Al Jazeera has rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack against the network during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, the news channel reports.

In a statement on Friday, Al Jazeera Media Network said it “categorically rejects” Netanyahu’s remarks, regarding them as the latest example of Israel’s “sustained campaign against Al Jazeera and its journalists”.

In his address at the UNGA on Thursday, where he attacked critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu singled out Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera rejects Netanyahu’s remarks about the network in his address to the UN General Assembly
• Al Jazeera decries ‘unfounded’ Israeli claims about its Gaza journalists
• ‘Baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide’ – Mayor Mamdani hits back after Netanyahu’s attacks during UN speech
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

He called the network one of the world’s “toxic media outlets” that intends to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel”.

Al Jazeera said Netanyahu wanted to stop the outlet from “reporting facts from the ground, documenting events, providing context and ensuring that a range of voices and perspectives are heard”.

Further rejecting Netanyahu’s verbal assault, Al Jazeera said the fact that “such rhetoric was delivered from the podium of the United Nations is a matter of particular concern, given the threat such rhetoric poses to the safety of Al Jazeera journalists working in the field”.

“This rhetoric cannot be separated from the heavy toll borne by Al Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza,” the network’s statement added.

Israel’s war on journalists -targeting Al Jazeera               Video: Al Jazeera

270+ journalists killed in Gaza
More than 270 journalists have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal onslaught. At least 12 of the victims had been reporting for Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera said the network “has lost a number of journalists and camera operators while they were carrying out their work. Some were subjected to campaigns of incitement and vilification before being targeted”.

Of the more than 75,000 people killed in Gaza, at least 706 are family members of journalists of Palestinian journalists, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

Israel has repeatedly cracked down on Al Jazeera and used pressure campaigns against Qatar.

Two years ago, Israel’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the network’s broadcasts. This came after Israel’s Knesset passed a law allowing the government to temporarily close down foreign media outlets it deemed a “threat to security”.

“These measures do not target Al Jazeera alone; they also undermine the right of every person to access truthful information and independent journalistic coverage,” Al Jazeera said on Friday.

It added that “the role of journalism is to provide the world with facts and context, while respecting the right and ability of individuals to assess sources and form their own opinions.”

Republished by Pacific Media Watch from Al Jazeera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) September 24, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Netanyahu faces a general election in Israel on October 27.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Press TV (@PressTV) September 23, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After facing public scrutiny, some of the members of different Māori delegations to Israel have spoken out about the trip.

The trips were reported to have been organised and funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with conflicting claims over whether they were fully or partially funded. The Israeli Embassy has declined to confirm the details.

The trip was advertised under the banner of “business and innovation”.

• READ MORE: ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• Māori delegation’s Israel trip under scrutiny over funding and itinerary
• Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission of Inquiry finds
• Other Gaza reports

But questions remained on why Māori leaders were going to Israel, while its government is committing a genocide in Gaza.

‘The other side of the story’
One of the people who have just recently come back from the trip was Iwi leader Renata Hakiwai, who believed the trip was to promote Israel and to “provide the other side of the story”.

He claims the trip was partly due to personal reasons as well.

“I have interest in business technology and innovation, and the cohort was about business technology and innovation,” he said.

“As a child, you learn around the Bible, and as a Christian, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a good opportunity for me to visit some of these sites’.”

Before going, Hakiwai stated he had “anti-Semitic thoughts”, but his mind was changed after the visit.

He called himself a “truth seeker” and pointed to social media’s algorithm for people believing certain stories over others, which was one of the reasons he went.

“One thing I found is that you get an algorithm on TikTok or social media, and it can totally consume someone’s brain with a certain subject, and I had to check myself.

“I started learning the other side, and some of the history, and some of the reasons as to why things have been happening, and that’s sort of the reason why I thought, ‘Actually, I need to go and hear what’s on the ground and some of the truths’.

“And so it changed my mind totally.

“I haven’t swung right to the other side, but I think my view is probably a little bit more balanced.”

Hakiwai admits he did not speak to any Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, but did visit the Gaza Envelope, an area of southern Israel bordering the Gaza Strip.

When asked by Te Ao with Moana whether he could present a balanced view without speaking to people in Gaza and the West Bank, he instead pointed to the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023.

“I think to myself, if my daughter or my young fellow or kids were at that concert, I would want ultimate revenge.

“Obviously, Israel came down hard. Have they come down too hard? Potentially,” said Hakiwai.

“I didn’t read too much into the UN stuff, because I even know at the UN there’s opposing views depending on what side of the board you sit on,” said Hakiwai.

He also said he did not believe a two-state solution would work because of Hamas.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN finds        Video: UNNews

‘They didn’t really like being asked the hard questions’
Indigenous lawyer Maui Solomon was invited on the trip but was later excluded for asking “hard questions”.

“I was maybe half an hour talking with [the organiser], and I just did not have a good vibe because I was asking the hard questions. And to be fair to Riki [Manarangi], actually, he said, ‘Ask the hard questions’. But yeah, they didn’t really like being asked the hard questions,” he told Te Ao with Moana.

Solomon said he had already intended not to go before being kicked out of the group.

He claims to have tried showing those in the delegation what happened to Māori who supported Palestine in Israel.

“I also posted to the group a video of Hāhona Ormsby, a Māori who had been there as part of the flotilla delivering aid into Gaza. He says in that video that he was captured, he was bound, he was beaten, he was tortured, he was kneed in the genitals. And he was singled out because he was Māori. He’s got a full mataora.

“As a result of that, I was excluded because I was ‘fear-mongering’.

“So I was merely highlighting what some of the concerns were, but then I was accused of just buying into all of the fear-mongering, and someone accused me of being an algorithm.”

He believes the trip was to promote the people of Israel as “Indigenous”, not a “business and innovation” trip.

“I’d also heard that Israel had been bringing Indigenous peoples from Australia and Canada and the United States over there.

“But that’s what seems to be the agenda is for the State of Israel to say they have the support of Indigenous peoples around the world, and therefore they are also Indigenous.

“Some of the comments I’ve heard from former delegates who have been there is exactly that. It’s all been pro-Israel, State of Israel, and that they are Indigenous to the region, so whether there’s been a brainwashing going on or whatever?”

Solomon said it’s concerning that the Israeli government was reaching out to Aotearoa.

In saying that, adding that he might have gone if there was more transparency and the delegation was allowed to enter Gaza to see what was happening first-hand.

‘I want to make decisions myself’
Former Broadcaster Neil Waka went on the 2025 delegation after being shoulder-tapped to join.

He told Te Ao with Moana he “hesitantly” said yes.

Waka said he did not regret going to Israel, despite the deaths happening in Gaza — more than 75,000, mostly women and children, have been killed since October 2023.

“People are very ferocious about their thinking around Israel and Gaza. I know they are, but I don’t have to agree with them because they think a certain way, and I certainly don’t follow trends.

“I want to make decisions myself over whether or not I believe certain things, and it all came back to the ideologies to me.

“It just came back to this organisation wants a complete eradication of Israel. This organisation wants to just exist,” said Waka.

When questioned on whether he spoke to any Palestinian people in their own space, Waka immediately said: “No, I never wanted to”.

“For me, personally, I didn’t trust that that was a place [Gaza] that I’d be safe.”

Similar to Hakiwai, the former broadcaster doesn’t believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

“Yeah, look, some people can say it is, but a genocide is the absolute ethnic cleansing or eradication of a people. That’s not happening.

“That’s just not happening because Israel has the power to do that if they wanted to. Now, if they did that, if they threw in nukes and just cleaned up the whole of Gaza, evil. They’re not doing that.”

He instead blames the current state of Gaza on Hamas, not Israel.

Te Ao with Moana pointed out similarities between Waka’s talking points and those of the Israeli government.

“I’m just going on what my feeling is. Did I feel comfortable being there all the time? No. Did I feel comfortable that I could talk to whomever I wanted to? Yes. Do I agree with everything that happens on both sides? No.

“I don’t think anyone’s perfect in this. What I find the most fascinating is that one side is being globally attacked.”

First published by Te Ao Māori News and republished with permission.

• Watch Te Ao with Moana on Māori+, every Monday at 8 pm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2023, Fiji’s Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) was scrapped, marking a significant moment for Fiji’s media landscape.

A year later, at the PINA Media Summit in Niue, Fijian journalists spoke openly about rebuilding — of a media industry that was learning to find its feet again, reclaim its confidence and, importantly, rediscover its freedom.

At that Niue meeting, we lobbied and won the bid to bring 2026 PINA Summit to Fiji.

• READ MORE: Other PINA Pacific media summit reports

This week, we are in Savusavu and with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka choosing to attend and officially open the summit almost four years after his government threw out MIDA, it feels like a full circle has been completed.

The Prime Minister’s announcement that Fiji National University will partner with the Fijian Media Association to establish a media training centre in Suva was the icing on the cake.

It is a significant commitment to strengthening journalism skills, professional development and the future of Fiji’s media industry.

Allowed media space
Love him or hate him, Prime Minister Rabuka has maintained an open and accessible relationship with Fijian journalists. He has taken questions, faced tough interviews and allowed the media space to scrutinise his government and his decisions.

For an industry that has spent years navigating uncertainty, rebuilding trust and finding its voice, having the Prime Minister open the regional media summit in Fiji — and announce support for journalist training — was more than symbolic.

It was a reminder of how far we have come, and how much further we still have to go.

Republished from Fiji Times managing digital editor Anish Chand’s social media post with permission. He is a former Fiji TV news operations manager.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other Saige England reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women deserve freedom.

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

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Lau chief raises concern over Fiji treaties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

States hardly needed technological assistance with that.

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

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

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

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

Now we have given it an algorithm.

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

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

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

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

Humans supply the malice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And therein lies another danger.

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

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

Nor can it assume responsibility.

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

The machine, magnificently innocent of everything, points nowhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will simply have taught them something terribly old.

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

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

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

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

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

Assange returns                                                 Video: Caitlin Johnstone

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

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

I’m back. https://t.co/2e58azeJkt

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) September 17, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

— Jonah Platt (@JonahPlatt) September 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coxon spoke to the BBC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUDIENCE: [applause]

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

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

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

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

NARRATOR: Religious end-timers.

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

NARRATOR: Tech end-timers.

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

NARRATOR: Ethnonationalist end-timers.

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

PERSON: That was a good take right there.

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

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

PERSON: Uh—

PERSON: You’re hesitant.

PERSON: Yeah, well, I—

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

PERSON: The most powerful people in the world –

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

PERSON:  – an end they themselves are both accelerating –

PERSON: – and profiting from.

ELON MUSK: [laughs]

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

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

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

PERSON: – and making life here better?

‘End Times Fascism’      Video: Democracy Now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is this different than back then?

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

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

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that? That Vance said —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[MUSIC BREAK]

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

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

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

PERSON: New Gaza.

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

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

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

PERSON: Let’s just plan for catastrophic success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting for the environment, fighting against detention centers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon

The last hearing block of Australia’s Bondi Royal Commission focused on social cohesion, defined as the “national consensus in support of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law”.

Counsel assisting Zelie Heger SC explained that the block would present “measures currently contributing to strengthening social cohesion” and “advancing the interests of all Australians” by promoting “respectful discussion of difficult issues”.

Among those chosen by Counsel Assisting were Roz Mendelle and Simonne Whine, co-directors of the Australian Cohesion Forum (ACF).

The Australian Cohesion Forum
ACF is a national not-for-profit connecting communities across Australia. It claims to be apolitical,

“… we don’t advocate for parties, candidates, or geopolitical positions, and we don’t promote stances on international conflicts. However, we recognise that politics is often central to lived experience. Our focus is on how global events affect Australians here, and our programs create structured, safe spaces to discuss difficult topics with openness, respect, and healthy boundaries.”

• READ MORE: Dark Money: Labor and Liberal join forces in attacks on Teals and Greens
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

In explaining how ACF came into being, Mendelle and Whine told the commission that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, they had separately organised to support the Jewish community.

Marketing manager and Israeli citizen Roz Mendelle explained how she moved to Brisbane with her Australian wife Hava, who had “made Aliyah” to Israel.

After October 7, Mendelle felt a

“‘wall of hate’ from protests against Israel.”

She started organising pro-Israel events which were supported by Iranians and Hindus who supported Israel. She realised “this is the trick … these are the people that I need to expand relationships with”.

Meanwhile, Whine had founded a grassroots network in Melbourne called J-United to support the Jewish community.

Whine told the commission that she kept hearing about Mendelle’s work, telling the commission, “We want to fill a gap. And so we came up with the Australian Cohesion Forum.”

The ACF organises “impact nets”, “coLabs” and virtual storytelling through which they collect data from attendees to analyse how they can partner together in a “fully collaborative, agile” way.

“As long as ‘none of us endorses violence against another community, and we don’t wish the elimination of another community, we can work together, we can create beautiful things together,'” Mendelle told the commission.

None of the lawyers present or the commissioner had any questions, and so Mendelle and Whine were excused.

Astroturfing campaigns
There is an easily identifiable gap in Mendelle and Whine’s evidence about how they came to work together, which in turn raises questions about how they were selected as witnesses who are said to be “advancing the interests of all Australians” by promoting “respectful discussion of difficult issues”.

Mendelle and Whine collaborated in well-funded political astroturfing campaigns in 2024 and 2025 aimed at defeating Greens and Teals. (Astroturfing is the practice of making a top-down political campaign look like a spontaneous grassroots movement.)

Deep Cut News, The Guardian and Australian Jewish News also reported on these campaigns.

In March  2025, Whine and Mendelle appeared in a webinar staged by the far-right Australian Jewish Association, then led by David Adler, who was a founder of Advance Australia. Advance campaigned strongly against the 2023 Voice Referendum in terms that many saw as racist.

On this occasion, Mendelle and Whine gave a different version of how they came to work together.

Earlier still, in 2024 Mendelle and her wife Hava began the third party campaigning organisation the Queensland Jewish Collective (QJC). Their strategy was to defeat the Greens by recommending voters put them last on the ballot papers.

Asked how she developed her messaging, Mendelle explained that she chose

“what was screaming in her head”,

which was that the Greens support terror groups and are anti-semitic.”

It was that simple. Australia has no truth in political advertising laws, so it didn’t matter that the Greens completely rejected the allegations.

QJC claimed credit for defeating Queensland Greens MP Amy McMahon in October 2024. They then set their sights on the Federal election and established a new third-party organisation called Minority Impact Coalition (MIC) to campaign in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. MIC describes itself as “minority and refugee lead grassroots advocacy“.

MIC and ACF operate from the same address in Apsley, Queensland. Roz Mendelle was an MIC director until January 2026.

J-United director Sharon Kuper later told the pro-Israel L’Chaim radio programme that QJC were happy for J-United to replicate their messaging campaign that the Greens were “misinformed, dishonest, fostering hatred and harming social cohesion” and “disregard for human life”.

Enter Advance Australia
When J-United needed funds to emulate the QJC campaign in the 2025 Victorian Prahran byelection, they reached out to Advance Australia. Kuper told the L’Chaim radio programme that the Advance organisers said, “We’re happy to support you. What do you need? How about if we just support your whole campaign?”

Kuper described this as a “huge boost that they paid for our entire campaign… it took away the security concerns we had, with them endorsing and authorising our campaign”.

Advance went on to work with MIC and J-United on the Federal election under the brand name Put the Greens Last.

In the AJA webinar, Whine confirmed Kuper’s account of Advance providing assistance to J-United, describing it as a “fantastic, efficient, strategic and resource” which was “totally transparent. Very helpful…I think we’ve now built a really good relationship”.

The QJC’s Queensland campaign cost $30,000. Mendelle realised that they needed more funds for the Minority Impact Coalition’s Federal campaign from “people with slightly bigger means”. MIC sought help from Advance, who she found to be “absolutely honest, transparent, direct, and easy to deal with”.

ZIonist astroturfing organisations were not the only Zionists to embrace Advance. Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal’s husband John Roth donated $50,000 to Advance through a family foundation.

Any hint of this intense political campaigning was missing in Mendelle and Whine’s Royal Commission version of how they came to join forces in ACF.

Women’s International Zionist Organisation
In June, ACF featured in a plenary at the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) Australia conference on the Gold Coast. WIZO works in partnership with the Israeli government to strengthen the resilience of Israeli society and raises funds for Israel.

The panel discussion “Cohesion in Action: Strength and Friendship featured Jewish, Iranian, Druze and Torres Strait Islander Australians”, led by Roz Mendelle, with the five speakers each expressed support for Israel.

Minority Impact Coalition
In introducing the Social Cohesion hearings at the RC, Senior Counsel Assisting Richard Lancaster SC explained that staff had already reviewed all submissions and that these informed the choice of witnesses. We can assume then that counsel were aware of MIC’s 122-page submission.

The key contact for the MIC submission is Roz’s wife, Hava Mendelle, and the submission team includes Roz Mendelle, fellow ACF director Iranian Azin Naghibi, messianic Christian Zionist preacher and lawyer Dr Warren Keir and extreme pro-Israel supporter Joshu Turier.

MIC’s recommendations to the Royal Commission are hard-line, in some cases going beyond Special Envoy Jillian Segal’s recommendations.

Far from showing respect for other Australians, MIC wants Australians who do not support Israel to be penalised and shut down.

According to MIC, accusing Israel of genocide is a “blood libel” sustained through “fabricated casualty figures and weaponised by elected officials, protest organisers and venue operators” to justify the exclusion of Jewish Australians.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

According to MIC, those who amplify anti-Zionist narratives should face enforceable consequences including loss of funding. Institutional silence in the face of documented antisemitic conduct should be considered a failure of duty of care.

Elected officials who promote statements that do not meet the IHRA definition or who operate official Parliamentary events featuring such content are in breach of their duties and should be accountable.

The ABC and the Federal Court should both be investigated for antisemitism for accepting the existence of a “lobby” that pushes pro-Israeli perspectives.

Duties of Counsel Assisting
Counsel assisting Royal Commissions play a key role in developing investigation strategies and ensuring evidence is presented impartially and in a way that does not obscure the truth.

Mendelle and Whine were introduced by Counsel Assisting Tamara Phillips whose manner throughout the Royal Commission has been empathetic.

In December 2023, Phillips was one of more than 450 lawyers who signed a letter which defended Israel and its military tactics against criticism by 1400 lawyers who had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire.

Mark Liebler of law firm Arnold Block Liebler, which represents Federal and State Zionist organisations at the Royal Commission, was a top signatory to the pro-Israeli letter.

All the material in this article is on the public record. Michael West Media alerted the Royal Commission to published material about their astroturfing activities shortly before Mendelle and Whine gave evidence.

Has the evidence changed?
MWM has been asking for the exhibit of Roz Mendelle for three weeks, and has been told that there are delays “to ensure accuracy is maintained, and legal sensitivities are addressed.” We have responded and asked

how an exhibit once tendered could be changed?

Commission lawyers are now summarising evidence and developing final arguments. The commissioner alone will then make findings. Meanwhile, the commission staff continues to hold meetings with selected individuals where no details are published.

In the name of “procedural fairness”, those who were called as witnesses will be given a chance to respond to final submissions of Counsel Assisting.

Not so the groups and unnamed but identifiable individuals in the pro-Palestinian movement whom witnesses have accused of antisemitism, including those who wanted to give evidence but were not invited.

For them, there is no right of reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) September 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toroama struck a defiant tone after the incident.

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

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

Israel is holding 37 Palestinian journalists in its prisons, including 19 under administrative detention without charge or trial, says the Palestinian Prisoner Society.

The nongovernmental advocacy group said all 37 journalists were detained following the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023.

It said Israel continues to target Palestinian journalists through arrests, prison sentences, solitary confinement and prosecution over their work and freedom of expression.

• READ MORE: West Bank: RSF condemns Israeli army over escalating violence against Palestinian journalists
• Other Palestinian journalist reports

Among the latest detainees are journalists Muath Ammarna and Sabri Jibrin, who were arrested last Thursday after Israeli forces raided their homes in Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.

The group said Ammarna had been repeatedly targeted by Israeli authorities and was now being detained for the third time over his journalistic work.

It also cited the case of journalist and writer Mahmoud Fatafta, who was sentenced to 48 months in prison over what Israel described as “incitement,” one of the harshest sentences issued in such cases, according to the statement.

The society said Israeli authorities increasingly use “incitement” charges against journalists, alongside administrative detention based on what authorities describe as “secret files”.

Administrative detention
Nineteen journalists from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are currently held under administrative detention, accounting for 51 percent of all detained journalists, it added.

The group also highlighted the case of journalist Bushra al-Tawil, 33, who was transferred from Damon Prison in northern Israel to solitary confinement at Ramla Prison in central Israel.

It accused Israeli authorities of intensifying isolation and other restrictive measures against female Palestinian prisoners, alongside food deprivation, denial of medical treatment and poor sanitation conditions.

The society said detained journalists faced the same conditions as other Palestinian prisoners, including hunger, medical neglect, torture, abuse, solitary confinement and denial of basic rights.

Journalists are also targeted through killings, enforced disappearances and direct attacks while carrying out their work, it added, describing this as part of a systematic policy aimed at restricting Palestinian reporting and documentation of Israeli crimes and violations.

The occupied West Bank has seen daily Israeli army raids and escalating attacks by occupiers since the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023.

The attacks have included killings, arrests, demolitions, attacks on homes, vehicles and mosques, destruction of agricultural land, restrictions on farmers, displacement of Palestinians and expansion of illegal settlements.

​​​​​​​On Thursday, the Palestinian Prisoner Society said Israeli forces detained more than 100 Palestinians across the West Bank over the previous week, bringing the number of West Bank detainees since October 2023 to more than 25,000, in addition to thousands detained from Gaza.

Republished from Anadolu Ajansi.

After a two-year legal battle to punish a prominent Australian journalist for her public criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) has withdrawn its case.

“This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression,” Kostakidis said on X. “Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly damaging trial.

“The purpose of journalism is to get to the truth — fearlessly — and to hold power to account. This is a win for press freedom, which has prevailed.“

Kostakidis, who anchored the SBS national news for nearly 20 years, was a high-profile target for the Zionist Federation in its quest to silence outrage over Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

Alon Cassuto, the ZFA chief executive who brought the case against Kostakidis, claimed on X that he withdrew it on Thursday to deprive her of a platform. He wrote:

“I do not intend to spend another year taking Ms Kostakidis’ repugnant commentary from the dark corners of the internet and giving it a Federal Court platform in her pursuit of martyrdom. My job here is done.”

The majority of his statement was a continued attack on the journalist. He claimed that the action he brought against Kostakidis was satisfied by an apology she had issued. But that was two years ago and he pursued his case against her nonetheless.

What he did not mention is a recent series of court decisions in Australia by judges who upheld the right to criticise Zionism, which appears to have weakened his chances of winning.

Kostakidis had also won approval for full discovery of ZFA communications.

In claiming victory, Kostakidis wrote:

“Watching a people live stream their own genocide while the international community responsible for creating this mess offers the victims sympathy and the perpetrators bombs, diplomatic cover and impunity, has been disgusting.

“Thank you to the Jewish and Israeli people all over the world raging against this in recognition our common humanity trumps any form of tribalism.

“Australia must stop disregarding the Orders of the International Court of Justice which were clear: we are obliged under international law to take meaningful action to prevent genocide in Palestine and to do all in our power to bring about an end to apartheid.

“Hypocrisy, double standards and a lack of courage are aiding the destruction of a framework intended to protect against the worst excesses of state power.”

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London.

Breaking: Zionists legal proceedings against me have been withdrawn after a 2 year battle.

This is a win for every Australian who values our democratic right to freedom of political expression. Zionist zealotry has had to beat a retreat from what was going to be a highly…

— Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) September 10, 2026

In citizen responses to this article published by Consortium News:

ANALYSIS: By Tess Newton Cain and Stefan Armbruster

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other Gaza war graves desecration reports

They are not simply names on a distant memorial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their graves subsequently became part of Gaza’s landscape.

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

And then Gaza became a battlefield again.

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

That is the tragedy of Gaza’s war graves.

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

The men buried there were part of our history.

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

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

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

And that makes their treatment today especially painful.

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

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

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

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

Their names remain.

Their graves remain.

And their story should not be forgotten.

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

Misinformation on social media is the biggest challenge for journalists, says Belinda Kora, secretary of the Media Council of Papua New Guinea (MCPNG) and founder of Women in Media (WIM).

She gave her address at the closing ceremony of an Election Integrity Workshop for media last week.

The week-long programme was hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with the European Union (EU) and MCPNG on August 31-September 4.

• READ MORE: Other PNG media reports

She cautioned that Facebook posts were often unreliable and urged reporters to verify content before publication.

“Always make sure that whatever you have, go back to your newsroom and share it with your colleagues before publishing,” Kora said.

To illustrate, she pointed to a viral post about a giant cabbage being sold for more that 100 kina (NZ$38) at Eliseo Shopping Centre. Many online users dismissed it as artificial intelligence (AI), but she confirmed its authenticity after checking.

“Get used to verifying and then put it in your [social media] account and say, ‘I verified this’. Doing this will help because there is a lot of misinformation,” she told journalists at the workshop.

Importance of networking
Kora also stressed the importance of networking, highlighting the women-in-media WhatsApp group that has more than 300 members nationwide.

“It’s a good place to share experiences, or if you need contacts for news stories across the country, you can always ask in the group and they will be happy to help,” she advised.

The Media Council of Papua New Guinea, established more than 20 years ago, does not interfere with editorial decisions but provides guidance, training, and support to journalists.

The workshop was designed to strengthen ethical and objective reporting ahead of the 2027 elections.

At its conclusion, 10 media representatives received certificates of participation, equipping them to share the knowledge with colleagues and uphold ethical standards in their reporting during the election period.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

Pro-Palestine activists made strong pleas for stronger boycotts of Israeli products today and again demanded that the New Zealand government sanction Tel Aviv over its Gaza genocide.

In the 153rd week of continuous protests, the activists themed the global BDS – boycott-divestment-sanctions — campaign with local targets such as the Auckland Council and other investment funds.

Speakers included activists Leeann Wahanui-Peters, Neil Scott, Kathy Ross, Achmat Esau and Anna Lee.

• READ MORE: Israel must protect West Bank’s Palestinians amid settler pogroms, says US envoy
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) campaigner Neil Scott gave a blistering indictment of the current coalition government’s weak response to what he called Israeli crimes against humanity.

He also called on the government to end the “visa free” policy for anybody who is in the Israeli military.

“That’s [those] in the current military, or the military reserves — and they are in reserves until the age of 40,” he said. “These people should not be coming to Aotearoa when they are in a genocidal terrorist entity for the Israeli Defence Forces [IDF].

“That should be ended,” Scott added, and he was greeted with loud cheers and applause.

Compared with South Africa
Speakers also compared the BDS campaign with the successful anti-apartheid campaigns against white minority-ruled South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Now South Africa is spearheading the legal fight against Israel in the world’s top judiciary, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague. Last week it filed a new legal dossier highlighting the genocidal state’s non-compliance with binding provisional measures.

Another PSNA activist, Anna Lee, also called on protesters to support the BDS movement and do all they could to “damage the Israeli Zionist regime and its ability to continue the genocide”.

“We can financially damage the Israeli economy just as we did when there was an international boycott on apartheid South Africa,” she said.

“We need to target goods, services and any investments that aid the Zionist economy and assist it to do ‘business as usual’ with its apartheid and murderous activities.”

Lee reminded the crowd that boycotts did work.

“They were very successful in hitting the apartheid regime in South Africa and they are already damaging the Israeli economy.

“In fact, they are so successful that Israeli-sponsored Zionist groups in the USA are pressuring Republican state governments to persecute any state employee or contractor who admits to taking part in the boycott of Israel.”

Israeli regime ‘hurting’
The Israeli regime was “hurting” which was why it was working hard on small nations around the world to get more economic collaboration.

“This is why very recently the NZ Israeli Innovation Hub sales promotion was held here in Tāmaki Makaurau [Auckland].

“This shameful event was aimed at increasing NZ economic collaboration with Israeli companies. And it was attended by officials from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).”

Lee said the boycott movement did not just include Israeli-owned companies but included international businesses which had invested in Israel to take advantage of financial incentives and the opportunity to “profit from exploitation of the Palestinian workers in the ‘occupied territories’”.

“It’s not hard to identify these companies today. We can’t rely on the ‘made in’ labels on the packages because these businesses, like the Zionists, are devious.

“But we do have phone apps like ‘No Thanks’ which you can install on your phone.”

Lee said all people needed to do was “scan the barcode” and they would immediately get an answer.

“If the product is on the boycott list you can then make one more ‘click’ and read why. If it is OK the app will say so.”

The app was developed by a Palestinian software engineer from Gaza — “and it is a powerful tool to use to hit the Zionist regime and support Palestinian freedom”.

Activists from the PSNA and other Palestinian solidarity groups around New Zealand held meetings this week to plan actions for the Global March for Palestine on October 10. New Zealand will be the first country in the world to kick off that march.

Support groups include Banners for Palestine, the Palestine Car Convoy, and Stand With Palestine Waiheke Group.

The Auckland event is scheduled to start at 2pm in Te Komititanga Square/Britomart on that day and march up Queen Street to Albert Park.

Also, a solidarity “kite day” event at Coyle Park, Point Chevalier, is planned for next Saturday after the 2pm CBD rally.

Nobody ready to push back
Meanwhile, a prominent Israeli peace activist has warned that no one in Israel’s government was prepared to push back against the extremist policies of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Alon-Lee Green, co-director and founder of the Palestinian-Jewish activist group Standing Together, told Al Jazeera that Israeli politicians were “all fighting against each other over who is more extreme and who is winning more of the right-wing voters”.

Many opposition figures would not represent a departure from current anti-Palestine policies, the activist said, but instead sought to contest “the right wing in power over the question of who’s more right wing”.

Ben-Gvir was “trying to promise us that with more death, and more blood, and more abuse”, Israeli Jews will gain security, Green added.

“He’s lying. We will only get more violence out of it,” he said.

No one could have predicted this disaster would happen when it did, but we all knew it would happen one day.

As this paper went to press last Thursday afternoon, the unimaginable scale of the Central Nepal flood catastrophe was becoming apparent. With every notice about a bank branch that lost all its staff, a police station without a single survivor, buses full of Janai Purnima pilgrims swept away, and phone calls to this office from Indian families asking to locate their loved ones — we have had to come to terms with the tragically high cost in human lives.

Not since the 2015 earthquake has Nepal seen a disaster of this magnitude. In terms of economic damage to infrastructure and property, it is the worst in this country’s history. Remote sensing has enabled us to pinpoint the location of the avalanche on the north face of Langtang in Nepal that blocked the Lhende Khola which flows into the Trisuli in Nepal and which burst last Wednesday morning just before 9 am.

• READ MORE: Rescue efforts continue as Nepal-China flood death toll surpasses 1270
• Temporary burial for flood victims in Nepal
• Nepal-Tibet floods: What happened, what caused them and who is missing?
• Other Nepal-China flood reports

The debris flow at Timure on the border was nearly 80m high, and as the flood raced downstream it swept everything in its path. It spared nothing.

No one could have predicted this disaster would happen when it did. But anyone could have said it was bound to happen one day. In this newspaper, we ourselves have frequently reminded policy makers about the need to prepare for floods unleashed by extreme weather, glacial lake outburst floods, and transboundary climate calamities.

We said that after the Barun Khola flood of 2017, after the Melamchi disaster of 2021, and after the Teesta flood in Sikkim that swept away a $1 billion dam, we wrote in this space about lessons for Nepal’s own hydroelectric plants on the Arun, Marsyangdi and Trisuli. And the Bhote Kosi flood on July 8 last year was another alarm bell.

Strategy for survival
Arguing that this is not a problem we created, that we need to be compensated for historical carbon emissions, is for speeches at UN climate summits. There is no money coming for Loss and Damage. We are in this on our own, we have to craft our own strategy for survival.

This was not a “natural” disaster. Nothing about it was natural — not the glacier melting due to greenhouse gas buildup due to fossil fuel burning, not the location of expensive hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not designing highways to follow rivers, not the settlements that have grown around them, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.

Our ancestors knew not to live next to Himalayan rivers. Nepal’s townships used to be located along high ridgelines, and floodplains were only used to grow food or grind grain. Bridges were temporary, and designed to be rebuilt after monsoon floods washed them away.

Economic desperation, outmigration from rural areas and proximity to roads have pushed people to settle along river banks — despite full knowledge of the risks. Hazard mapping of settlements along river banks enforced by local governments could have saved many lives last week.

Early warning will be of no help if homes are located right next to rivers flowing down from the world’s youngest and most seismically-active mountain range, now feeling the full impact of the climate crisis.

We have repeated this ad nauseum after every disaster: let us not put all our eggs in one basket. Instead of taking huge loans to invest in cascades of expensive hydroelectric plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, Nepal should opt for smaller projects across the country and spread the risk.

In one fell swoop on Wednesday morning, Nepal lost 440MW from 12 hydroelectric plants — 10 percent of the country’s total generation capacity. Transmission lines and substations located along the river corridor were destroyed.

A culture of fatalism can explain the lack of interest in preparedness for disaster that we know will happen, and with greater frequency in future. But that is no excuse. Even if previous governments ignored this, Nepal’s new administration with its technocrats and PhDs must take measures to address seismic and climate co-hazards.

Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This disaster also offers the chance for Prime Minister Balendra Shah and his government to demonstrate a proactive approach in search, rescue, rehabilitation and a preparedness strategy for the future.

We should not need a disaster to remind us to be prepared. By then it is too late for many people, as it tragically was this week. We failed to learn our lessons once again. This period of national mourning calls for Nepalis to be united, to show the same spirit of compassion and generosity that we saw in 2015.

Sonia Awale, editor of the Nepali Times. First published on 27 August 2026 and republished under Creative Commons.

New Zealand signed an international letter criticising Israel which foreshadows sanctions but a pro-Palestine advocacy group has rapped the government over its “haphazard” and “mixed messages” West Asia policy.

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) cited a “hint of future economic sanctions” against Israel in a statement of concern issued jointly by New Zealand, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway and Canada just over a week ago.

However, New Zealand did not put its name to another second and stronger statement of condemnation against Israel constructing the highly strategic E1 illegal settlement on the Occupied West Bank.

• READ MORE: ‘Not sorry’ – will international pressure mean justice for Zomi Frankcom?
• PSNA slams NZ’s ‘uncaring’ lack of signature on global Israeli settlements censure
• Why Israeli tenders for illegal E1 West Bank settlement prompted outrage
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

The second statement was issued at the same time, and had been signed by 22 Western countries.

All the countries who signed the second letter, except New Zealand and Germany, also signed the first one.

PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said in a statement that ether New Zealand was deliberately identifying and aligning with Germany — which is Israel’s third largest arms supplier — or “outsourcing” its foreign policy,

“More likely, it’s National outsourcing its foreign policy to New Zealand First, whose leader is blatantly pro-Israel. That haphazard arrangement results in mixed and ambiguous messages for the world and for New Zealanders,” Tamimi said.

Warning over tenders
She said there was a suggestion of economic sanctions in the second statement which did have New Zealand’s signature.

The statement stated “businesses should not consider bidding for construction tenders.

“They should be aware of legal and reputational consequences, including the risk of involving themselves in various breaches of international law.”

Tamimi said this warning was presumably to local companies in each country. It was a notice that the governments of the signatory countries could bring legal proceedings or amend legislation to thwart these companies.

“If governments follow this through, this is hugely important for investment funds in New Zealand which operate under Acts of Parliament, such as the Super Fund, ACC and KiwiSavers,” she said.

“The Super Fund lost a court case earlier this year, due to its attempts to keep investing in companies profiting from Israeli West Bank settlements. The writing is on the wall for other investors in Israel.

“Investment in genocide and apartheid Israel is neither a prudent nor moral choice for anyone.”

The Free Palestine Party was presented at a solidarity rally at the weekend as the new political group contesting the New Zealand general election in November.

But the plea was “don’t vote for us” — instead, use the party as a platform pressure the government to honour its obligations under international law over Palestine.

Organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), the rally — staged on the 152nd consecutive week since Israel launched its genocide on the besieged Gaza enclave in October 2023 — activist Anna Lee “unofficially” explained the party’s stance.

• READ MORE: New Zealand’s Free Palestine Party aims to turn solidarity movement into political force
• Palestine Free From the River to the Sea Party
• Global March for Palestine

embed code
In an interview with Türkiye’s Anadolu news agency in July, party leader Paul Hopkinson declared: “The Palestinian issue has disappeared from public space. We will make sure that the Palestinian issue is front and centre in this election.”

Formally registered as a NZ political party on August 5, Free Palestine states on its website that it is “committed to justice, international law, and a democratic state with equal rights for all citizens”.

“My understanding is we don’t want you to vote for the Palestine Free from the River to the Sea Party,” said Lee, a PSNA organiser and a party member.

“The aim is to change public opinion and put sustained parliamentary pressure on the New Zealand government to uphold its obligations under international law with respect to Palestine.”

The party is centred on the Nakba — “the catastrophe”, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine — as the historical root of the ongoing crisis, directly challenging Western narratives that deny or minimise Palestinian evictions.

Anna Lee outlined the party’s aims — building a broad, democratic party that unites supporters of Palestine from all traditions, allowing different ideas and perspectives to be discussed in an environment of tolerance and respect.

It also seeks to pressure the NZ government to support the prosecution of war crimes and genocide, uphold UN resolutions, and exercise its independent voice in international forums.

The idea is to build links in solidarity with all those resisting inequality and injustice around the world, recognising that Palestinian liberation is bound up with the broader struggle against imperialism.

Lee also stressed the party’s founding principles. The first two are as follows and the full list is here.

• A just peace in Palestine depends upon the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland and the dismantling of the Zionist structure of the state of Israel, recognising that the further partitioning of Palestine in order to create the so-called Two State Solution would only lead to further injustice and suffering.
• Acceptance of the primacy of international law and the United Nations resolutions as the basis for the ending of military occupation and all forms of ethnic discrimination in Israel.

The PSNA invited nine political parties and independent candidates to its “Make genocide an election issue” rally and public forum last Saturday in Auckland.

However, none of the three government coalition parties responded, nor did the fast-growing Opportunities Party (TOP).

Four opposition parties — Free Palestine Party, Green Party, Labour Party, Te Pāti Māori, and Dr Timoti Te Moke (independent candidate for Māngere) — agreed to take part.

Free Palestine Party seeks electoral voice in New Zealand    Video: Anadolu

Their presentations were reported by Asia Pacific Report here.

PSNA’s Neil Scott summarised a few of the government’s “positive” steps:

• Condemned illegal settlements: The government has stated Israeli settlements in the West Bank violate international law
• Sanctioned 3 extremist settlers: Travel bans were imposed on Itamar Yehuda Levi, Harel David Libi, and Eliav Libi for violence and expanding illegal settlements
• Supported two-state solution: Officially backs a negotiated two-state outcome (but does not recognise Palestine?)
• Called for ceasefire: Peters has publicly called for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian access to Gaza
• Voted for UN resolution: NZ voted for a UN resolution demanding Israel end its unlawful presence in occupied Palestinian territory within 12 months.

But Scott also read out a long list of NZ government “negatives”:

• The coalition government had the chance to recognise Palestine alongside Australia, the UK, and Canada — but it refused. The government said recognition was a matter of “when, not if,’ but then chose not to act.
• Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick’s bill to sanction Israel has been blocked by this coalition government — denied even a first reading.
• Does not support the South African government’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
• Refuses to ban NZ holiday visas for members of the IDF: ”New Zealand’s Working Holiday Scheme arrangement with Israel was agreed to in 2010 in the spirit of promoting closer cooperation between Israel and New Zealand. We are not looking to alter this arrangement currently.”
• PSNA raised concerns with Judith Collins in November 2024 re Rocket Lab complicity in the war on Gaza. She refused to investigate.
• New Zealand continues joint military drills with Israel under RIMPAC – NZDF sent the largest contingent in a decade to RIMPAC 2026, alongside Israel and US.
• Under current coalition Holocaust education passed to become part of the NZ curriculum.

“PSNA supports including Holocaust education in the compulsory curriculum,” said Scott.

“But this education must be delivered in the broader context of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the other components of customary international law.

“It is simply not appropriate for the curriculum to centre genocide of Europeans while bypassing the numerous genocides of people of colour throughout colonial history, including in Aotearoa New Zealand, and up to the present day.”

PSNA – along with other groups – is now organising its part in a major Hīkoi for Palestine: International Day of Action on October 10. New Zealand will be the first country in the world participating in this event for the people of Palestine.

A national pro-Palestine advocacy group has criticised the “absence of signature” by the New Zealand government on a 22-member joint statement condemning the E1 Israeli settlement in the Occupied West Bank as a “moral collapse” in foreign policy.

The recent joint statement was issued by the foreign ministers of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Commission.

The statement condemned the decision by the Israeli Higher Planning Committee to approve plans for settlement construction in the E1 area, East of Jerusalem, as “unacceptable and a violation of international law”.

• READ MORE: NZ left parties condemn Luxon govt on lack of humanity, ‘complicity’ over Gaza genocide
• Palestinians, UK condemn Israel’s ‘destructive’ E1 settlement plan
• PM Christopher Luxon condemns Israel’s E1 settlement plan
• Other Palestine reports

The E1 settlement would divide the Occupied West Bank into two regions — northern and southern — and seriously damage the prospect of a Palestine state.

However, the status of New Zealand’s position on the joint protest was confusing with an Australian government statement not listing New Zealand while the UK version did.

RNZ National reports that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had condemned Israel’s E1 settlement plan in spite of New Zealand “not signing a joint statement”.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) spokesperson Rinad Tamimi condemned the New Zealand’s government’s “absence from the statement” in the context of the specific citing of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, describing the settlements as a “flagrant breach of international law.”

“The Key/English National Party government co-sponsored this resolution at the UN Security Council in 2016,” she said in a statement.

Israel’s E1 Settlement Plan Sparks International Condemnation   Video: Al Jazeera

“But the Luxon National Party, even after the genocide in Gaza in the past three years, can’t even bother to put its name to this recent condemnation,” Tamimi said.

Israel’s ‘favourable note’ on NZ
“In the nuanced world of international diplomacy, Israel will be taking favourable note of New Zealand’s slide into not caring what atrocities Israel is committing.

“Without taking any other action, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has always made of point of saying he often ‘made his concerns known’ to Israel. Now he’s even given up on that.”

Tamimi also criticised the lack of specific policies by New Zealand’s political parties to support Palestine in their election manifestos.

However, Te Pāti Māori publicly presented a strong 10-point pro-Palestine policy platform by co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer at a PSNA “make genocide an election issue” rally in Auckland on Saturday. Labour Party and Green Party spokespeople also made key statements over Palestine at the rally.

Tamimi said Israel’s genocide in Gaza was the worst atrocity of the 21st century.

“While there is meant to be a functioning ceasefire, the latest news from Gaza is that Israel has reoccupied more than 70 percent of Gaza, Israeli forces have resumed their assault because children in Gaza were flying kites,” she said in the statement.

“And on the Occupied West Bank Israeli settlers are openly beating up foreign network journalists with impunity.”

Practical, significant leverage
She said New Zealand had practical and significant symbolic leverage against Israel which it had “deliberately decided not to use”.

“As you would expect, all three coalition parties, pretend there is no such thing as foreign policy.”

“Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori have expressed support for Palestine, including imposing sanctions.

“But they need to clearly state what type and level of sanctions. Even the present government can say its immigration bans on West Bank terrorist settlers constitutes a sanction.

Tamimi said it was just “election rhetoric”, without announcing specific and meaningful sanctions in all areas — trade, investment, diplomatic, military and immigration.

“Without sanctions, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the Greater Israel project, are all still licensed for Israel to action,” she said.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Justice Desmond Fagan’s Supreme Court decision in the State of New South Wales v Farhat wrecks the architecture designed by Antisemitism Special Envoy Jillian Segal, adopted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and enforced across Australia.

Australians have been instructed that hostility towards Israel is hostility towards Jews. The lobby never won that argument. It changed the dictionary instead.

Albanese supplied the imprimatur. NSW Premier Chris Minns supplied the muscle. David Crisafulli criminalised protest slogans. Peter Malinauskas carried the doctrine into the South Australian Parliament.

• READ MORE: NSW ‘seeking urgent advice’ on controversial court ruling that found anti-Israel vandalism was not antisemitic
• A judgment that challenges the IHRA definition of antisemitism
• Other Australia antisemitism reports

Different parties. Different states. The same obedient genuflection.

The vandal who wasn’t an antisemite
Mohommed Farhat was a vandal for hire. He caused more than $110,000 in damage, torched a vehicle and painted “Fuk Israel” across Woollahra.

Justice Fagan found Farhat was recruited and did not know what some slogans meant. Yet the State wanted him branded an antisemite and shackled with 55 terrorism supervision restrictions.

Fagan refused. His judgment is an autopsy of how propaganda becomes administrative fact. Police, prosecutors, the Crown Solicitor and the Director of Public Prosecutions repeated an unexamined claim until repetition replaced proof.

The label was false and “injustice to the defendant” followed.

Then he turned to the definition. The IHRA formulation promoted by Segal and embraced by Canberra was, he found, “verbose and imprecise” and “detached from the reality of common usage”.

Promoting it sought to change the settled meaning of “a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years” and to “graft” onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism ”a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel”.

Fagan cited Pew polling showing 74 percent of Australians unfavourable towards Israel, rising to 79 percent this year, and inferred a “humanitarian reaction to Israel’s genocide of the Gazans”.

A definition that tars four in five Australians is not detecting hatred.

It is outlawing majority opinion.

Antisemitism, Fagan said, is simply “hostility to Jews for their Jewishness”. It is real, repugnant and must be confronted. Israel is a foreign state. Zionism is a political ideology. Neither is entitled to immunity from condemnation.

Protecting Jewish Australians is essential. Protecting a foreign government from criticism is not.

The lobbyist who wrote the law
Segal became Special Envoy after leading the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose published mission includes defending Israel, encouraging Zionism and lobbying governments for positions favourable to Israel.

The referee was recruited from one team’s front office.

She may hold those views. She may not launder them through the Commonwealth and receive them back as law.

Albanese outsourced the dictionary to a protagonist, then adopted her every recommendation despite warnings from Jewish and civil liberties groups that it would punish lawful advocacy for Palestine.

Not consultation. Capitulation, formalised in a press release.

The government’s response commits the Commonwealth, states and territories to implementing Segal’s programme. National machinery of compliance, and the premiers queued up to install it.

Minns, Crisafulli, Malinauskas
Minns expanded police powers and created new speech offences. Crisafulli criminalised two protest slogans, with two years in prison where words might reasonably cause somebody to feel menaced, harassed or offended.

Offended. The decay of liberal democracy, compressed into one word.

Malinauskas backed IHRA through the South Australian Parliament, then pressed Adelaide Writers’ Week to dump Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. David Gonski, whose name once meant needs based schooling, now fronts an Antisemitism Education Taskforce with Segal at his side.

The Australian Public Service Commission says IHRA applies in federal workplaces. AHPRA adopted it across 16 professions and more than 960,000 practitioners. A reference tool held over a doctor’s registration is not a dictionary but a threat to a livelihood.

Fear is the cheapest police force ever deployed.

Executive policy cannot rewrite ordinary language. A circular cannot create law. Parliament never enacted IHRA, so the court gave it no force. Not a High Court ruling, but a preview.

Eighteen police, one shirt
I have been the test case.

On 3 November 2024, NSW Police arrested me at Bondi for wearing “Fuck Israel, Fuck Zionism”. I threatened nobody and damaged nothing. I was handcuffed, held six hours, fingerprinted and DNA tested by force over my objection.

Three charges followed, with bail conditions that ran more than a year. At one point I was banned from the eastern suburbs. My home in Surry Hills sat 400 metres from the boundary. One wrong walk meant arrest and up to 12 months in a cell awaiting a hearing.

For a shirt.

All three charges collapsed in December 2025 once my lawyers raised the implied freedom of political communication.

On April 6 this year, as many as 18 officers surrounded me at Bondi over the same shirt, among them Odin squad taskforce officers and two senior officers from area command. Overhead, a drone and a helicopter. On standby, an ambulance and two caged wagons.

Odin is a tactical unit for crowd management, high visibility policing and high risk operations. The high risk operation that morning was a shirt. I took it off. They arrested the shirt. A penalty notice arrived a week later.

Fagan has not decided my remaining matter, but he has demolished its pretence. He found the sprayed “Fuk Israel” was “crude political expression of contempt” for a foreign state, not hatred of Jews. If those words stayed political when painted during a crime spree, they cannot become Jew hatred worn peacefully on cotton.

The obscenity was never the shirt. It was the state power assembled around it.

Segal supplied the language. Albanese supplied the authority. Gonski took the classroom, AHPRA the professions, Minns the handcuffs, Crisafulli the statute book, Malinauskas the Parliament and the festival stage.

Justice Fagan supplied something none of them could survive: the law.

• Editor’s Note: the NSW Government is considering appealing Justice Fagan’s decision.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned and highlighted recent attacks and obstructions committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian journalists reporting from the occupied West Bank.

In a statement, RSF says this targeted violence is aimed at preventing media professionals from doing their jobs.

It also condemned the documented violence by extremist Jewish settlers against the Palestinian population.

• READ MORE:  The Gaza doctrine – Israeli ‘journacide’ and the muted NZ media response
• Other Palestinian journalist reports

“RSF condemns the Israeli army’s attacks on journalists and calls on Israel’s allied governments to pressure the country’s authorities to put an end to these actions,” said Martin Roux, head of RSF’s Crisis Desk.

“Amidst documented violence by extremist Jewish settlers against the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers are targeting journalists, thereby preventing information from emerging from this territory, which is increasingly cut off from the rest of the world.

Against the backdrop of intensified repression of Palestinian journalists since 7 October 2023, RSF has documented key incidents over the past three months:

11 May: Violence at Qalandiya camp
Israeli armed forces targeted a group of journalists with tear gas and stun grenades while they were covering a raid on the Qalandiya camp, located between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, both territories under Israeli occupation. The attack specifically targeted a crew from the Qatari channel Al Araby.

16 May: Access to Jenin camp barred
Israeli armed forces barred journalists from entering the Jenin camp in the northern occupied West Bank while military and demolition operations were underway. According to reporters on the scene, Israeli soldiers had sealed off the area.

27 May: Journalist prevented from visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound
Saif Al-Qawasmi, a 25-year-old freelance journalist who works for the Qatari news channel Al Jazeera Mubasher, among others, was detained by police while heading to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem on assignment. He was subsequently questioned about his work by law enforcement and Israeli intelligence for several hours. He was banned from accessing the site (initially for one week, and later for six months) on arbitrary grounds. This punitive access ban is frequently used by Israeli authorities against Palestinian journalists, a practice that predates the crackdown following 7 October 2023.

7 June: Live fire in Balata camp
A group of journalists went to the Balata camp, east of Nablus, to cover a large-scale raid by the Israeli army. Among them were Majdi Mohammed Shteih, a photographer for the US news agency Associated Press, and freelance journalist Sidqi Ayoub Rayyan, who works for the news site Noon Post. According to their accounts to RSF, the Israeli army fired stun grenades in their direction and then opened fire while they were attempting to cover the military operation.

16 June: Targeted attacks in Nablus and Deir Abu Mashaal
In the early hours of the night, while protecting a convoy of extremist Jewish settlers (not necessarily Israeli citizens) who had illegally entered Palestinian territory en route to Joseph’s Tomb, east of Nablus, the Israeli army forced out about 10 journalists reporting in the area (including crews from the Qatari channel Al Jazeera and the Jordanian channel Roya News) using stun grenades, thereby preventing media coverage of the event.

That same day, Motassem Saqf Al-Hayt, a correspondent for the independent news site Quds News Network, was injured after the Israeli army fired tear gas grenades while he was reporting from Deir Abu Mashaal, a village west of Ramallah where other settlers were attempting to establish an outpost.

22 July: Haaretz team obstructed south of Nablus
The Israeli army blocked a vehicle belonging to a team from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz south of Nablus. Soldiers claimed that the move was intended to prevent clashes with settlers established in the area.

On 10 August, the same Haaretz team was blocked and attacked by other settlers near a neighbouring village. This time, Israeli soldiers present at the scene refused to intervene and to protect the journalists, according to accounts.

19 journalists detained
Alongside these attacks against Palestinian journalists covering events, the number of journalist arrests in the occupied West Bank has surged since 7 October 2023. Of the 19 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank detained by Israeli authorities, 15 were arrested after that date.

Most recently, on the morning of 12 August 2026, Israeli armed forces arrested freelance journalist Mohammed Awad, who has notably contributed video work to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Qatari channel Al Jazeera, at his home in the village of Beitunia, west of Ramallah, on charges of “terrorism”. When contacted by RSF, the army had not, as of this writing, provided information to substantiate this accusation.

Foreign journalists also targeted
This crackdown on local journalists is compounded by obstacles facing international press correspondents. French journalist Alice Froussard, a contributor to Radio France Internationale (RFI), was deported upon her arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on June 10. This followed entry bans issued against journalists Queralt Castillo, Khadija Toufik, and Alessandro Stefanelli.

RSF, with the support of its Palestinian partner Watan Academy, continues its commitment to journalist safety. In August, the organisation conducted Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), tailored to the local context, for 20 Palestinian journalists.

• Read the full report at Reporters Without Borders.

ANJALI KAMAT: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Anjali Kamat.

We turn to the occupied West Bank, where Israeli settlers are continuing to lay siege on homes in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. The siege has attracted international attention, in part because one of the homes is owned by a Palestinian American.

The US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, surprised many when he recently described the siege as a, “horrific act of terror” being committed by, “Israeli terrorists”.

Loui Ridi, who lives in Ohio, spoke to Reuters before he flew from the United States to the West Bank to protect his home there.

• READ MORE: Qusra is where Israel’s lies about settler violence hit a wall
• Palestinian victims of Israeli settler attacks face battle for justice
• Qusra siege by Israeli settler ‘terrorists’ in West Bank persists despite global outcry
• Other occupied West Bank reports

LOUI RIDI: I have a lot of emotion in Qusra. I was born and raised in Qusra. My mother, 83 years old, still in Qusra, my sisters, my brothers, my nieces, my nephews, my cousins, my friends.

ANJALI KAMAT: Shortly after Loui Ridi landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, he received a video showing Israeli soldiers shaking the hands of the Israeli settlers laying siege to his home.

LOUI RIDI: When I landed, my brother sent me this video. That’s terrifying. That just happened like an hour ago. And they’re near the soldierS. They’re shaking hands with the soldiers. That’s just happening today.

I’m going to stay in this house tonight. So, I’m terrified. I’m asking the US officials, the embassy, to provide me protection and to remove the settlers permanently from our village and my area.

ANJALI KAMAT: Then, after Loui Ridi arrived back in the village of Qusra and reunited with his brother and other relatives, he raised an American flag on the roof of his home.

LOUI RIDI: I came here to be present with him. I left my luxury home in America. I left my luxury vehicles in America. I left my wife, my two daughters. I left my business and decided to be here at my home to protect it from the settlers [trying] to steal it, and raising the American flag to send the message to the American Embassy and the US officials that I am currently under siege and I need a protection.

ANJALI KAMAT: Despite Loui Ridi’s return, settlers have continued to confront the family. In this video, a settler is seen approaching and harassing Ridi on his own property.

SETTLER: [speaking Hebrew]

LOUI RIDI: You are a terrorist settler. You know that?

SETTLER: [speaking Hebrew]

LOUI RIDI: You are a terrorist settler. It’s garbage.

You know what that means? You stink. You stink. Move. Move. Don’t touch me.

SETTLER: [speaking Hebrew]

LOUI RIDI: Don’t touch me.

SETTLER: [speaking Hebrew]

LOUI RIDI: Terrorist. You are a terrorist.

ANJALI KAMAT: We go now to Qusra, where we’re joined by Loui Ridi.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Loui. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing right now? Describe the scene. Do you still have settlers coming into your property?

LOUI RIDI: Thank you for having me.

Day four in Qusra
Yes, this is my fourth day here in Qusra, in my house, that is still under siege by the IDF and the settlers. The settlers still manage every day to pass by my house. And the IDF are present and not doing anything to them.

They’re not arresting them whatsoever.

ANJALI KAMAT: Your reaction, Loui, to the comments by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee describing the settlers as “Israeli terrorists”?

LOUI RIDI: Well, again, I appreciate Mike Huckabee condemned it, called them terrorists. But I’ve been in contact with the embassy, that nothing has been done on the ground. And actually, I asked the US Embassy to send me a team to see themselves what’s going on here in my own house, so [they] can see what’s going on.

ANJALI KAMAT: And what kind of protection have you got?

LOUI RIDI: None. I’m not getting no protection here. I’m still [in] fear for my life. I still fear for my family’s life here. The IDF not even making it better here. They’re not allowing us to leave the house. They’re not allowing anyone to come to my house freely. If we need to bring food, we have to do coordination through the mayor of Qusra, and then he has to call the Palestinian Authority, and then they have to call the Israeli authority. It takes hours, if not days.

ANJALI KAMAT: Loui, this area of Qusra has been under siege for months, and your home specifically for at least a week, if not longer. And you’ve had — when you reach out to the US Embassy, I mean, you have the ambassador to Israel speaking out about this. You are an — what are they saying in response when you reach out for help? You have an American flag on your home.

Meet Loui Ridi – the Palestinian American returns home      Video: Democracy Now!

Under attack since January
LOUI RIDI: That’s right. This house has been under attack by Israeli settlers since January this year. It’s been under siege for 13 days. We have reached the US member of Congress local office. I have reached multiple times the US Embassy that I need help. Yes, I raised the American flag to send my message to the American people and to the government of the United States that there is an American under siege by the Israeli settlers, needs help.

ANJALI KAMAT: I want to bring into the conversation Oren Ziv in Tel Aviv. He’s a reporter and photographer for +972 Magazine and the independent Israeli local news site Local Call. His most recent article is headlined “Qusra is where Israel’s lies about settler violence hit a wall.”

Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what are these lies? What did you see in Qusra?

OREN ZIV: Yeah, thank you for having me.

I’ve been to Qusra twice in the recent week. First, a week ago on Friday, with — a group of activists [who] tried to march to Ridi’s house to bring food and water and medicine, and were blocked by the Israeli army and border police, the same army and police who allow for months the settlers to attack, to murder there, to injure. Israeli human rights activists were severely injured there a few months ago. Houses were attacked and vandalised.

Amir Odeh, a young Palestinian, was shot there during the war against Iran. And this is all happening, of course, with the active support of the army and the police. So, the first time, I was there on Friday, and we were blocked as journalists, also the activists that were coming bringing the food.

And the police and the army just let the activists leave the food near a few meters from the house. And later, local MK, parliament member, Ofer Cassif managed to bring it in.

Authorities do nothing
And the second time, I actually managed to go in, after waiting for a long time outside and talking to the army. And what I could see is the same reality that Loui is describing. Despite all the international attention, the media attention, the Americans speaking about it, the Israeli army and authorities are doing barely nothing to control the situation.

The house is still under siege. Settlers are roaming around. And, you know, myself as a journalist and many people are asking: Does the army — does the army [not] want to do anything, or under the political current situation in Israel, they can’t do anything? They don’t control the situation in the West Bank.

And, you know, I think it’s a hard question, but either way, the situation on the ground is that the house is under siege. You know, the army cannot deal with the 20, 30, 40 settlers that are acting violently, attacking this property and others.

And I think this is happening because of, of course, the support from the Israeli extreme government, but because of the perception that any settler, 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, can do anything that he wants in the West Bank, putting up outposts, putting a siege, killing, attacking, going to all these tours or trips and harassing Palestinians.

And soldiers are just not – they don’t think about the option to put a limit to that. And even though that the chief-of-staff talks about it and the commander of the West Bank, and I think the story gained a lot of attention because it shows the current situation of the Israeli army, that they cannot deal with five or 10 settlers.

But this kind of perception that settlers can do whatever they want and the army just has to support it is very, very strong.

ANJALI KAMAT: Oren, can you talk about this argument that, you know, Bibi Netanyahu is making, also, to some extent, Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, that there’s some sort of distinction between the settlers here — I believe Mike Huckabee called them “unsettlers” — and the vast majority of other settlers? And there also seems to be a distinction, you know, so, sort of “good settlers” and “bad settlers”.

‘Group of troubled youth’
OREN ZIV: Exactly. This is something Netanyahu — so, Netanyahu doesn’t give interviews to local media. He talks in American media. And when he’s asked about this, he always says, “This is a group of troubled youth.”

You know, sometimes he says 70, 150. But it’s very, very clear: They can act like this because of the active support from the Israeli government that gives them weapons, gives them ATVs, like the ones they raided Ridi’s house in Qusra and other houses, because of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, the establishment of more and more outposts that are kind of front bases for these terror attacks.

And they could not stay one day without the active support of the police that is completely controlled by Ben-Gvir, by the army that is controlled by the settlers and by the extreme government.

We did a story a few months ago about how the settlers, after — since October 7, they managed to ethnically cleanse dozens of Palestinian communities in Area C, mostly farming and herding communities. They just moved on.

And they say it openly, to Area — they say it openly, to Area A, to Area B of the West Bank, besieging houses, villages and town, and taking them over. And according to our investigation a few months ago, they already took over tens of thousands of hectares inside Area B and A that, according to the Oslo Accord and even according to official Israel, are under Palestinian control.

So, all this is happening with — like, this example, it’s happening in hundreds of other locations in the West Bank. The thing is, here — because even next to Abu Ridi’s house, in Jalud, the same tactic from the same violent outpost happened a month ago, that the Tubasi family was forced out.

‘Brave family’ slowed settlers
And the only difference here is that this brave family managed to slow down the process a bit with their decision not to leave, even [though] they had barely any food and water, with the violent attacks, the fact they’re under siege. They insisted on staying. He came from the US and managed to get media attention, including mainstream media, even local mainstream media, that have barely covered [the issue].

ANJALI KAMAT: Oren, I just want to go back to Loui Ridi, the Palestinian American whose home in Qusra is under siege by settlers. Loui, why did you return from Ohio to your home in Qusra?

LOUI RIDI: Well, I’d been watching all the attacks on my house, on my brother and his son, on the — live [feed] on my security cameras. I couldn’t sleep anymore. I have to stay up all night. And the situation became dangerous way when they completely blocked him off from food on August 9.

And I was talking to my brother, and I told him, “You know what? I’m going to come, and I will do whatever it takes to provide you food and supplies and end the siege, and trying to protect you.”

ANJALI KAMAT: Loui Ridi, thank you for joining us. We will continue to follow the settler siege on your home in Qusra. Thank you also to Oren Ziv of +972 Magazine. We will link to your new piece, “Qusra is where Israel’s lies about settler violence hit a wall.”

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

The IDF’s decision not to open a criminal investigation into the deaths of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, including an Australian citizen, drew strong condemnation.

But for Palestinians, this has simply become the norm.

Four years ago, when I arrived from Palestine to study for my Master’s degree in Melbourne, Australia, I had a hard time finalising some paperwork related to government services, simply because I could not create an account. The problem was that my country, at the time, wasn’t listed within the governmental system.

• READ MORE: Palestinian theologian warns against trusting Israel over Hind, medics killings probe
• What did Al Jazeera’s investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza reveal?
• Who was Hind Rajab and why is Israel investigating her killing?
• Israeli military launches criminal probes into killings of 5-year-old and paramedics
• Other Gaza genocide reports

There was no “Palestine” or “West Bank” and not even a slot for “Occupied Palestinian Territories”. At another interaction with local bureaucracy, the worker who received my passport commented that it was the first time he had seen a Palestinian one.

“I am sorry,” he said politely, “but I can’t even see it on the map.”

By the time we left Melbourne in 2024 and returned to our home in Ramallah, a lot had changed. For many months, hundreds of thousands of people gathered every Sunday in the city centre, raising Palestinian flags and calling to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

Watching these protests develop and gather steam, I came to realise that they were taking place not because Australia had become as “pro-Palestinian” as some of the media coverage had suggested, but rather because Israel’s image had badly deteriorated.

Australian opinion shifted
In September of 2025, the shifts in Australian public opinion regarding Israel and the occupation found their way into the country’s official policies, when the government in Canberra recognised Palestine. Australia was one of several influential countries to do so in recent years.

One of the most influential turning points in Australian public views of Israel came in April 2024 when an Israeli airstrike on Deir al-Balah killed seven aid workers from the humanitarian organisation World Central Kitchen, among them Zomi Frankcom, a 43-year-old woman from Melbourne.

For many Australians watching the horrors in Gaza from afar, that was the moment the war became personal.

This week, an internal inquiry by the Israeli military determined there was no criminal wrongdoing by any of the officers or soldiers involved in the fatal incident. Two years after the aid workers had been killed, Israel made clear it had no intention to punish anyone for their deaths, or even allow a proper independent investigation.

In Australia, this decision has been received with a mixture of anger and disappointment. The Australian Foreign Minister summoned the Israeli ambassador in protest.

I was following the headlines in Australia’s leading news websites from my home in Ramallah and realised how different my expectations as a Palestinian are from Israel, compared to those of many Australians. For me, there was nothing surprising about the Israeli military shielding soldiers from accountability.

Adla Alnazer is a public policy consultant and former adviser to the Palestinian government. This article was first published by Haaretz.

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

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

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

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

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

“Justice must prevail. Justice will prevail.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American President Donald Trump posted an image on his Truth Social today. An AI-generated image. It has the Strait of Hormuz circled, and above it, in large letters:

NEW U.S. TERRITORY

I wrote that line in capitals on purpose. Because this is not something said in a speech. This is a picture. One state is drawing an image and declaring another country’s sea lane its own territory.

Now the question is: does the Strait of Hormuz belong to America?

• READ MORE: Trump denies talks with Iran; Tehran claims US begging for negotiation
• Other War on Iran reports

No. To the north of the strait is Iran. To the south is Oman. America is an outsider sitting several thousand kilometres away.

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi answered this on X today: “We will correct the delusions of this delusional man.”

Last night, Trump told Fox News journalist Trey Yingst: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”

Meaning he does not want Oman reaching any agreement with Iran in any way at all. And yet Oman is an American ally. There are American troops in Oman. Oman lets America use its bases.

That same Oman, simply for talking to Iran, is today having its existence discussed. The threat was made once before as well, this past May.

The Strait still closed
Now let us come to the calendar. The war began on February 28. In June, a memorandum of understanding was signed, with a 60-day deadline. February passed into March. April, May, June and July went as well.

Now it is August. Yesterday those 60 days ran out. There is no deal. The strait is still closed.

Iran’s Speaker, the man who led Tehran’s negotiating team in the peace talks, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said in Parliament today: “The Strait of Hormuz will not open until the blockade is lifted.”

He laid out the rest of the conditions too — frozen assets must be released, the oil embargo must be lifted, threats and military operations on all fronts must end.

Think about it. The one who is supposedly finished off is the one setting the conditions.
But? Yes, there is a big but here. Trump said yesterday: “The Strait is open, and the oil prices are coming down.”

And yet on that very same day Brent crude went past US$90. And Reuters reported today, citing preliminary Kpler data, that six commodity ships passed through the strait on Monday.

The 10-day average is 11. Six. That is what total control looks like.

Cheap oil and gasoline
Now look at the state of things inside Washington. Vice-President JD Vance said on Fox last Thursday that goal number one is: keep oil and gas cheap for Americans.

On Monday morning Trump posted that goal number one is stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

The Vice-President says one thing. The President says another. And Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on that same Fox programme today that the strait was still a conflict zone.

The President says total control. His own Secretary says conflict zone.

This morning UKMTO reported that a vessel was struck by an unknown projectile while transiting the strait. The engine room was damaged. One crew member was a casualty. The Omani Coast Guard has moved in to assist the rest.

Yes, you are reading that right. The Omani Coast Guard. The Oman that was threatened with bombs yesterday is today saving ships in those very waters.

But the question is: why is Oman not backing down even after all these threats?

Not backing down
Here I will give my own opinion instead of quoting anybody else.

Oman is not backing down because Oman has worked out the arithmetic. Geographically the southern shore of the strait belongs to Oman. Iran cannot run the strait without that shore, and America cannot sustain the blockade without it either.

When you hold the thing both sides need, threats stop working.

JUST NOW: President Trump declares Strait of Hormuz as US territory. pic.twitter.com/OXyskj6BXW

— Donald J Trump Posts TruthSocial (@TruthTrumpPost) August 18, 2026

And the whole world is watching this scene. An allied state that gave its bases, that allowed troops, a relationship two centuries old — is being threatened with bombing simply for talking to its neighbour.

Trump has taken Venezuela. He wants to take Cuba. He wants Greenland too. He says all of it openly. And this same America goes around preaching peace, civilisation and democracy from country to country.

Write it down — after the Iran war the countries of the world will slowly pull themselves away from America. Europe has understood all this and is moving along its own path.

But the kings and sultans of the Gulf still do not understand. The way Oman is being glared at today, the day American interests take a hit, that same treatment will fall to them. The America they have kept close to protect their own thrones is the same America that will one day bring about their ruin.

I am closing today’s piece with something Trump himself said. About the Iranians he told Fox: “Good poker players, but they’re dying.”

Those who are dying stood in Parliament today and set the conditions. And the one with total control is generating a picture with AI and declaring territory.

When an empire has to draw a map to prove possession, you have to understand that in reality the possession is not in its hands.

Republished from Iran International.