrated the culmination of two years of work by a writing team, resulting in a trilogy that chronicles the journey of a lay pastor, a tribal chief, and what many now call a “father” to the indigenous Papuan.

From lay pastor to Indigenous defender
Thom Beanal was no ordinary leader. Born on 11 July 1947 into the Amungme tribe in Timika, he completed his education from primary school to a Catholic theological academy, then served as a catechist teacher in Wamena and Paniai and as a lay pastor in several parishes.

Yet behind his calming smile and disciplined demeanour lay a profoundly thoughtful mind.

Witnessing firsthand the human rights abuses and ecological destruction caused by PT Freeport Indonesia, Beanal resigned from his pastoral duties. He felt a more urgent calling: to defend indigenous communities whose lands and lives were being uprooted.

In 1994, he founded LEMASA, the Amungme Traditional Deliberative Council, as a vehicle for indigenous advocacy. Two years later, he took an audacious step — suing Freeport in a New Orleans court. That legal action set a precedent: for the first time, a Papuan had dared to take on a multinational giant on foreign soil.

His fight did not stop there. Beanal went on to push for a one percent allocation of mining revenue for affected communities. Although limited in scope, that achievement brought a measure of justice to people who, for decades, had borne the negative impacts of mining without enjoying the wealth of their own land.

Reform era and a unique role
Entering the reform era, Beanal’s role expanded. Together with other Papuan figures and students, he helped establish FORERI, a forum that channelled Papuan aspirations during the early wave of reform.

When the Papuan Council (Dewan Papua) was formed in 2000, he served as its vice chairman. He later became chairman of the Papuan Traditional Council from 2002 to 2007. Remarkably, President Abdurrahman Wahid — known as Gus Dur, a leader with genuine concern for justice in Papua — appointed Beanal as a commissioner of PT Freeport Indonesia.

Serving until 2018, Beanal found himself in a unique position: an indigenous rights fighter sitting on the board of the very company he had long opposed.

Yet despite those strategic roles, speakers at the book launch event described Thom Beanal as a humble man, disciplined and rich in metaphor. He never offered instant answers.

Instead, he opened spaces for collective reason to search for truth. In every balance of history, he arrived precisely when the Papuan people were not in a good state. And sadly, three years after his passing, the reality facing Papua remains far from encouraging.

A grim reality for Papua today
The presentations at the Tempo building painted a grim picture. Terms like genocide, ecocide, and ethnocide were mentioned as ongoing threats to Indigenous life. Papua’s gold and other natural resources, it was argued, remain mortgaged until 2061 under a contract deemed uncivilised because it ignores the basic rights of the customary landowners.

Suffering, the speakers said, is still the daily bread of Papuans. It is against this backdrop that the three books on Thom Beanal were written — not to lament the past, but to read the present clearly and to weave solutions for the future.

The 47 contributors to the third volume, divided into six sections, provided reflections and testimonies that enrich the books. They came from diverse backgrounds: family members, prominent figures of the Amungme tribe, academics, activists, and religious leaders.

The head of the writing team, Markus Haluk, expressed his highest appreciation to everyone who supported the two year process. Moral support and advice from religious, traditional, and political leaders were cited as a key source of strength.

Special thanks were directed to the book’s reviewers, including Dr Budi Hernawan, Dr Suraya Afiff, Yorrys Raweyai, Inayah Wahid, and Emanuel Gobay, for their critical engagement with the content.

Six strategic demands for the future
More than a launch, the event became a platform for six strategic recommendations and hopes. First, the books should serve as historical source material and references for young Papuans and the wider public. The concern that the struggles of national figures might vanish with time underscores why documentation and dissemination are so urgent.

Without conscious efforts to write and spread the stories of past heroes, dark chapters could repeat, and the sacrifices of predecessors might become meaningless.

Second, the book launch was not meant to be a time for complaining or blaming one another. Instead, it is time to speak honestly about Papua’s current realities and then collectively formulate comprehensive, strategic solutions.

This constructive mindset is a legacy of Beanal’s way of thinking — seeing problems as challenges to be solved, not excuses for despair.

Third, participants were called to continue the prophetic voice exemplified by several great figures. Mentioned were bishops such as Monsignor Staverman, Monsignor Monninghoff, Monsignor Laba Ladjar, Monsignor John Philip Saklil, Father Neles Tebay, Monsignor Yanuarius You, and Monsignor Bernardus Baru OSA.

Among executive leaders, two presidents known for their deep concern for Papua — B. J. Habibie and Gus Dur — were hailed as models of dignified, peaceful struggle. The goal is noble: to save the people, culture, and natural world of Papua, which remains the last remaining lung of the Asia Pacific region. Achieving this requires genuine solidarity across sectors and religions.

Fourth, a firm call was directed at the Indonesian government, especially President Prabowo Subianto and relevant ministers: stop the mortgaging of Papua’s natural wealth, stop the gold theft, and stop the destruction of the universe that is the Papuan people’s home.

The contract binding Papua until 2061 is seen as a form of structural injustice that must be corrected. Rejection of all forms of natural resource pledging for the benefit of a few — especially to foreign parties — was voiced loudly before dozens of attendees.

Fifth, recognition of and respect for the rights of the Papuan people over politics, land, natural resources, and human dignity are non negotiable demands. The threats of genocide, ethnocide, and structural violence must be halted immediately. The absence of genuine recognition of these basic rights has been the root of decades of conflict and suffering in the land of Papua.

Sixth, and perhaps most fundamental, is the call to build honest, peaceful, and democratic negotiations between the Papuan people and the Indonesian government. This is not a new idea. It is precisely what Thom Beanal himself voiced when he stood at the State Palace on 26 February 1999.

He laid before the president the sincere desire of his people, offering equal dialogue based on honesty and peace. Twenty seven years later, the same call must be repeated — proof that a massive homework assignment still lies before the Indonesian government.

Continuing the struggle, not grieving
The subsequent discussion session opened the floor for strategic ideas from participants. The emphasis was that this gathering was not for grieving or lamenting fate, but for continuing the struggle. Attendees were encouraged to step out of their comfort zones and contribute according to their capacities.

An academic might contribute through critical research, a journalist through balanced and in-depth reporting, a politician through pro-people policy advocacy, a religious leader through moral and spiritual reinforcement, and an artist through works that raise awareness.

The event closed with a beautiful, touching metaphor drawn from Thom Beanal himself. He once reflected on the rain that welcomed his funeral in Timika. In his poetic logic, he hoped that the words spoken by those who continue his struggle would water the still thirsty soil of the fight.

The land of Papua, with all its natural wealth and cultural diversity, has long been like an arid field waiting for the rain of justice, recognition, and respect from the wider Indonesians.

A test of national commitment
The gathering at the Tempo building ultimately served as a test of Indonesia’s national commitment. Do we truly want to learn from a figure like Thom Beanal? Can we draw wisdom from the journey of a lay pastor who left his religious duties to pursue social justice? Do we have the courage to admit that for decades, systematic structural injustice has occurred in Papua?

And most importantly, do we possess the political will to stop all forms of exploitation and violence, and to build equal, dignified dialogue?

The trilogy on Thom Beanal, launched that day, is not merely a collection of stories from the past. It is a mirror for understanding today’s reality, and a compass for stepping into the future. It is a document of courage from a child of the nation who chose not to remain silent, despite great risks.

It is a legacy for young Papuans so they do not lose their historical roots, and for young Indonesians outside Papua, so they do not lose empathy and a sense of justice.

In the end, the gathering affirmed that Thom Beanal’s struggle is unfinished. His legacy still needs many hands to carry it forward. Amid threats of genocide, ecocide, and various forms of structural violence, prophetic voices like those modelled by the bishops, priests, and presidents who dared to side with justice are still desperately needed.

Will the Indonesian government listen? Will today’s leaders — including President Prabowo Subianto and his ministers — respond to the call to stop mortgaging natural wealth and to start honest, democratic negotiations? These questions still hang in Jakarta’s hot air, while in Timika, the rain may continue to fall, waiting for the words that can water the still thirsty land.

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

What a blast at the Auckland Writers Festival today, I had tickets for Marika and I to attend Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi’s talk and decided to dress up and wear my Palestine-flag-dress.

Little did I know the stir it would cause — the Aotea Centre security literally chased me through the building and around the auditorium where Tareq would be talking, saying I had to “remove my flag”.

But it was attached to my dress, so it was not “removeable” — unless I took my dress off (which was an option if things got too heated).

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So I kept on walking, staying in view of all the people who were witnessing and sticking up for me. Yes, members of the public were challenging those security guards chasing me and questioning them about why I couldn’t keep my flag-dress as it was.

This went on until I managed to disappear into the rows of seats — what a great example of humanity that was. Later, after the talk, when I met gorgeous Tareq for the book signing, he also praised the dress and the action to dodge the security guards (there was only one witness who totally disappointed by their lack of support and sourness).

But the rest of humanity was totally behind this unplanned and unintentional statement.

Kathrine Ross is an activist with the Palestine Soidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This commentary was first published on her Facebook page.

• Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi’s moving memoir, Fire In Every Direction, as described in the festival storybook: “At once a love story, a coming-of-age tale and diasporic narrative, it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present, as Baconi traces generations of his family’s displacement through war, as well as his own political and queer awakening in the face of other forms of exile and expression.”

The Solomon Islands has entered a new political era. In a historic morning at Parliament House yesterday, Matthew Cooper Wale was elected as the nation’s new Prime Minister.

His victory marks the culmination of a dramatic week in Honiara and signals a potential shift in both the country’s internal management and its place on the global stage.

Wale, the longtime Leader of the Opposition, defeated former Foreign Minister Peter Shanel Agovaka in a secret ballot, winning 26 votes to 22.

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The result was greeted with cheers from supporters gathered outside Parliament, Honiara and around the country, as the 57-year-old leader prepared to take the oath of office before Governor-General Sir David Tiva Kapu.

The road to victory
The path to the premiership was anything but simple. Just eight days ago, the previous government led by Jeremiah Manele collapsed after losing a motion of no-confidence.

For years, Matthew Wale has been the most prominent voice of dissent in the Solomon Islands, often coming close to the top job but never quite reaching it. After falling short in the 2019 and 2024 leadership votes, many viewed Wale as the perpetual runner-up.

However, today’s result proves that his persistence and his message of “breaking the shackles” finally resonated with a majority of his fellow Members of Parliament.

In his first address following the announcement, Prime Minister-elect Wale was humble but realistic.

“We take the government at a difficult time,” Wale told the press. “Change is coming. These changes are necessary, and they may be painful. I ask that you join your government in putting your hand to the plough.”

Profile of a leader
Who is Matthew Wale? Born on 13 June 1968, in Ambu Village, Malaita Province, Matthew Cooper Wale is a seasoned veteran of the Pacific political landscape. Before entering the world of policy and Parliament, he was an accountant — a background that many believe informs his disciplined approach to the national budget.

Wale first entered Parliament in 2008 during a byelection for the Aoke/Langalanga constituency. He quickly made a name for himself as a fiery and articulate speaker. Unlike many politicians who stay in the background, Wale has never been afraid of a verbal scrap on the floor of Parliament.

Over the past 18 years, he has served in various roles, but he is best known for leading the Solomon Islands Democratic Party (SIDP) and acting as the primary check on the power of former Prime Ministers Manasseh Sogavare and Jeremiah Manele.

In late 2024, he was even awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for his long service to the public and political life of the country, a testament to his standing both at home and within the Commonwealth.

A vision of ‘economic liberation’
What does a Matthew Wale government look like? Throughout his career, Wale has championed a few core beliefs that he calls his “pillars of change”, “anti-corruption and “elite capture”.

Wale’s most frequent target is what he calls “elite capture” — the idea that a small group of powerful people in Honiara control most of the country’s wealth. He has promised to dismantle these systems to ensure resources reach the rural provinces.

Education and health: A vocal advocate for the “ordinary family”, Wale has consistently pushed for increased funding for hospitals and free, high-quality education. He believes that a nation cannot flourish if its citizens are not healthy and skilled.

Political stability: To end the cycle of “grasshopping” (where MPs switch parties for personal gain), Wale has signaled he will seek to strengthen laws that keep political parties disciplined and accountable.

The ‘China question’ and global relations: Perhaps the most watched aspect of Wale’s new leadership will be his foreign policy. For years, Wale was a staunch critic of the 2022 security pact signed with China, warning that it could “jeopardise” relationships with traditional partners like Australia and the United States.

Tone has evolved
However, as a pragmatist, Wale’s tone has evolved. While he is expected to rebalance the nation’s relationships — likely warming ties with Canberra and Washington — he has acknowledged that Chinese infrastructure is now a reality in the Solomon Islands.

He is unlikely to tear up existing agreements overnight, but observers expect a more “balanced” approach that prioritises Solomon Islands’ sovereignty above all else.

As the sun sets on the nation today, the atmosphere is one of cautious optimism. The challenges facing Prime Minister Wale are immense: a struggling economy, high cost of living, and a deeply divided Parliament.

But for today, the man who spent nearly two decades in the wings finally has the chance to lead. Matthew Wale’s message to the people is clear: the road ahead will be hard, but the destination — a fairer, more transparent Solomon Islands — is worth the effort.

The “Hapi Isles” are watching, and the world is, too.

Campion Ohasio is a Solomon Islands-based self-taught visual artist, graphic designer, and prominent political cartoonist known for capturing South Pacific social issues. He gained early recognition in the 1990s for his work on Uni Tavur at the University of Papua New Guinea and later as a editor for the Solomons Voice. This commentary is republished with the author’s permission.

“Whoever uses a citizen ill, indirectly offends the state, which is bound to protect this citizen; and the sovereign should avenge his wrongs, punish the aggressor, and, if possible, oblige him to make full reparation; since otherwise the citizen would not obtain the great end of the civil association, which is, safety.”

Swiss jurist Emmerich Vattel expounded this principle in his landmark The Law of Nations, 1758. It is universally accepted today that every State has an obligation to protect its nationals when they are overseas.

As Vattel explained back in the day: this is a duty arising from the bond of nationality. A leader who betrays this principle of citizenship is unworthy of high office. Such a man is New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

Late in the night of April 29, a large Israeli force made up of several warships, a prison ship, aircraft, and drones attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of over 60 humanitarian vessels drawn from dozens of nations across the globe.

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The Sumud flotilla, in international waters near the Greek island of Crete, was Gaza-bound. The plan was to open a humanitarian aid corridor to the enclave that is suffering genocide at the hands of Israel and its Western allies.

Over 20 vessels were boarded, many dozens of activists beaten, some later requiring hospitalisation. Once the crews were transferred to the prison ship, the vessels were sabotaged and abandoned in international waters.

For the next three days the Israelis beat dozens of the Sumud crew, tortured some, terrorised others with threats of murder, guns in their faces, and performed other unlawful acts including denying essential medication, forcing hostages into stress positions, forcing others to hug the Israeli flag, flooding decks to make sleep impossible, and many other sadistic acts. Several Kiwis were among those who were savagely kicked and punched in the head, back and ribs.

Like many Western governments, New Zealand leaders did absolutely nothing to condemn the attack, nor initiate action against Israel. They did not even offer material support to their citizen-victims once they had been dumped onto Crete without money, adequate clothing or phones.

Rainbow Warrior attack
Let’s be clear: according to international law, sovereignty does not end at the borders of a country. New Zealand suffered the most serious state terrorist attack on its own citizens since the French government bombed and sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985. This time the state was Israel. Both events bear uncanny resemblances and disturbing differences that are immensely consequential.

The similarity: a state terrorist attack on vessels on peaceful humanitarian missions.

The difference: the response to the two events by both the New Zealand governments and media of the day.

In 1985, when news that terrorists had infiltrated New Zealand and attached limpet mines to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior, blasting a hole below the waterline, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, the government, the media and the population of New Zealand went into a frenzy.

I will never forget those momentous times. Within days the culprits had been identified: they were agents of the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French equivalent of the CIA. Two of the large squad of French agents, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were caught. It eventually emerged that this terror plot — which the French impudently codenamed “Opération Satanique” — reached all the way to President François Mitterrand.

The story riveted and animated New Zealand for months. The government relentlessly pursued the villains, eventually forcing the resignation of high officials including defence minister Charles Hernu and the head of the DGSE, Pierre Lacoste. As part of the settlement the French had to pay for a replacement vessel for Greenpeace and the two spies were sentenced to 10 years prison, part of which were spent in New Zealand jails before they were transferred to internment on Hao Atoll. Within two years the French welched on the terms and let their agents return to France for awards and promotions.

Eugene Doyle comments on the flotilla outrage on Neutrality Studies.

The consequences for New Zealand were enormous. New Zealanders were shocked when they learnt Australia helped some of the attackers to escape, and the country’s other closest allies, the UK and USA, uttered not a single word of condemnation to the French. This betrayal and the terror attack itself fundamentally altered New Zealand’s relationship with its Western allies and set it on a path towards an independent foreign policy, the high-points of which was the Nuclear Free Zone Act 1987 and New Zealand’s expulsion from the ANZUS security pact with the US and Australia, both within two years of the attack. It was a time when many felt proud to be New Zealanders.

Shame of reporters
Fast forward 41 years and we have the most serious state terror attack on New Zealand since the Rainbow Warrior bombing. The media, to the shame of reporters I have spoken to off the record, treated it as a minor story and quickly moved on. The government told the victims of this terrorist attack they had to fend for themselves and offered not a breath of condemnation.

No mainstream reporter grilled the government over this inaction.

Prime Minister Luxon’s conduct is reprehensible on so many fronts. Prioritising “strategic alignment” with Israel and the US over the physical safety of New Zealanders is a betrayal of his most fundamental duty.

Even a neo-con like US President Ronald Reagan got the memo: “A government’s first duty is to protect the people,” he said in 1981. Luxon’s failure to defend his citizens — however contemptible it may be — probably does not reach the threshold of “treason” under the Crimes Act 1961 definition (lawyers may disagree) but it does confirm that the man has no place as the leader of a sovereign and democratic nation.

The Prime Minister constantly refers to himself as a “chief executive” or CEO, so I appreciate politics isn’t his strong card. Political philosophy is clearly a weakness too. So permit me, Christopher, a few observations.

Among my first lessons as a tender-faced youth attending political science classes at Victoria University was Thomes Hobbes’s principle that the only reason individuals surrender their liberty to a sovereign is for protection. If certain categories of citizens come to realise the state is willing to see them beaten and abused to please a foreign state, it breaks all sorts of bonds that should not be broken.

In other words, the litmus test for a sovereign democracy is not how the state treats docile citizens and its buddies but how it protects even vociferous dissenters when they are in the hands of a foreign power. The Sumud flotilla crew are anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-genocide; in other words, the opposite side to the Prime Minister and the New Zealand government. They deserve protection and medals not boots in the head and abandonment.

Breaches torture convention
The mistreatment of the Sumud prisoners also breaches the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and meets the threshold for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The Kiwis are free now and I know from speaking to some of them that they are shell-shocked and traumatised but also mindful that their ordeal was short and less than the medieval mistreatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli concentration camps today.

As a minimum the New Zealand government should confront the Israelis and demand two things: Non-repetition and Reparations.

Non-repetition is a commitment that such wrongful acts won’t happen again. The government should issue a “Note Verbale” — a formal warning to Israel of real consequences if citizens are in any way abused. They — and all governments — should have done so before the Sumud flotilla sailed.

Secondly, the government should demand Full Reparations — payment for medical bills, evacuation costs, trauma, and damage to property, including the millions of dollars in damage to all the vessels sabotaged, and return of stolen property (including Sean Janssen’s pounamu pendant, a Māori taonga (treasure) that was ripped from his neck by an Israeli stormtrooper).

I was proud to be a New Zealander when our government stood with Greenpeace following the French state terrorist attack in 1985.

Today, I am proud of the men and women of the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation, including Hāhona Ormsby, Julien Blondel, Jay O’Connor, Samuel Leason, Mousa Taher, Sean Janssen and Rana Hamida. They keep alive the flame of hope that one day New Zealand will again stand for humanity, international law, peace and an independent foreign policy.

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

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Why is US President Donald Trump carrying on with his State visit to Beijing this week on May 14? I wouldn’t if I were him.

It also shows that he is surrounded by incompetent officials. Any competent advisor would advise him against undertaking this trip.

He goes as the leader of a “defeated” nation, against a foe on which the United States has imposed the stiffest sanctions for 47 years. He will be viewed by the Chinese as the President that ended the American empire.

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He thinks he is going as a conquering hero and can wow the Chinese with his empty boasts that America won a huge victory and destroyed Iran. He will be met by President Xi and the Chinese leadership with polite smiles and smirks of the greatest disrespect.

If he has any EQ, he will know that his treatment in Beijing is going to be brutal. The Chinese may even gift him the symbolic white flag of surrender. You will see that in this summit, the US will be very much the junior partner.

Iran will never give this defeated President the satisfaction of a peace agreement which he so desperately needs, and is begging for, before his trip to Beijing. They will make sure he goes to Beijing as a defeated man.

Iran is not after a peace deal, but the total and comprehensive defeat of America as the global hegemon. Iran will see to it that the US gets out of the Middle East totally so that Israel is isolated and the Greater Israel project totally destroyed.

Security architecture shifting
Even as I write, the security architecture of the Middle East is shifting rapidly. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman are shifting their allegiances increasingly toward Iran, Russia and China.

Fifty-five years of being America’s poodles are coming to an end. These countries have realised that the US is an unreliable partner and cannot guarantee their security.

The stupid countries are the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, which still hitch their wagons to the Americans and Israel. They have dug their own graves.

History has never witnessed another event as dramatic as the Iran war, where a global power has lost power and prestige in such a short period of 4 months.

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 importance of media freedom is recognised each year globally on May 3. This year the Pacific Island country of Tonga commemorated World Press Freedom Day just a week after one of the most frightening threats to that freedom which took place at a media outlet.

A hooded man brandishing a pistol threatened a female journalist at the newsroom of Kele’a Voice, an FM radio station in Nuku’alofa. The radio station had broadcast a news story about a Tongan deportee serving a life sentence in Tonga for the importation of two kilograms of methamphetamine.

The convicted man was a member of an Australian motorcycle gang known as the Comancheros. He was planning to set up a chapter in Tonga, according to an ABC Foreign Correspondent documentary that included an interview with the man in prison.

• READ MORE: Tongan police investigate journalist threatened at gunpoint after gang-related report
• Other Pacific media freedom reports

The threatened journalist was warned never to broadcast any more stories on the Comancheros and drug trafficking.

The police are still investigating and looking for the man. The incident is to my knowledge the first armed threat ever carried out against any media in Tonga.

The manager of Kele’a Voice, Teisa Cokanasiga, said the incident was a huge threat to their freedom to report the news, and that it was the media’s role to report on stories of public interest.

Veteran journalist Katalina Tohi, president of the Media Association of Tonga (MAT), spoke out strongly: “A climate of fear and intimidation targeting media personnel undermines democratic principles and silences the very voices that hold power to account.”

‘Attack on right to know’
She said that an “attack on the press is an attack on our nation’s right to know”.

“The Media Association of Tonga is appalled by this brazen act of intimidation. Journalists must be able to carry out their work without the threat of violence or death.”

Tohi is also a board member of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA); her condemnation of the Tonga incident is representative not only of MAT’s views, but also those of PINA as the premier news association of the Pacific.

Threats against press freedom are unfortunately ongoing in the Pacific. The incident in Tonga demonstrates that the enemies of press freedom can come from anywhere — not always the government or those in power, but anyone averse to truth and transparency.

Whether it is in Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, French Polynesia or anywhere else in the Pacific, media freedom must be protected, advocated for and exercised to the fullest. Only then can we in the Pacific be assured of the proper exercise of democratic governance, the rule of law, transparency and commitment to truth as foundational pillars of society.

In Tonga, freedom of speech is a fundamental value inscribed in its 150-year-old Constitution. Clause 7 of the Tonga Constitution states:

“It shall be lawful for all people to speak write and print their opinions and no law shall ever be enacted to restrict this liberty.

“There shall be freedom of speech and of the press for ever but nothing in this clause shall be held to outweigh the law of slander or the laws for the protection of the King and the Royal Family.”

Social media issue
In an age when the communication industry has exploded, bringing with it misinformation and disinformation, the dominance of social media platforms has raised an important issue for our profession.

We need to redefine our freedom on the basis of truth, and not just because we have a voice. With the availability of technology such as AI, media freedom may be threatened not so much by forces from outside as from within the industry itself.

Never before has there been a greater emphasis on fact-checking, reflecting a decline in trust and reliability of content. Traditional editing has always included fact-checking, but it has become far more important amid today’s flood of misinformation, AI-generated inaccuracies and manipulated images.

Truth must be the foundation upon which media freedom is built. We are free to speak the truth — we are not free to misinform, deceive or propagate falsehood. There is a huge difference between the freedom to speak truth and the freedom to speak lies.

Freedom of speech is the tool for holding power to account on the basis of truth. And truth matters not only to those who speak but to those who listen; audiences influenced by misinformation train their ears to follow narratives that may be false.

In a world of too many confusing voices, what matters is not simply having a voice but having one that speaks truth — and we cannot be silent about the truth. We must speak, write, print and show, for truth matters.

‘Built on truth’
American civil rights essayist Maya Angelou rightly said: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”. Nothing important is built on silence. If it matters, it must be built on truth. And truth is dependent on a free and fearless media to be its voice.

Finally, I wish to point out a Biblical truth, spoken by Jesus himself: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8.32)

Here we see a connection between knowledge, truth and freedom — the freedom that is such a vital part of our Pacific cultures and existence.

Kalafi Moala established Tonga’s first independent newspaper and currently manages the online platform Talanoa ‘o Tonga. He was elected president of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) in September 2024. This article was first published by DevPolicy Blog and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

• Pacific Media Watch reports: Tonga dropped five places to 51st out of 180 countries surveyed in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index.

I was reluctant to enter into journalism because I valued the research and skills attached to the profession, particularly given it’s responsibility to hold the powerful to account.

I was lucky enough to have the legendary Colin McRae as my producer.

He said there are basically three rules. You must be fair, balanced and accurate.

• READ MORE:  Does abolishing the BSA mean the end of NZ’s enforceable media standards in general? — Peter Thompson
• Back to the old Wild West with no media standards? — The Daily Blog
• Open letter sent to Prime Minister and leaders of political parties one week before the decision to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority — Gavin Ellis
• World’s most powerful are suing media outlets before stories are even published, says editor — Michael Savage
• Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped
• Other NZ media regulation and self-regulation reports

We did have some wonderful exchanges where I queried how you can be all those things in a blatantly unfair, unbalanced and inaccurate world (you know, one where the dominant lens is rarely Indigenous?).

Sometimes we made slight adjustments to ensure that voices with lived experience or expertise come through. But always — fair, balanced and accurate was the goal. On the odd occasion when I got it wrong, I would be mortified.

I watch aghast at all the people across social media speaking into their microphones and talking absolute rubbish, no restraints or repercussions whatsoever — to get views. Often journalists have to clean up that mess by countering it with facts on their own platforms where we are held to account.

The wholesale ditching of the Broadcast Standards Authority (BSA) probably doesn’t mean anything to anybody struggling to pay their rent. But it is a sign.

Instead of adjusting it to a changing environment, the New Zealand government decided to get rid of the whole thing and let the sector and media companies “self-regulate”. Why not do the same when it comes to health and safety, or dealing with waste?

It is a big deal. So is what’s happening elsewhere to journalism. Actively targeted by hostile military groups and by those who have plenty of money, constantly derided and undermined by those in power.

This is not about me or we journos. It’s about ALL of us.

Anyway, off for a hikoi and a coffee.

Moana Maniapoto MNZM (Ngāti Tūwharetoa/Tūhourangi/Ngāti Pikiao) is an Aotearoa New Zealand singer, songwriter, storyteller, documentary maker, and presenter of Te Ao With Moana. This article was first published on her personal FB page and is republished with permission.

New Zealander Jay O’Connor had finished a long but satisfying day as a crew member aboard Eros 1, one of dozens of vessels that formed the Global Sumud Flotilla that was heading to besieged Gaza to open a humanitarian aid corridor.

What Jay wanted was a well-deserved rest, not a kick in the head from a jack-booted Israeli soldier. But that’s what he got.

Late in the night of April 29, just as he was lying down for some rest, the Israelis struck.

• READ MORE: After Israel’s brutal attack on Kiwis the NZ government does nothing
• UN demands Israel immediately releases flotilla activists
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports

One of the crew ripped open the hatch, “We’re under attack!” Everyone was taken by surprise because the flotilla was nearly 1000 km out from Israel, near Greek territorial waters.

“We saw a couple of military RHIBS (rigid-hulled inflatables) sitting behind us. They had laser sights from rifles pointed in our eyes. They identified themselves as the Israeli Navy.”

The Israelis seized control of the boat, ferried the Sumud crew onto a nearby prison ship — an amphibious assault vessel converted to hold four shipping containers for the hostages.

As they did this, the Israelis sabotaged the Eros 1 and other intercepted vessels, cutting fuel lines, interfering with the engines, slashing sails, destroying navigation and comms equipment, and so on. All this happened in international waters, blatantly illegal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

‘Sticking guns in our faces’
Inside the shipping containers, the 180 captives realised things were going to get worse.

“They were holding us in stress positions for ages, yelling at us, making us touch the Israeli flag, firing flash bangs, sticking guns in our faces, all that kind of bullshit,” Jay O’Connor said.

The raiders stripped Jay of his wet weather overalls and left him with no shoes, a t-shirt and the skirt he slept in. The nights were very cold and there was no bedding or mattresses inside the shipping containers.

“Occasionally they’d toss a bit of water or some really stale bread for us to eat. They were constantly pointing guns at us. They were constantly yelling at us and then they would fuck with us for no reason — get us to line up and be counted, make us sit in stress positions and occasionally grab someone, drag him out and beat them up.”

This went on for three days.

“About a quarter of us had to sleep outside on the deck. And just for shits and giggles, they would flood the deck with sea water just to make sleeping impossible.”

An activist talks to Dawn News about the illegal, brutal Israeli attack from on board the flotilla.

Diabetic crew member prevented taking insulin
Moussa Taher, another New Zealander, sailing on the Saf Saf, said the Israelis even refused to let a diabetic crew member take his insulin. Taher said one of his comrades turned 75 years old inside that shipping container prison.

On the morning of the third day the captives were told they were being transferred to another ship.

“At this point, we stopped complying,” Jay said, “Because they had six of us in solitary. We hadn’t any confirmation that they were even alive. So we basically sat down.

“They came in and grabbed us one by one, dragged us into the fourth container.” This is where dozens were severely beaten.

“I got a few punches to the head, a kick to the head, and a couple of really nasty kicks to my ribs and right kidney. After that, they were twisting our arms and dragging us out. Then all of a sudden, we’re on a Greek Coast Guard vessel!”

Transferred by the Greeks to Crete, the most seriously injured Sumud crew were taken to a local hospital. Later that day Jay and others were released and unceremoniously dropped off in a town square to fend for themselves. No phones, no money, no support.

NZ officials’ contact ‘limited, unhelpful’
Contact with New Zealand officials was limited and unhelpful. Citizens of other Western nations were treated in the same way by their pro-Israeli governments. These heroic activists were on their own.

“We couldn’t pay for a hotel. We couldn’t pay for a coffee, we couldn’t do anything. And then we see this line of local anarchists marching towards us, chanting! It was such a wonderful moment.”

While NZ Foreign Affairs were drafting press releases making hollow declarations such as “The safety of New Zealanders involved is paramount”, the Kiwis had to rely on the kindness of strangers who took care of them, fed them, clothed them and organised places for them to sleep.

The New Zealand government refuses to condemn the attack on Kiwi citizens.

Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto) was on one of the boats that escaped the raiders. In all, the Israelis attacked 22 of the more than 60 boats in the flotilla.

“This is a humanitarian flotilla,” he told Radio New Zealand. “The only thing we are armed with is aroha (love) in our hearts. The intention is to definitely keep going.

“As tangata whenua, Māori have lived through colonisation, land being taken, and cultural suppression, so that creates a natural solidarity with the Palestinians.”

Undaunted in spite of trauma
Mousa Taher says he is undaunted despite the traumatic experience. He is now in Turkïye, linking up with others preparing to restart the journey to Gaza.

“So please keep us in your prayers, and please keep the Palestinians in your thoughts and your prayers. Our silence is helping the occupation forces to systematically destroy them and dismantle them.”

A month earlier, back in Wellington Jay O’Connor said this:

“I will be traveling from Te Whanganui a Tara [Wellington] to join the Global Sumud Flotilla. I’m doing this because I can’t just stay at this side of the world watching this genocide unfold.

“I want to be able to look my kids in the eyes and tell them that I did something to try and alleviate the suffering of children just like them who are being victimised every day by Israel. So, Free Palestine!”

Now, after the horror of what he has been subjected to by the Israelis, how does Jay feel?

“Personally, any uncertainty about whether I wanted to continue or not has been burned out of me by my experience at the hands of the Israelis. I am so incredibly angry. I’ve never been this angry in my life. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Kiwi heroes of our time
Jay O’Connor, Hāhona Ormsby, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel, Sean Janssen and all the Kiwis onboard the Sumud Flotilla and within the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation represent the very best of the New Zealand spirit. They are the Kiwi heroes of our time.

Our government, sadly, stands with the villains and their names should live in infamy for not supporting their own people.

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

The announcement by New Zealand’s Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith that the government was abolishing the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) came as no real surprise.

But it leaves a big question hanging: will the news media still be held accountable to basic standards which protect the public interest and the core functions of the Fourth Estate?

Dr Goldsmith has said the Media Council, the industry body dealing with news and online content, “will become the primary regulator for journalism”.

• READ MORE:  Open letter sent to Prime Minister and leaders of political parties one week before the decision to abolish the Broadcasting Standards Authority — Gavin Ellis
• Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped
• Other NZ media regulation and self-regulation reports

That only raises more questions. The council primarily oversees standards in print and digital journalism. But unlike the BSA, it has no legal powers of enforcement, and its rulings cannot be appealed through the courts.

Goldsmith rightly points out the digital media environment has “changed dramatically, but our regulatory settings have not kept up”. But that is not the BSA’s fault.

Governments over the past two decades have proposed regulatory updates, but delivered nothing concrete.

Indeed, the Broadcasting Act dates back to 1989. Its definition of “broadcasting” excludes on-demand services but includes “any transmission of programmes […] by radio waves or other means of telecommunication”.

This became the focus of a heated dispute when the BSA signalled it was prepared to hear a complaint about online comments made on independent digital media site The Platform.

Reactions from the political right included accusations of bureaucratic overreach by the BSA, which allegedly was acting “like some Soviet-era Stasi” and making a “secret power grab”.

This significantly misrepresented the complexity of the issues at stake. For some years the BSA has openly advanced the case for regulatory reform — including whether that meant retaining the BSA itself in its current form.

No public consultation
The more fundamental question is whether any standards regime should apply to online media. That was a key issue raised in the media reform proposals put out for public consultation by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in 2025.

These included a proposal to:

modernise the broadcasting standards regime to cover all professional media operating in New Zealand, not just broadcasters. The role of the regulator […] would be revised, with more of a focus on ensuring positive system-level outcomes and less of a role in resolving audience complaints about media content.

This would have entailed a two-tier model: an industry regulator responsible for handling day-to-day complaints about breaches of content standards; and a statutory regulator to oversee systemic issues, with powers to ensure the overall standards regime remained robust.

Even if the BSA were restructured, there was no proposal to simply dispense with it and replace it with an industry self-regulator.

There were a range of responses to the proposal, but policy development certainly appeared to be progressing on the basis that some form of statutory regulator would be retained.

The decision to scrap the BSA may be a politically populist tactic to leverage the case of The Platform in an election year. But it is also democratically indefensible because it has not been subject to any meaningful form of public consultation.

Can the industry self-regulate?
There is no disputing that the regulatory frameworks need to be updated, given the current patchwork quilt of regulations that is full of digital holes. But applying basic standards such as accuracy, balance and fairness on a platform-neutral basis should not be contentious.

These principles are not, as some have claimed, an affront to free speech. They are the basis for upholding freedom of expression in a democracy.

Goldsmith explained the decision to abolish the BSA on the grounds that:

Greater industry self-regulation is the most practical way to level the playing field across platforms, and can provide an appropriate level of oversight to maintain ethical journalistic standards and audience trust.

But eschewing enforceable standards that apply to all media places too much faith in deregulated markets and the industry’s willingness to police itself in the public interest.

It is a regulatory model based on best-case scenarios, where all media players can be trusted to behave professionally, ethically and take their public obligations seriously.

The media system in general is facing unprecedented pressures from audience fragmentation, failing business models, lost advertising revenues and declining public trust.

The opportunity costs of adhering to standards are starting to collide with commercial shareholder imperatives.

That is probably an argument in favour of government funding to support public interest media. But it also demands a regulatory model fit for the digital age, with sufficient power to encourage compliance with basic standards.

Without that, any media operator deciding its commercial interests outweigh the cost of complying could choose to ignore the standards with impunity.

In a media environment where disinformation, fake news and polarising propaganda are already permitted to proliferate, this represents a real risk to democratic processes.

Dr Peter Thompson is an associate professor in media and communication at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article was originally published on The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Nothing illustrates the inversion of the international and moral order more than the genocide in Gaza and the shipment of tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Israel by Western nations — especially the United States — to sustain it.

Part of this inversion is the unrelenting persecution of those who denounce the genocide — especially those who risk their lives to halt it and demand the rule of law.

But the rule of law, it appears, is buried under the rubble in Gaza.

• READ MORE: NZ govt must rebuke Israeli envoy over beating of citizens, says PSNA
• Other Gaza genocide and War on Iran reports

And because of that Israel is able, with barely a word of protest by Western nations — Spain being one of the few exceptions — to abduct 175 activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla 500 nautical miles from Gaza and 80 nautical miles west of the Greek island of Crete.

This violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was accompanied by the usual Israeli brutality. Flotilla members from the 22 vessels that were intercepted and then transferred to the Israeli vessel Nahshon were denied food, forced to sleep on the floor as it was flooded “repeatedly” with water, punched, kicked, dragged across decks with their hands tied and shot at with rubber bullets and live ammunition.

Kidnapped by Israel                                   Video: The Chris Hedges Report

Eventually, all but two flotilla members were transferred to Crete, with 36 requiring medical attention.

Two of the leading activists on the flotilla, the Brazilian organiser of the flotilla, Thiago Ávila, and the Spaniard Saif Abukeshek, who is of Palestinian descent and who has organised Palestinian solidarity movements across Europe for more than two decades, were not allowed to disembark when the vessel reached Ierapetra Port in southern Crete, although the ship was in Greek territorial waters.

They were kidnapped and taken to Israel.

“Participant eyewitnesses provided harrowing testimony of Abukeshek’s screams echoing throughout the ship as he was subjected to systematic torture, after being separated from the others,” read a communique issued by the Global Sumud Flotilla.

Abukeshek was blindfolded, forced to lie on his stomach “since the moment of his seizure until this morning” which resulted in “bruising to his face and hands”.

Ávila was “dragged face-down across the floor” and beaten so severely that he passed out twice.

When the two activists appeared in an Israeli court there were visible bruises on their faces. Ávila had trouble lifting his right hand.

Since their kidnapping, the two men have been on hunger strike. They are accused of “assisting the enemy during wartime” and “membership in and providing services to a terrorist organisation”.

This is the world we now live in. The moral and the courageous are criminalised. The ruling class weaponises the law to justify the abuse and atrocities of the lawless.

Here is a link to an interview I did in Italy with Ávila.

Here is a link to the documentary we made in Italy where Ávila, along with Francesca Albanese, Greta Thunberg, Yanis Varoufakis and the striking Italian dock workers, who refuse to load weapons onto ships bound for Israels, are featured.

We must contact the Israeli Embassy in Washington. We must protest in front of the embassy, as well as the Israeli consulate in New York, to demand the release of Thiago and Saif.

They are the best among us.

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 X page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

Forough Amin in her opinion piece “The consequences of selective morality” (The Press, 28 April 2026) argues that the Palestine solidarity movement’s call for sanctions against Israel is “selective morality”. She says we should be calling out all human rights abuses everywhere — which in her case means Iran.

We agree with Amin’s basic premise that calls for action against countries abusing human rights should be consistent and comprehensive.

Our focus, given our organisations’ title, is however on Palestine. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is objectively the worst atrocity this century and one which all Western governments, such as ours, support. That genocide is in our name.

• READ MORE: Amnesty International calls on governments to stop predatory, anti-rights order from taking hold in pivotal moment for humanity
• Other reports in the Gaza genocide and US-Israel attacks on Iran

It is precisely because our government refuses to sanction Israel for the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and the pogroms conducted by Israeli settlers, with the support of the Israeli military, throughout the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory) that we must all speak up and demand accountability for Israel and from our government.

The complete avoidance of accountability by Israel is the single most important reason that it continues its brutal occupation in the OPT, its daily theft of Palestinian land and its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to land from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israeli militias in 1948.

Our government operates a simple, easy to understand, double standard — it calls out and acts on human rights abuses in countries that the US sees as enemies, but refuses to call out or act on human rights abuses in countries the US sees as friends.

That is why the government has enacted comprehensive sanctions against Iran and Russia, but miserly measures against a small handful of racist Israeli settlers for the most egregious of war crimes.

Tight business restrictions
Regarding Iran, for example, our government has imposed tight business restrictions, targeted travel bans, asset freezes, import/export bans and suspension of bilateral engagements.

in October last year the government even re-imposed UN sanctions following Iran’s non-compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on nuclear technology, ignoring the fact that the US pulled out of the JCPOA eight years ago.

New Zealand expects Iran, yet not the US, to keep following the trashed agreement.

So comprehensive and pervasive are the sanctions against Iran that the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) advises that “given the wide scope of the Regulations, and the penalties for non-compliance, it is recommended that anyone contemplating doing business with Iran obtain independent legal advice before engaging in business with people in Iran, or with entities that are incorporated in Iran or subject to its jurisdiction”.

The sanctions regime against Russia is similar in scope and designed to hold Russia to account for its invasion of Ukraine.

So, what did we do when the US and Israel twice launched massive air attacks against Iran, both times while the US was in negotiations with the Iranian leadership? Nothing.

Our Minister of Foreign Affairs issued a statement, not condemning the US and Israel, but condemning Iran for retaliating against US bases in the Gulf states. It would make great satire in a TV comedy but unfortunately its real.

No coup condemnation
Amin does not condemn the US-orchestrated overthrow of the first democratically-elected government in Iran in 1953 when Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was deposed in a coup to make way for the US-installed Shah of Iran — a lineage Amin wants to reinstate, albeit temporarily.

Needless to say, calls for democracy under the Shah were met with hideous brutality and widespread oppression of Iranian human rights activists.

It’s important to consider the feelings of New Zealanders who have community connections to overseas conflicts. It’s also important not to blame any community here for war crimes committed on the other side of the world.

Palestinian New Zealanders in particular deserve our support and empathy as they watch tens of thousands of their kinfolk, mostly women and children, being killed in Gaza — actions driven by the most hideous, genocidal rhetoric from Israeli political and military leaders.

The situation with Israel is similar to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Western governments, especially New Zealand, stood with apartheid South Africa and resisted black South African calls for sanctions, until international civil society groups (including HART and CARE here) mobilised public opinion to demand action against that apartheid state.

All major human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with human rights groups in Israel, describe the regime there as an apartheid state. It has a whole host of laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

Two to one back sanctions
The government’s selective morality is in our sights. Already public surveys show that of New Zealanders who give an opinion, they are two to one supporting sanctions against Israel.

Let’s hope Auckland City Council votes to end procurement of goods and services from companies identified by the UN Human Rights Council as supporting Illegal Israeli settlements in the OPT. These settlements constitute a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

And if Amin can find any comparable human-rights-abusing companies the Auckland City Council is working with, then she should take that up with the council and would be guaranteed backing from our supporters.

John Minto was national co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Press and is republished with permission.

My name is Campion Ohasio, and I am currently the only political cartoonist in Solomon Islands.

In recent weeks, I have received many questions and comments from people across the country about my cartoons.

Some ask why I draw our national leaders in certain ways. Others wonder whether my caricatures are personal attacks or whether they violate the leaders’ rights.

• READ MORE: Other Campion Ohasio political cartoons and commentary
• Campion Ohasio artwork and cartoons

A few have even suggested that I should stop drawing critical cartoons.

I would like to take this opportunity to explain my work clearly and honestly.

As the only political cartoonist in our nation today, my job is simple: I use drawings to comment on the decisions, actions, policies, and laws made by our leaders.

My cartoons are not meant to attack any leader as a person or as a human being. Instead, they highlight issues that affect ordinary Solomon Islanders — issues such as corruption, poor governance, broken promises, and policies that may not serve the public interest.

Public figures hold power
In a democracy like ours, national leaders are public figures. They hold power on behalf of the people, and the people have every right to question how that power is used.

Political cartoons are one peaceful and creative way for citizens to express their views and hold leaders accountable.

As response to the many questions I have received. I believe healthy criticism is not an insult; it is an important part of democracy. Through my cartoons, I hope to encourage Solomon Islanders to think critically, ask questions, and stay engaged in the affairs of our country.

I remain committed to drawing honest cartoons that reflect the realities facing our people, always with the hope that our leaders will listen, improve, and serve the public interest better.

Thank you for your interest in my work.

A political caricature (also called a political cartoon) is a funny or exaggerated drawing that comments on a leader’s decisions, policies, or actions. It uses humour, symbols, and exaggeration to make a point about what the leader is doing in his public role.

Many people mistakenly think that a caricature is a personal attack on the leader as a human being. This is not true.

Eight reasons why leaders’ human rights are not violated
Here are eight reasons why cartoons and caricatures are not a violation of the leader’s human rights:

1 What a political caricature actually does: It criticises the actions, decisions, or policies of the leader.

It does not attack the leader’s basic human rights (such as the right to life, dignity, safety, or personal freedom). It focuses on the leader’s public role, not his private life as a father, husband, or ordinary person.

2 Why it isn’t a personal attack on human rights: Leaders are public figures. When someone becomes a president, prime minister, or national leader, they voluntarily step into the public spotlight. Their decisions affect thousands of citizens. Because of this, they must accept public criticism, including through cartoons and satire.

3 Criticism targets power, not the person: A caricature usually mocks a bad policy, a broken promise, corruption, or a harmful decision: not the leader’s race, family, or basic humanity. For example, drawing a leader as a big balloon floating away from reality is criticising his disconnection from people’s problems, not denying his right to exist.

4 Satire and humour are protected forms of free speech: In a democracy, freedom of expression includes the right to use humour and exaggeration to comment on those in power. Political caricatures have a long history of helping people understand and question government actions.

5 It doesn’t take away basic rights: Drawing a funny or critical cartoon does not stop the leader from: Living safely, having a family, practicing his religion, speaking freely, receiving fair treatment in court. These are real human rights. A caricature does not remove any of them.

6 Public accountability requires public criticism: Leaders exercise public power using taxpayers’ money. Citizens have the legitimate right to comment on how that power is used. Caricatures are one peaceful, creative way to do this.

7 Confusion between criticism and hate: Some leaders or supporters claim any negative drawing is “hate speech” or a human rights violation. This is usually an attempt to avoid accountability. Legitimate political satire is very different from threats, violence, or calls for harm.

8 Thin-skinned leaders weaken democracy: If leaders cannot handle a simple drawing or joke about their policies, it shows they may not be ready for the public scrutiny that comes with power. Strong leaders accept criticism; weak ones try to ban it.

For example: If a cartoon shows a leader pouring money into his own pocket while the people are hungry, it is highlighting possible corruption or bad priorities. It is not saying the leader has no right to live or be treated with dignity. It is saying: “Your policy or action is wrong.”

A political caricature is a form of peaceful criticism, not a personal attack. It doesn’t remove or violate any of the leader’s fundamental human rights. Instead, it exercises the public’s right to question those who hold power.

In a true democracy, leaders must learn to live with satire and criticism. Their job is to serve the people: and the people have the right to laugh, question, and point out when the leader is failing in that duty.

Criticising a leader’s actions through a caricature is about holding power accountable, not denying the leader’s humanity or human rights.

Campion Ohasio is a Solomon Islands-based self-taught visual artist, graphic designer, and prominent political cartoonist known for capturing South Pacific social issues. He gained early recognition in the 1990s for his work on Uni Tavur at the University of Papua New Guinea and later as a editor for the Solomons Voice. This commentary is republished with the author’s permission.

Kiwi Julien Blondel’s face may be bloodied but it is unbowed. So far the New Zealand government has done nothing after Blondel and other New Zealand peace activists were savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers who attacked the Global Sumud flotilla near the Greek Island of Crete on April 30.

The flotilla was Gaza-bound and seeking to open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza to bring humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and apply pressure to the Israelis to halt the genocide.

New Zealanders Jay O’Connor, Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel and Sean Janssen were among 176 people who were captured in international waters, subjected to vicious mistreatment then dropped onto Crete.

• READ MORE: Gaza flotilla organisers subjected to ‘extreme brutality’ in illegal Israeli detention
• Global Sumud Flotilla calls on NZ govt to intervene after Israeli interception
• Former Greek minister slams ‘Western complicity’ over brutal Israeli kidnap of Gaza flotilla leaders
• NZer Rana Hamida reports
• Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

O’Connor and Blondel were immediately transferred to hospital on arrival in Greece.

Several days after the Israeli attack, I spoke with Samuel Leason, another Kiwi who was on a boat that evaded the Israelis and made it to Crete. He told me that several people were still in hospital.

Our government has so far offered no consular support and the Kiwis, like their comrades, have had to rely on the kindness of strangers and local peace activists.

Samuel said it was really hard to see what Julien Blondel had been through.

‘Brutalised state’
“I spent the last week with him, preparing in Barcelona. He’s just the most lovely man. It was very difficult to see him in such a brutalised state.

“Despite what happened to him, he is steadfast in the movement, and he is steadfast for Palestine. We all are. We’re all fuming. We’re all fuming that our government can let Israel get away with something so blatantly illegal.”

At least four Israeli warships, overhead surveillance planes, drones and sophisticated jamming technology (to shut down the flotilla’s Starlink comms) were deployed against the humanitarian activists.

The Israeli raiders systematically destroyed communications, navigation and other equipment on the ships they captured. They tampered with engines, cut fuel lines and shredded sails.

Once they transferred the abductees onto warships, they abandoned the Sumud vessels in open seas.

Members of the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation who I talked with today said the beatings of dozens of activists was systematic. It started when flotilla members protested when two of the Steering Committee members, Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila, were isolated and then subjected to violence (they heard their screams).

The IOF soldiers dragged dozens of Sumud members, one after another, into a separate area where they were repeatedly kicked and punched.

Among many beaten
New Zealander Blondel (pictured) was one of many to be savagely beaten. Several were hospitalised when the Israelis, coordinating with allies in the Greek military, transferred them to Crete.

It is worth noting the attack happened within Greece’s Search And Rescue zone and yet the Greek Navy ignored SOS calls from the flotilla.

Such is the loyalty to Israel of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters that there has been no immediate condemnation of either the violence meted out to New Zealand citizens or the fact that this violence was part of an act of piracy in international waters hundreds of kilometres from Israel.

The NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued the standard mumble: “The safety of New Zealanders involved [is] paramount and international law must be upheld.”

Will the Minister of Foreign Affairs haul the Israeli ambassador in for a dressing down? Will the government publicly and forcefully rebuke Israel for its criminal behaviour? Will the government seek reparations for the damage done to the Sumud vessels?

Unlikely, as it was revealed last week that the New Zealand prime minister wanted to even more strongly support the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran but was blocked by the minister of foreign affairs. (Imagine if Luxon had been our prime minister when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk).

With leaders like these across the Western world the Israelis have learnt that they can act with impunity.

‘Imagine the Palestinian hostages’
Eloiza Montana, comms lead for the Global Sumud Aotearoa delegation said: “What our people suffered is terrible but it is tiny compared to what Palestinians go through.

“Imagine: if the Israelis are allowed to do this to international activists who are sailing in the middle of the Mediterranean — imagine what is going on inside Israeli prisons to the Palestinian hostages.”

I have written a series of articles over the past few years highlighting the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners. I have had the grim experience of watching footage of the rape-murder of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli soliders at Sde Teiman prison and seen one of the perpetrators blessed a few days later on-camera by Netanyahu’s rabbi, who praised him for his work.

The only person punished for these sordid events was Israel’s top military prosecutor Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi who, disgusted by the impunity, leaked the footage.

Israel’s outstanding human rights organisation B’tselem has done the world a great service by documenting the physical, sexual and psychological abuse that is standard practice within Israel’s prison system. For those who can handle the truth, I highly recommend B’tselem’s site “Welcome to Hell – The Israeli Prison Camps as a network of Torture Camps.”

New Zealand has maintained virtually total silence over this criminality in order to provide assistance to its close friend and ally Israel.

Our leaders tell us we share values with the Israelis. The New Zealand government may; I do not.

Speaking from Türkiye, Rana Hamida from Sumud’s Aotearoa New Zealand delegation told me: “We need to hold the criminals accountable, so we can move to restorative justice. Free Saif. Free Thiago. Free yourself!”

Olivia Coote, also a member of the delegation said: “Palestine activated for me a realisation that the society I was a part of is an absolute farce and that we are not the good guys.”

Last word on the attack
I’ll give the last word to Samuel Leason who told me from his ship moored off Crete this week:

“What this attack reveals is the true nature of the Israeli Occupation Force. There are 70 different nationalities on these boats — we represent the international community. For them to be able to come out here, brutalise us, steal our things and imprison us for days and then take some of our comrades to be questioned and tortured back in Israel just shows how much regard they have for people around the world.

“It shows how little regard they have for international law, and just how morally messed up they are.”

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 is a frequent contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other Fiji literature reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How insane is it that, a Theocracy is winning the propaganda war against a Democracy?

How badly has Trump screwed up when religious zealots are beating you in the marketing game?

It’s not just the social media meme burns where Iran is winning, they are actually winning the war strategically.

• READ MORE: ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump

Trump’s inane decision to get conned into an illegal war against Iran by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has swiftly become the biggest geopolitical blunder since Vietnam.

By shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran finally has a weapon that is forcing Trump to back down.

Here’s the future timeline:

• Late May – June 2026
  → noticeable fuel price increases globally
• July – September 2026
  → inflation spike, food costs rising
• Late 2026
  → real economic slowdown / recession risk

Causing global economic pain is the only way the Iranian regime can force Trump to stop the violence.

If this is still blocked come the midterms, Trump and the Republicans are finished and he’ll be swamped with impeachments attempts.

Iran’s information war at home and abroad  Video: Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post

There is NO WAY Iran are giving that leverage up now they have been forced to use it.

For the Theocracy, Trump’s insanity has opened an unexpected door to not only have all the damage rebuilt but the economic sanctions off as well.

Did you read that?

Trump has given the Theocracy the chance to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people they have repressed.

If the Iranians can force America and Israel to agree not to attack them again, pay for all the damage they caused and lift economic sanctions, they will gain legitimacy with the Iranian population they could never have dreamt of.

There’s no way they are handing over the Strait, so Trump either surrenders or nukes the entire Iranian coastline.

Martyn Bradbury is the editor and publisher of New Zealand’s The Daily Blog. Republished with permission.

If Iran succeeds in extracting reparations for the damage done to it in the US-Israeli war, it will be a world historic moment.

Iran may be bloodied but it remains unbowed and is seeking compensation from the Arab states over “direct involvement” in the US-Israeli war of aggression.

Iran sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this month outlining its claim against Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan. They also intend to apply a transit toll on the Strait of Hormuz as an instrument of restorative justice.

• READ MORE: Iran’s FM arrives in Russia as Strait of Hormuz remains closed
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Under international law — if anyone still pays attention to such things — the Iranians have a strong case. What will determine if justice is done, however, is victory over the aggressors.

More than 100 US-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners have released a letter stating that the United States and Israel violated the UN Charter by launching strikes on Iran on February 28. The signatories include leaders of prominent international law associations and former Judge Advocates General — the top legal advisors to the US armed forces. They cite the complete lack of evidence of an imminent Iranian threat that could support a self-defence claim.

Under international law the aggressor is responsible for all the destruction that follows. The white-dominated Western countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand should stop banging on about the illegality of Iran taking control of the Strait and address the root causes of why it did so.

The case against the Arab states
In the early days of the war, radar systems operating from these countries were fully engaged in the war. Thousands of US troops were operating from 14 US bases in their territories.

Attack planes, refuelling planes and aerial surveillance planes all operated from bases like Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd Air Base, as reported by Middle East Eye. Major Western outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times documented missile launches and multiple other ways Jordan and the Gulf States were directly involved in the war despite the mainstream media portraying them as innocent bystanders and victims of Iranian aggression.

Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have both described the Gulf States as fighting “shoulder to shoulder” with the US and Israel. In filing their letter with the UN the Iranians have also provided satellite and other data to support their claim.

Iran argues that the Arab states, under international law, are co-belligerents. The UN’s International Law Commission (ILC) Articles on State Responsibility (2001) defines the concept of “Aid or Assistance” in the commission of an internationally wrongful act. It is not hard for Iran to prove that these states did not maintain neutrality.

In reality, for Iran to get justice, deterrence and reparations, there is no international body or court to turn to; it must win by making a continuation too painful for the aggressors.

There are signs it might just succeed. Iran has achieved something few on the Western side anticipated: the destruction of most of the US bases. Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University told Middle East Eye, “The bases around the region are suffering real damage, and I think it’s very unlikely that we’re ever going to go back and put our Fifth Fleet back in Bahrain. It’s too vulnerable.

“This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month.”

The War on Iran is a long way from finished. Even if the ceasefire holds, the Israelis and Americans will see this only as a stage in their multi-decade project to wreck Iran as a major regional competitor.

The victims are usually the ones who must pay
At the end of imperial wars, the victims are traditionally made to pay.

In the 19th Century, the British fought the Chinese over the latter’s resistance to the British government’s lucrative opium trade into China. The imperialists won and imposed the infamous Unequal Treaties on China, including awarding to Britain the island of Hong Kong.

Queen Victoria even shamelessly named a stolen Pekingese dog “Lootie” after the British sacking of Beijing’s Summer Palace, one of the great cultural crimes of history.

When the genocidal US war on Vietnam ended, decades of harsh US sanctions on their victims began. As the US moved towards accepting it had lost the war, Nixon promised $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid under the Paris Peace Accords (1973). The Americans never paid a cent.

The US also pressured the IMF, World Bank, and UN agencies to block Hanoi’s applications for loans, seriously retarding reconstruction.

When the slave revolt in Hispaniola (present day-Haiti) drove out the French, the Western powers returned in force a few years later and imposed harsh “reparations” for being dispossessed of their “stolen” land and humans. From 1825, Haiti was forced to pay 150 million francs to France to compensate former slaveholders for their “lost property”. This debt was only fully paid off in 1947, permanently crippling the nation.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is something different. Iran, like the Vietnamese, the Algerians and the Indians may have what it takes to prevail over imperial aggression. Iran may also have something different: the power to impose reparations on the aggressor.

Across the West we are subjected to the astonishing chutzpah of Western leaders decrying the “illegality” of Iran’s declaration of sovereignty over the Hormuz Strait in response to the war launched against them. These same leaders stood silent and complicit and lifted no more than an eyebrow as hundreds of Iranian schoolchildren were killed, hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure destroyed, and leader after leader were assassinated.

Cowards, all of them, they at best offered whispered rebukes when Trump threatened the destruction of Iranian civilisation in a single night. But tax a barrel of oil and “Oh my god, this is intolerable!”

Iran has every right to insist on reparations but they will only come about if Iran succeeds in imposing its position on the belligerents. The Israelis and Americans are unlikely to face justice at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or International Court of Justice (ICJ), so reparations must be extracted from the other enabling states like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and France. It is an elegant solution.

One thing the Iranians will hopefully recover soon is their stolen money. Experts estimate more than $100 billion remains blocked in foreign banks (including in the US, Qatar, South Korea, and Iraq).

We should remember that since 1979 the Western world has grievously damaged Iran’s economy via sanctions and the weaponisation of international trading systems, as well as blocking its integration within the community of nations.

A world historic moment is possible
If Iran succeeds in extracting reparations, it will be a world historic moment. It will be an achievement that will benefit countries around the globe which are similarly assailed by major powers. Nuclear powers like the US and Israel should respect the territorial integrity of non-nuclear states. They have done the opposite — and should face consequences.

For these reasons and more, I hope the Iranian government succeeds in its historic mission to preserve the territorial integrity of the sovereign state of Iran and that they can receive just compensation for the terrible crimes committed against them.

I will give the last word to Mohaddeseh Fallahat, a mother who spoke to the UN Human Rights Council this month about losing her daughter to a US airstrike at Minab at the very start of the US-Israeli war on Iran:

“As they walked out the door, they simply said, Mum, come pick us up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind a thousand times. Each time my heart burns with pain. No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence.”

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

MEDIA FREEDOM: By David Robie

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Pen MacRae (@penmacrae) April 23, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On its monitoring website it lists the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

During the two years I spent writing American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants.

They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers.

They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

• READ MORE: Lebanon truce extended; Trump says ‘clock is ticking’ for Iran to make deal

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair.

The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers.

The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” — overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing.

Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonises nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults US allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims.

He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programmes designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorise the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.

Trump employs the US military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”

These eight characteristics are:

1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.

2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.

3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.

4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as US Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.

5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.

6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.

7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.

8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.

Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.

Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

Cults are characterised by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.

“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace. “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children.

“If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”

Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”

“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:

“He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world.

“What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours.

“He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies.

“The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.”

The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralysing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point.

The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide. “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot — it confuses those who think straight.

“The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.

The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters.

“Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.

The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy.

This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programmes to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.

There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invalidating or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.

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

REVIEW: By Lee Duffield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t blame Iran for going cold on another sham negotiation session with the US.

After all, why would they take the US or Israel seriously? Or even remotely trust either of them when:

• They both bombed Iran right in the middle of two sets of previous “negotiations”; and
• Trump lied about Lebanon being included in the recent ceasefire agreement.

That inclusion was acknowledged by the mediators, Pakistan.

• READ MORE: Trump extends Iran ceasefire, keeps blockade as Pakistan talks in disarray
• Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as ‘voracious predators’
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

As a result, Israel continued to bomb Lebanon; in fact they stepped up their attacks and killed 300+ people in one day.

In the very latest agreement, Iran opened up the Strait of Hormuz as agreed, but the US (incredulously) continued with its blockade.

Yesterday the US escalated things by attacking and confiscating an Iranian merchant ship.

750+ Palestinians have been murdered by the IDF during Trump’s fake ceasefire in October 2025. They are slaughtering women and kids in Gaza and the West Bank every day.

Thousands of Israeli violations
Israel broke their ceasefire agreement signed in November 2014 with Lebanon thousands of times (according to UN peacekeepers in Lebanon).

Both Trump and Netanyahu have made numerous threats to obliterate Iran, to commit genocide and even holocaust.

They have bombed thousands of Iranian civilian targets in contravention of international law — residential buildings, government buildings, historic sites, bridges, police stations, schools, universities, pharmacy companies, factories, public transport, ambulances, medical centres and hospitals.

So WHY the hell would Iran have any confidence that anything that these devious and untrustworthy US and Israeli war criminals agree will ever be adhered to?

Both of these warmongering nations have displayed a total lack of integrity and credibility through their disingenuous words and actions over many decades.

I don’t see any other alternative than for Iran to play hard ball.

Time is Trump’s enemy, not Iran’s.

And now Trump has extended the ceasefire at the last moment.

Tim O’Shea is a New Zealand social, environmental political activist and commentator.

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

As we continue to look at the US and Israeli war on Iran, we’re joined now by Dr Maryam Jamshidi. She is an Iranian American associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute. She has written a new piece for The Nation magazine headlined “Only One Side Has Clearly Broken the Law In the Strait of Hormuz: And it isn’t Iran.”

Professor Jamshidi, explain.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So, you know, what I was trying to get at in that piece is that, you know, there’s been a lot of international outcry about what Iran has done in the strait, specifically its efforts to regulate passage of ships through the strait and to charge certain ships a fee for going through the strait.

The international rhetoric has been that what Iran is doing is completely and clearly illegal. And from my perspective, that’s not entirely true. This is not a black-and-white issue. Iran does have a reasonable legal argument to regulating the Strait of Hormuz, as well as to charging fees.

• READ MORE: ‘Predators’: Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as human rights decline
• Tehran spurns talks under threats; Trump says blockade stays
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

By contrast, the criticism of what the United States and Israel has done to Iran, which is an aggressive and illegal war, has been more muted, in particular from Western states, as well as from some of the regional Arab states. And I think this contrast between these two reactions is very telling — on the one hand, total condemnation of Iran on legal issues that are far from clear, and very more muted criticism, more limited criticism of the United States and Israel when it comes to actions they’ve taken that are very clearly unlawful under international law.

I think this says a lot about the ways in which international law is being deployed in this moment as a way of restraining and regulating Iranian behavior, while effectively allowing the United States and Israel a free hand to do what they want against the Iranian government.

Who is breaking international law in the Strait of Hormuz?   Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think this unprovoked war that Israel and the US — this war of choice, as it’s called — have engaged in with Iran has done to international law and people’s perspective view of it around the world, and the consequences when people want to apply international law?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, over the last few years, we’ve seen the ways in which Israel, in particular, with support from the United States, as well as with support from much of the rest of the West, Western governments, has eroded and violated and scoffed at international law, in its actions towards the Palestinians, its actions in Lebanon, its actions in Syria, its actions in Yemen, its other actions in Iran.

And I think that, you know, these actions that Israel has taken has understandably led many to question the utility and importance of international law, whether or not it still exists or not. And, you know, now with this war against Iran, that, those concerns, those fears that international law is really meaningless, have only increased.

In this moment, though, I think what’s also important to understand is that states like Iran are also at the same time saying, “No, international law matters very much, and we expect to be treated as equals under international law.”

Iran, in this moment, is framing a lot of what it’s doing in international law terms, because it understands that if international law is truly going to be thrown into the dustbin, then it’s going to be far more vulnerable on the international stage.

So, we basically see a battle. We see a battle between, on the one side, states like Israel and the United States, states that are, by and large, Western, you know, basically saying, “International law doesn’t apply to us. We can do what we want,” and then other states, like Iran, states of the Global South, saying, “No, we want international law. We value international law. International law is necessary to ensuring that we are sovereign and equal to other states on the international scale. And so, we are not going to let international law just be taken away from us.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about the UN Security Council? You’ve noted multiple resolutions have been introduced to condemn Iran’s regulatory actions in the strait. Who is behind these resolutions? Meanwhile, the Iranian Parliament is reportedly considering legislation that would formalise its regulatory system, including the fee system, as part of its domestic law.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Right. So, there were — there have been multiple resolutions brought before the Security Council since the war started. They have mostly been focused on Iran and Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz. The states that have been the real force behind these resolutions appear to be the Arab Gulf states, in particular Bahrain and the UAE, who have also been the subject of the most attacks by Iran.

What’s, again, very interesting and, I think, important to understand about these resolutions is that they very clearly and absolutely condemned Iran for its regulatory actions within the Strait of Hormuz. As I mentioned, even though those actions do have a legal basis, those resolutions presented them as being fully unlawful.

And one of those resolutions, which, thankfully, was vetoed by China and Russia, would have effectively authorised all UN member states — that’s over 190 states — to go to war with Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, that is a very radical proposition, to basically validate and allow states to engage in armed conflict against another state simply for the purpose of opening a waterway.

So, you know — and again, there were no resolutions that were brought to the Security Council to explicitly condemn the US and Israel for their actions against Iran.

In terms of the domestic legislation inside Iran, you know, that the Iranian Parliament appears to be contemplating, as you mentioned, this legislation would basically make the regulatory scheme within Hormuz, in the Strait of Hormuz, a part of Iranian law.

It’s not entirely clear what the terms of that law are, you know, what the basis for it is, what kind of regulation it will in fact implement. But it does seem to have a fee system as a part of it. So, the Iranians are trying to take this ad hoc fee system that they have developed over the course of the last few weeks and actually institutionalise it within domestic law.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you about [US President Donald] Trump’s comments. On Saturday, he told a reporter at Fox News, “If Iran doesn’t sign this deal, the whole country is getting blown up.” That followed two weeks before, when he warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Professor Jamshidi?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: These comments are absolutely unacceptable. I mean, they are borderline genocidal in their intent and in their implications. To say to the world that you’re going to obliterate an entire civilisation is, in fact, to make very clear that you desire to destroy an entire people.

You know, I don’t know if he thinks that this is an effective negotiating tool, but certainly from a legal perspective, from a moral perspective, it’s beyond the pale.

This article is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they still refuse to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That conflation matters.

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

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

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

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

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

He further added:

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

He described this as a “German duty”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went on to write that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The outcome of this process is what we see today.

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

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

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

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

US President Donald Trump probably thinks he can starve a country that feeds itself.

Washington is selling the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as a chokehold. However, it is worth asking whether the hand actually reaches the throat.

Iran shares land borders with seven countries — Türkiye, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nearly 5900 kilometres of border, criss-crossed by road and rail.

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No naval force on earth blockades a land route.

Petrochemicals, minerals, manufactured goods are moved overland. Machinery, spare parts, consumer goods, all come back the same way. The Strait of Hormuz does not sit across any of that.

Then there is the food issue, which is where blockades historically do their cruellest work.

It will not work here. Iran is approximately 96 percent self-sufficient in essential foodstuffs.

Iran doesn’t depend on imported food
Fertile western plains, mountain valleys, Caspian lowlands, including wheat, rice, fruit, livestock. The Gulf states that cheered this blockade loudest — the UAE and Qatar — depend almost entirely on food imports. Iran doesn’t.

You cannot starve a country that feeds itself.

What about the blockade?

Yes, that will hurt. Hard currency earnings from oil tanker traffic will fall. That is real and Washington knows it.

But “hurt” and “collapse” are different destinations, and the distance between them is precisely what the architects of this policy appear not to have calculated.

Central Asia and the Caucasus remain open. Regional markets will absorb what the sea lanes cannot carry.

The economic pressure is genuine. The total isolation that the blockade promises is not.

Iran has survived four decades of sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It did not survive them by accident. It survived them because its geography is not a weakness waiting to be exploited.

It is the strategy.

Prince Taofeek Ajibade is an educator and digital creator from Ibadan, Nigeria.

Most of Iranian oil — 96.7 percent — is destined for China. If you note this figure, you will realise that the Americans are really trying to choke off the supply of Iranian oil to China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a major part of the American containment strategy against China.

Now that America will most likely lose control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, they are shifting their attention to the other most critical chokepoint in the world — the Strait of Malacca.

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About 80 percent of China’s imported oil has to pass through the Strait of Malacca. Vessels come down the Strait, sail past Singapore which is at the southernmost tip of the Strait, before they swing upwards into the South China Sea to go to the Philippines and East Asia, including China.

The two most important countries which border the Malacca Strait are Indonesia and Malaysia, one on either side of the Strait.

A very interesting development took place on Monday in Washington when the Defence Minister of Indonesia Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin signed a cooperation agreement with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Speculation on details
People are speculating about the details of the agreement:

• Will it allow the Americans to base troops in Indonesia and use Indonesian airspace for their air assets?
• Will American naval vessels be allowed to dock at the old Dutch port of Belawan, near Medan, in Northern Sumatra, which is near the opening to the Strait?
• Will the Malacca Strait now become the focal point in this great power struggle between America and China?
• What will Indonesia’s other BRICs partners, principally China and Russia think of Indonesia’s move in signing this agreement with the Americans?

To spice things up, Indonesian President Probowo Subianto was in Moscow a few days ago meeting with President Putin.

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.

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks.

Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen.

If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance — you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

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Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various “civil wars” that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

Israel is UAE’s close ally.            Image: Google Earth map

We first need to understand what UAE (United Arab Emirates) really is. Comprising seven emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah — it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai.

Family business with six sons
Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this “Israel First” policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way. It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Dr Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London told The Thinking Muslim channel recently that UAE is far more advanced than Saudi Arabia in establishing powerful, agile networks across a wide zone of influence.

“It’s not about size. Size doesn’t matter in the networked global order that we’re operating in today. It’s about connectivity and who you can mobilise on your behalf — whether it’s in the information environment or armed non-state actors, such as the STC (in Yemen).

“But it’s also the commodity traders, the financiers, the banks, the insurance companies, the other trading corporations, that you can mobilise to generate what strategy is all about: influence and power,” Krieg says.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state “Somaliland” that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The UAE has military bases in “Somaliland” and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside: Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the Western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?

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.

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 contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global oil prices jumped after Trump announced the blockade.

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

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

Trump orders naval blockade of Iran            Video: Democracy Now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: That Trump pulled out of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would you do, if you were Mojtaba Khamenei?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.”
​

By now, it is an open secret that Trump is being blackmailed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who holds evidence of degenerate behavior by the US president from his devilish days on disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But even in a moment of incompetence, incredible loss, and national humiliation for America like this, Vance had a chance to save his country.
​
Now we know for certain that everyone who has ever worked for Trump is diminished by it. Vance was an exception only for a second.
​
IRNA News Agency is state-controlled media.

AMY GOODMAN: As the US and Iran prepared to hold ceasefire talks in Pakistan today, Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon.

The death toll from Israel’s massive attack on Wednesday topped 300. More than 1150 people were injured. In a span of 10 minutes, Israel struck 100 sites across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The Financial Times described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as, “one of the deadliest single bombing campaigns in the history of a country wracked by decades of war and destruction”.

• READ MORE: Vance in Pakistan to lead US-Iran ceasefire talks; Israel bombs Lebanon
• Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel and the US have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal does not include Lebanon, but numerous other nations disagree — and the ceasefire mediator Pakistan provided written evidence that Lebanon was included.

Foreign ministers of Pakistan and France condemned what they called “serious ceasefire violations made in Lebanon”. CBS News reports Trump initially agreed Lebanon was included in the ceasefire, but his position changed after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US is expected to host talks between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday. As Israel continues to attack Lebanon, Hezbollah has retaliated by firing missiles at Israel.

At the United Nations, a spokesperson for the secretary-general spoke.

STÉPHANE DUJARRIC: With the announcements of the ceasefire between Iran and the United States, the ongoing military activity in Lebanon poses a grave risk to the ceasefire and efforts towards a lasting and comprehensive peace in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the war began in late February, Israel has killed more than 1530 people in Lebanon, including at least 130 children. In Beirut, grieving families gathered at hospitals to identify bodies after Israel’s attacks on Wednesday.

MOHAMMED: [translated] I had dropped off my sister. She went up into the house. I went on a little trip, and they hid. I came back and didn’t find the building.

I didn’t find my sister, and I didn’t find my family, any of them. I found my brother, and his son was in the rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s an award-winning Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her books include No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. Her latest piece in New York magazine, headlined “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rania. Why don’t you describe those scenes of a day of carnage in Beirut? We have a four-second delay, so we will wait.

Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s Black Wednesday    Video: Democracy Now

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was 10 minutes of terror, a day that the Lebanese are calling Black Wednesday. It was hard to tell what was blowing up where, because those hundred or so attacks were all happening simultaneously, and not just in the capital Beirut, but also in other parts of the country.

They targeted very densely populated parts of the capital, neighbourhoods in the capital that were themselves hosting people who had been displaced from other parts of the country. In the Beqaa, mourners at a funeral in a cemetery were targeted. In Beirut, workers at a well-known roastery were removed by Civil Defence personnel as charred corpses.

So, it was a very, very ugly day. And as we speak, the — I can’t say “rescue,” because there’s — unfortunately, the people are dead, but search teams continue to try and locate and find and retrieve the remains of people who were killed in the rubble of their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel will “continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required,” but later said he’s approved direct talks with Lebanon as soon as possible. Can you talk about what’s happening with these negotiations?

You had the Belgian foreign minister who had come to Beirut to meet with the Lebanese President Aoun, and the bombing hit very close to their quarters, as he was congratulating the Lebanese president on saying that he would directly negotiate with Israel, then condemned the attack and said Lebanon had to be included with the ceasefire.

Can you take it from there? What’s happening now? Where do you understand these talks will take place?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the first thing is that the talks remove Lebanon from the wider ceasefire talks that are due to take place between Iran and America tomorrow. That has many Lebanese worried, because they wonder: What sort of leverage does Lebanon have? It doesn’t exactly have a Strait of Hormuz, whereas Iran seems to have a stronger negotiating position.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam made it quite clear. He said that Lebanon, the Lebanese government, will negotiate for Lebanon, and that nobody else will do so.

So he has very clearly drawn the line between whatever Iran negotiates and what he hopes his government will be able to negotiate with the Israelis. Now, the Iranian foreign minister has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition of tomorrow’s talks, so it’s unclear whether or not they are going to go ahead.

So, in addition to the question of what sort of leverage does Lebanon have, some Lebanese are also worried because there is a precedent. There is a 15-month so-called ceasefire, where the — this is the second war in less than two years — and there was a 15-month ceasefire between the two.

During that period, the Lebanese government was supposed to negotiate indirectly with Israel, through something called a “mechanism” — which was US and French-led — to ensure that each side fulfilled its requirements under the terms of that ceasefire. During those 15 months, Israel continued to occupy five hilltop positions that it had newly seized in the war.

It was supposed to withdraw from them under the ceasefire. It didn’t. It was supposed to withdraw its troops back across its border under the ceasefire. It didn’t. So the Lebanese government was unable to get Israel to adhere to any of the conditions of the ceasefire. So some Lebanese wonder what it will be able to achieve now.

In addition, I have to say that the — just the mere fact of direct talks not only breaks a taboo here in Lebanon, it also breaks a very longstanding law. Since the mid-1950s here, it is considered an act of treason to have any direct interaction with an Israeli.

But the Lebanese president himself, General Joseph Aoun, about a month ago, called for direct talks with Israel, breaking that massive, massive taboo. He had four conditions for these talks that were supposed to be followed sequentially. The first condition was an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Condition number two was that the Lebanese Army is strengthened. Third was that the Lebanese Army would continue its efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

And then fourth was the direct negotiation. So it looks like the Lebanese state has jumped over the president’s own — you know, three of his conditions to go straight to the fourth one.

So, Hezbollah, for its part, has said it does not think that Lebanon should be negotiating under fire, because it puts it in the weaker position. Some Lebanese fear that this is a ploy by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prolong the war under the pretext of, you know, having these talks under fire.

The proponents of the talks, I have to say, say that it is an issue of Lebanese sovereignty that Lebanon will negotiate any sort of deal with the Israelis. They also say that Lebanon is not a card for the Iranians to wield or to use in any negotiations. And they point out that, well, you don’t exactly talk to your friends to make deals; you talk to your enemies.

So, it’s a very, very divisive issue. The Hezbollah secretary-general is due to give a speech where he will, no doubt, address the issue of the talks. And there’s supposed to be a protest here in Lebanon, just behind me, actually, in front of the Grand Serail, which is where the prime minister’s office is, against the idea of these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to the questions you raise in your latest New York magazine piece, “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.” First of all, “How much of Lebanon is Israel prepared to destroy while claiming to target Hezbollah and its infrastructure, and will the world just watch as it does so?”

And your second question: “Can Israel even defeat Hezbollah militarily or is it, as many Lebanese suspect, trying to exact so painful a price from fellow Lebanese that they turn on the group, plunging the country into civil strife?”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Israelis have made no secret of what they want to do in Lebanon. Officials, from the defence minister, Smotrich, the finance minister, they have all talked about Lebanon being part of their Greater Israel project. They have talked about seizing and occupying southern Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, which, at its deepest, is about 30 km away from the Israeli border.

Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said that he wants to turn that area, that lush, verdant agricultural area, into a wasteland that resembles what the Israelis did in Gaza. He has threatened that the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced from there will not be allowed to return.

So, that’s what the Israelis have indicated that they want to do.

In terms of what they’re able to do, they have, according to Israeli media reports, had to scale back some of those ambitions because of the fierce resistance that they’re facing on the ground from Hezbollah fighters.

Let me give you the example of a town in southern Lebanon called Khiam, where there are Israeli forces in this town, but they have been fighting for weeks and weeks to try and take control of it, and they have been unable to.

So, according to the Israeli media reports, they now say that they want to occupy about a three-to-four-kilometre strip of territory. And Hezbollah will, no doubt, fight and try and prevent them from doing that, too. So, that’s what the Israelis want to do.

In terms of Lebanese turning on each other, Israeli officials called up — there are a couple of Christian villages down in the south. There are also Sunni. There are Druze, as well as the Shiite villages down south. It’s a mixed area.

And the Israeli officials called up some of those Christian towns, where the people refuse to leave their territory, and told them, “Listen, do not shelter your Shiite neighbours; otherwise, you will come under attack.”

So, that’s a very clear sort of indication of what the Israelis are sort of hoping to foment in terms of civil strife and turning, literally, neighbour against neighbour.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play a clip from a Beirut resident. Naim Chebbo survived a bombing on Wednesday, said he’s now afraid to sleep. He said he wants the fighting to stop, and blamed Hezbollah.

NAIM CHEBBO: [translated] We want peace. We don’t want problems with anyone anymore. Eighty percent of Arab countries have peace with Israel. Why doesn’t Lebanon have peace, so that we can end all these problems?

As long as Hezbollah is in Lebanon, Israel will strike Lebanon. That’s it. Hezbollah is not defending Lebanon. It’s defending Iran’s agenda. That’s it.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, how common or typical is this comment of a Lebanese who survived the bombing on Wednesday, Israel’s bombing?

RANIA ABOUZEID: The Lebanese are very divided over the issue of Hezbollah and its weapons, and they always have been, but more so now in this recent war, because it started on March 2, and Hezbollah lobbed about six rockets into Israel, claiming that it was in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as, “in defense of Lebanon.”

So, many Lebanese saw it as a war of choice almost by Hezbollah.

Now, Hezbollah and its supporters say that after those 15 months of a ceasefire — that wasn’t really a ceasefire, because, according to the UN, Israel violated Lebanon’s sovereignty about 15,000 times during that period. There were thousands of attacks, resulting in the deaths of more than 350 Lebanese.

So, Hezbollah supporters say they were patient for those 15 months, and now they have chosen to respond.

But, certainly, there are Lebanese who are very angry with Hezbollah. They don’t want any war. I mean, no Lebanese wants war, even the hundreds of thousands of displaced, many of whom might be Hezbollah supporters. Everybody wants to go home.

You know, war is not the option for anybody. But it’s a question of: Under what circumstances, for example, will Lebanon negotiate with Israel? Will it be under the Iranian umbrella in these talks tomorrow, or will it try and forge another path? And which is better?

I mean, look, there are some Lebanese who don’t care if aliens will negotiate on behalf of Lebanon as long as it can secure a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to, finally, ask you about what’s happening on the ground. According to the World Health Organisation, some of Lebanon’s hospitals may run out of lifesaving medical supplies within days and attempt to treat patients wounded by the Israeli airstrikes. This is WHO representative in Lebanon, Dr Abdinasir Abubakar.

DR. ABDINASIR ABUBAKAR: There are some shortages, some of those essential chronic medications, the insulin, but also some of the, you know, dialysis supplies.

If the current situation and the current demand actually continue and the current escalation continue, probably the country may be facing a very real risk of critical shortage, including trauma supplies, surgical materials, blood products, chronic medications.

And any other further disruption could seriously hinder the ability of providing timely, adequate care for both emergency and ongoing health needs.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, your final comments on what you think is about to happen? And do you think Iran will insist on including this in the ceasefire, joined by many countries around the world who are saying Lebanon has to be included, or, as you write in your column, “many Lebanese are wondering whether Iran will forsake Hezbollah and allow Lebanon to be pounded”?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Very difficult to tell, Amy. That’s the honest truth. But, you know, Iran also has its considerations. If it does forsake Hezbollah and goes it alone, well, then, you know, Hezbollah is part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. There are other allies in the region who will see this and wonder if Iran might forsake it, too.

So it’s a question of its broader network. There are the Houthis in Yemen. There are various militia groups in Iraq who will be watching very carefully to see what Iran does, if it stands by its ally, Hezbollah, or if it doesn’t.

There are also — it also has domestic considerations. You know, Iranians have been pounded now for weeks and weeks. They want a reprieve. They don’t want to return to war.

So, the Iranians will be juggling those, their own sort of conditions, as well, in terms of what their ultimate stance is with regard to heading to the negotiations with or without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Rania, I mean, you are there in Beirut. Israel struck central Beirut, southern Beirut, gone beyond the Litani River to the Zahrani River, some are wondering if they’ll take over that whole land, about a fifth of Lebanon. But you, yourself, are you afraid to walk in the streets?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It depends on what streets, Amy. It depends on where, what part of Lebanon, because that’s the thing about Wednesday’s attack, is that it shattered the sense that any place is safe, because you just don’t know.

The neighbourhoods that were targeted were very far, for example, from the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has some institutions — not that that justifies striking a very densely, you know, populated area. The southern suburbs are home to hundreds of thousands of people.

But it was anybody’s guess. Like, why target a street with a roastery? Why target during rush hour when children were leaving school and civil servants were heading home? So, that’s the thing. The sense of safety anywhere has been shattered.

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

ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start.

• READ MORE: This illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran is also an assault on the United Nations
• Israel says no ceasefire with Lebanon, US-Iran talks due
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel dazzled Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.

The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the US, and probably a redline for Israel.

Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in 2018.

The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty.

It is crucial to note that the UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate.

The UN was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it.
Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarised as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after the First World War.

Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich favour Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine.

America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.

Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by US Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996.

We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.

This is not to say that the US lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.”

On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.

In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike — essentially a replay of the US operation in Venezuela.

It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by the New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that US intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted.

Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Kushner and Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Rubio and Ratcliffe).

Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire
Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to the Third World War. The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in US presidential history.

Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.

The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes.

A permanent US-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.

Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the US to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason — to have unchecked freedom to terrorise and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit.

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognised borders of June 4, 1967.

Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace — if the US accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace.

That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the US and Iran in the next two weeks.

American views clear
The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavourably, the highest unfavourability in history. Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it. Iran’s proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement.

The question is whether the US will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Republished under Creative Commons.

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilisation” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran.

The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war.

• READ MORE: Israel’s Lebanon attacks threaten US-Iran ceasefire as negotiations near
• Trump claims ‘success’ in Iran in just 32 days compared to lengthy US wars
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump — thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

In other words, Tuesday’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he framed it as a victory).

The Iran fiasco is only the latest in a host of examples revealing how to defeat Trump.

In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Greenland.

Inside the US
Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E Jean Carroll and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.

What’s the strategy that connects them all? All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power.

Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jiujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won. Consider:

Iran knew it was no match for the superior might of the US (and Israel). So it used cheap drones and missiles to close the Strait of Hormuz and incapacitate other Gulf oil installations, thereby driving up the prices of oil and gas at the pump in the US, which has put growing political pressure on Trump, months before a midterm election. Hence, Trump has been forced to pause his war.

China knew what to do when Trump imposed a giant tariff on Chinese exports to the US: it put restrictions on seven types of heavy rare earth metals and magnets, crucial to US defense and tech industries. Beijing continues to use these rare earth restrictions as tactical levers in ongoing negotiations over trade, rather than demand complete surrender by Trump on his trade policies.

Russia has leveraged its vast deposits of oil and natural gas in gaining leverage over US allies. It has also demonstrated its potential ability to intrude into US elections (the Mueller report detailed a “sweeping and systematic” campaign by Russia to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, primarily favouring Trump).

Canada and Mexico have won tariff showdowns with Trump by leveraging the US’s substantial economic dependence on them for components and raw materials, but without crowing about their victories.

Greenland has leveraged public opinion globally and in the United States — overwhelmingly against an American invasion or occupation — to curb Trump’s ambitions there.

Minneapolis resistance
Now, as to what’s happened inside the United States:

The citizens of Minneapolis and St Paul have leveraged their asymmetric power against Trump’s ICE and border patrol agents by carefully organising themselves into a force of non-violent resistance to protect immigrants there.

Harvard University’s strategy for resisting Trump’s interference in Harvard’s academic freedom has been to leverage its influence with the federal courts in Boston and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to get rulings that stopped Trump (although he’s still trying).

The comedian Jimmy Kimmel turned a political crisis into a ratings victory by using the public backlash against his suspension from ABC, which Disney owns. Since ABC reinstated him, Kimmel has continued to target Trump, and secured his contract through 2027.

The writer E Jean Carroll defeated Donald Trump in two civil cases over sexual abuse and defamation, ultimately securing over $88 million in damages from him — verdicts that have been upheld by federal appeals courts.

Carroll’s lawyers used a civil lawsuit, requiring a lower burden of proof than proving a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. They presented the jury with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and testimony from other Trump accusers. His depositions, where he called her a “whack job”, were played for the jury.

The law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale refused to follow Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms that had represented causes or clients that Trump opposed.

First Amendment rights infringed
The firms leveraged constitutional arguments with the federal courts — arguing that the orders infringed on their First Amendment rights to advocate whatever causes they wished, violated the constitution’s separation of powers because the orders would prevent the judiciary from considering challenges to executive authority, and violated their clients’ rights under the constitution to be represented.

The Justice Department ultimately dropped its fight against these firms in March 2026 after federal appellate judges also found Trump’s orders unconstitutional.

What’s happened to the countries and organisations that have caved to Trump?

All have strengthened Trump’s leverage over them. Europe seems incapacitated, fearing Trump will leave Nato (despite a US law prohibiting it), but unable to decide where to draw the line with him.

The media network ABC continues to lose viewers, while being subject to Trump’s next whims. CBS was purchased by the Trump allies Larry Ellison and his son, David, and is hemorrhaging talent.

Columbia University has been racked by dissent from both students and faculty. The Trump regime continues to make demands of it.

The law firms that caved in to Trump’s executive orders have seen lawyers exit who felt the deals betrayed the firms’ values and principles.

Microsoft dropped Simpson Thacher to work with Jenner & Block — a firm that fought Trump. Students at elite law schools have also reportedly begun to shun firms that struck deals with the Trump regime.

Bottom line: there’s now a clear blueprint for how to defeat Trump. It’s available to any country, organisation or person on which he seeks to impose his will: reject his demands and then use your own asymmetric power — a form of jiujitsu — to turn Trump’s power against him.

Robert Reich, a former US Secretary of Labour, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and he blogs at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK. This article is republished from his Facebook page — other Robert Reich articles at Asia Pacific Report.

Yesterday began with Donald Trump issuing genocidal threats against Iran on social media and ended — just ten hours later — with the announcement of a 14-day ceasefire, on Iran’s terms.

Even by the volatile standards of Trump’s presidency, the whiplash is extraordinary. What, then, have the two sides actually agreed to — and what might it mean?

In a subsequent post, Trump asserted that Iran had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open during the two-week pause in hostilities. Negotiations, he added, will proceed over that period on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, which he described as a “workable” foundation for talks.

• READ MORE: ‘Killing machine’: Lebanon mourns as Israeli raids shake US-Iran
• Iranians breathe a ‘ceasefire’ sigh of relief as all sides claim victory
• Ignoring genocide – the bill for Australia’s silence has arrived
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Those 10 points are:

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.
2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.
3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear programme.
4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.
5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.
6. End of all United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.
7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme.
8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.
9. Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
10. Ceasefire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The United States has not, of course, signed on to all 10 points. But the mere fact that Iran’s framework will anchor the negotiations amounts to a significant diplomatic victory for Tehran.

More striking still, according to the Associated Press, Iran will retain control of the Strait during the ceasefire and continue — alongside Oman — to collect transit fees from passing vessels. In effect, Washington appears to have conceded that reopening the waterway comes with tacit recognition of Iran’s authority over it.

The geopolitical consequences could be profound. As Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti note in Responsible Statecraft, Tehran is likely to leverage this position to rebuild economic ties with Asian and European partners — countries that once traded extensively with Iran but were driven out of its market over the past 15 years by US sanctions.

Also strategic
Iran’s calculus is not driven solely by solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also strategic. Continued Israeli bombardment risks reigniting direct confrontation between Israel and Iran — a cycle that has already flared twice since October 7.

From Tehran’s perspective, a durable halt to its conflict with Israel is inseparable from ending Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an aspirational add-on; it is a prerequisite.

The forthcoming talks in Islamabad between Washington and Tehran may yet falter. But the terrain has shifted. Trump’s failed use of force has blunted the credibility of American military threats, introducing a new dynamic into US-Iran diplomacy.

Washington can still rattle its sabre. But after a failed war, such threats ring hollow.

The United States is no longer in a position to dictate terms; any agreement will have to rest on genuine compromise. That, in turn, demands real diplomacy — patience, discipline, and a tolerance for ambiguity — qualities not typically associated with Trump.

It may also require the participation of other major powers, particularly China, to help anchor the process and reduce the risk of a relapse into conflict.

Above all, the ceasefire’s durability will hinge on whether Trump can restrain Israel from undermining the diplomatic track.

No illusions
On this point, there should be no illusions. Senior Israeli officials have already denounced the agreement as the greatest “political disaster” in the country’s history — a signal, if any were needed, of how fragile this moment may prove to be.

Even if the talks collapse — and even if Israel resumes its bombardment of Iran — it does not necessarily follow that the United States will return to war. There is little reason to believe a second round would produce a different outcome, or that it would not once again leave Iran in a position to hold the global economy hostage.

In that sense, Tehran has, at least for now, restored a measure of deterrence.

One final point bears emphasis: this elective war was not only a strategic blunder. Rather than precipitating regime change, it has likely granted Iran’s theocracy a renewed lease on life — much as Saddam Hussein did in 1980, when his invasion enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to consolidate power at home.

The magnitude of this miscalculation may well puzzle historians for decades to come.

Dr Trita Parsi is the executive VP of the Quincy Institute and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”.

Having launched an illegal, destructive war that brutally struck the entire planet’s economy (and confirmed once again Europe’s combination of irrelevance and hypocrisy), and after threatening Iran with genocide and “civilisational annihilation,” President Trump ultimately backed down on everything.

Like a Roman Emperor during the Empire’s declining years would declare victory and stage triumphs in Rome following massive defeats of his legions at the hands of Gothic warriors, so now does this modern American Nero struggle to convince us that he “won”.

In reality, Iran now decides which vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz and, for the first time, charge them tolls for so doing.

• READ MORE: US, Iran announce two-week ceasefire; Israel claims truce excludes Lebanon
• Pope Leo XIV hails ceasefire between US and Iran as “sign of real hope”
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The demands of the White House, which Trump had set as prerequisites for stopping the bombings, have bitten the dust.

The surrender of Iran’s enriched uranium, the demand for the destruction of Iran’s missiles, the vain hopes for regime change, the designs on Iranian oil — all of these goals were forgotten.

What has not been forgotten, and will not be forgotten, are the 180 schoolgirls that the US murdered on the first day of their attack by striking their school — along with the thousands of other killed and maimed civilians.

False sense of relief
Lest the world be overtaken by a false sense of relief, it is crucial to brace ourselves for the long-lasting economic repercussions of Trump’s idiotic war.

Make no mistake: the shockwaves of economic hardship caused by the US attack on Iran may wane but it will not be averted.

The wave of soaring prices, the blow to employment, the increase in interest rates and foreclosures will not disappear with this ceasefire.

On the contrary, because of the oligarchic cartels that also see this crisis as an opportunity, it will take political pressure by the many on the very few to reverse the negative consequences of this criminal war, as well as all the various crises that preceded it.

Republished from Yanis Varoufakis’ X feed.

There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Michael West Media reports on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.

When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.

Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.

• READ MORE: Iran accepts ceasefire after Trump says it will pause bombing for two weeks
• Synagogue in Tehran ‘completely destroyed’ in US-Israeli attack
• Top university says US-Israel attack targeted Iran’s progress, AI learning
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.

Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.

Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.

“I’m offended by crocs,” says man apprehended by many police & special ops for wearing “F… Israel” t-shirt

The footage #andrewbrown #legend #auspol pic.twitter.com/fc1p3f911d

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) April 6, 2026

The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.

The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with.

A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.

It never does.

More than 72,000 people killed so far. More than 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.

Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck.

Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.

Australia expressed concern.

Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.

And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by 18 months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.

Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.

They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.

Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.

If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force.

And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.

Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.

The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.

The pain is no longer abstract.

When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.

Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue

without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.

That fiction is now dead.

The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months.

None of that is over there.

The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it.

Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.

Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.

Complicity is not passive.

When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.

The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.

Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.

The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for 18 months.

But a 40 percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.

The people who protested over Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.

Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.

And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.

That shelf life has expired.