Greenpeace International has condemned Israeli armed forces for illegally attacking a peaceful Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters for the second time.

The flobal environmental movement said in a statement it echoed the Global Sumud Flotilla’s urgent demand for safe passage for their peaceful humanitarian mission.

“Governments must act now to stop these illegal acts of aggression,” the Greenpeace statement said.

• READ MORE: Irish president’s sister, 2 Kiwis among Gaza flotilla activists detained by Israel
• The Flotilla Tracker map showing the location of the vessels
• Live streams from the flotilla
• Other Gaza humanitarian flotilla reports

Greenpeace spokesperson Pujarini Sen said: “In Palestine, in Lebanon and now in international waters, Israel’s disregard for human rights and international law cannot be tolerated.

“How long will the world stand by and watch Israel act with such impunity?

‘Protect the flotilla’
“Greenpeace calls on all governments to act with urgency to uphold international law and ensure the immediate release and protection of the Global Sumud Flotilla with concrete steps to ensure its safe passage to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

The Global Sumud Flotilla is a peaceful international movement sailing to oppose Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza, to confront the complicity that enables occupation, and to stand with the Palestinian people.

The Israeli government continues to enforce a blockade by land and sea of aid and food from international organisations. Blocking aid and targeting those who attempt to deliver it are violations of international humanitarian law.⁣

CPJ protest over journalists
In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called on international governments to demand the immediate release and protection of all civilians detained after Israeli forces attacked and intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters, including at least seven journalists on board.

“Detaining journalists for documenting a humanitarian mission is a grave violation of press freedom and international law,” said CPJ’s MENA regional director Sara Qudah in a statement.

“Israeli authorities must restore communications, ensure the safety of all passengers, and allow independent media to report without intimidation, violence, or arbitrary detention.

“Governments worldwide must act now to prevent further Israeli attacks on journalists and humanitarian civilians.”

At least 40 countries are represented by some 500 protesters and humanitarian activists on board the flotilla.

Israel is reported to have boarded and seized more than 60 boats in the flotilla.

At least two New Zealanders are reported to have been kidnapped by the Israeli military.

CPJ calls on international governments to demand the immediate release and protection of all civilians detained after #Israeli forces attacked and intercepted #the_Global_Sumud_Flotilla in international waters, including at least 7 #journalists on board. Detaining journalists for… pic.twitter.com/OpcQ33Jgrj

— CPJ MENA (@CPJMENA) May 18, 2026

Israel is now perceived more negatively than any other country in the world, according to new global polling published by Nira Data as part of its 2026 democracy and country perception research.

The five most positively perceived countries were Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden and Italy.

The findings place Israel at the bottom of the Global Country Perceptions 2026 ranking, a survey of 46,667 respondents assessing how 129 countries and three international organisations are viewed around the world.

• READ MORE: As Israel becomes a global pariah, leaked Meta data reveals soaring costs for its brands
• Israel to spend $730m on propaganda as global image collapses over Gaza genocide
• Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
• Other Gaza and war on Iran reports

The ranking was published alongside Nira Data’s 2026 Democracy Perception Index, which surveyed 94,146 respondents across 98 countries on how citizens experience democracy in their own countries.

The result marks another sign of Israel’s deepening international isolation amid its genocide in Gaza, mass displacement of Palestinians, starvation policies and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, and attacks on Lebanon in breach of a so-called “ceasefire”.

Israel’s global image has collapsed as human rights organisations, UN experts and international courts have warned of grave violations of international law by the occupation state.

The United States has also suffered a dramatic collapse in global standing. The US is now ranked among the five most negatively perceived countries in the world, below both Russia and China in international favourability. Its net perception score fell from +22 per cent in 2024 to -16 per cent in 2026, a 38-point drop in just two years.

Growing anger over Trump
US decline came amid growing anger over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, including strained relations with NATO allies, aggressive tariffs, threats relating to Greenland, cuts to Ukraine aid and Washington’s role in the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. The survey found that the US is now viewed as a major global threat, behind Russia and Israel.

The wider 2026 Democracy Perception Index describes itself as the world’s largest annual democracy survey.

Unlike expert-based democracy rankings, it asks citizens directly how they experience democracy through questions on elections, freedom of speech, political pluralism, civic education, separation of powers, rule of law, government transparency and peaceful transitions.

The collapse in Israel’s standing comes as global public opinion has shifted sharply against the occupation state over its assault on Gaza.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, destroyed most of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, displaced nearly the entire population and imposed conditions that UN experts and genocide scholars have described as genocidal.

For the US, the findings point to the steep cost of Washington’s continued military, diplomatic and political support for Israel.

While successive US administrations have shielded Israel from accountability at the UN and continued arms transfers despite mounting evidence of war crimes, the survey suggests that global publics increasingly associate American power with impunity, double standards and destabilising wars.

Republished from Middle East Monitor.

While appreciating certain points in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s speech “Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World” on current challenges to international law, enshrined “rules” and “order”, we must take a hard look at the solutions he offers to enhance security.

Security now clearly is shaped in a global context. The world’s geopolitical issues affect us all, not just those near sites of military engagement, as wars on Ukraine and Iran show.

So it’s misleading to consider security as simply a national or even regional issue, though people within range of military missiles and drones suffer the most horrendously.

• READ MORE: New Zealand in ‘big trouble’ amid growing global uncertainty, US-China relations, expert says
• Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World — Luxon speech

We would agree, as Luxon claims in closing remarks, that we have values worth defending.

What kind of a world and what network of values do we most want to defend? And how can we do this without compromising those same values?

Does anyone really believe that cultural and political values such as democracy are best defended by doubling military spending as he proposes? Or that 20th century national security perspectives and “bomb them to hell” strategies are fit for purpose today, while nuclear arsenals grow month by month, no longer restrained by arms control agreements?

We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order”. Australia, now our only officially acknowledged defence partner, is closely linked militarily with the US.

Exercises against ‘enemy’
Last year. NZ’s navy joined US and Israel in regular RIMPAC military exercises, to prepare for war against those labelled “enemy”. Judith Collins justified this on the basis that the US sent the invitations; NZ didn’t create the guest list. (Jack Tame interview, The Nation).

Clearly it’s time to weigh up our bedfellows more judiciously, and what values their actions, rather than their words, show they are defending.

It’s hard to see how one defends values like democracy by preparing for war alongside nations whose “Ministries of War” commit and enable genocide in Gaza, threaten to add Canada and Greenland to the US real estate portfolio, and bomb weaker nations back to the Stone Age, while kidnapping presidents of other nations if US corporate interests could benefit.

Luxon is right in stating that this is a historical inflection point, and the way in which we react, along with other nations, will determine “what kind of world comes next”.

How are our values best defended? With weapons and threats? Or by joining like-minded nations to call out all who undermine the values, rules and institutions that endeavoured since the end of World War Two and the United Nations Charter to enhance genuine human security worldwide?

Only ethically grounded values, policy and strategies, supported by inspired multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution skills, can promote such values and the multilateral order which supported them.

War is a barbaric, blunt tool from a past age which cannot deal with worsening 21st century existential threats which need global collaboration to solve, if most of humanity is to survive the future.

We owe it to our descendants to defend ethical values appropriately to build the foundations of a world that is fit for them.

Frances Palmer is a peace and conflict studies advocate and commentator. She was a SCF nurse in Vietnam and Khmer refugee camps 1975, 1980. Palmer wrote history resources for schools on “Cambodia, Faces of Violence, Hegemony & Holocaust” and “Aotearoa NZ 1980s-1990s, Participation & Resistance to International War”. This article was first published at Scoop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kidnapped by Israel                                   Video: The Chris Hedges Report

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

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

They were kidnapped and taken to Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are the best among us.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges X page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) May 1, 2026

Varoufakis is calling on the world to demand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) April 30, 2026

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

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

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

Republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons licence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman.

As we continue to look at the US and Israeli war on Iran, we’re joined now by Dr Maryam Jamshidi. She is an Iranian American associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute. She has written a new piece for The Nation magazine headlined “Only One Side Has Clearly Broken the Law In the Strait of Hormuz: And it isn’t Iran.”

Professor Jamshidi, explain.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So, you know, what I was trying to get at in that piece is that, you know, there’s been a lot of international outcry about what Iran has done in the strait, specifically its efforts to regulate passage of ships through the strait and to charge certain ships a fee for going through the strait.

The international rhetoric has been that what Iran is doing is completely and clearly illegal. And from my perspective, that’s not entirely true. This is not a black-and-white issue. Iran does have a reasonable legal argument to regulating the Strait of Hormuz, as well as to charging fees.

• READ MORE: ‘Predators’: Amnesty slams Netanyahu, Putin, Trump as human rights decline
• Tehran spurns talks under threats; Trump says blockade stays
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

By contrast, the criticism of what the United States and Israel has done to Iran, which is an aggressive and illegal war, has been more muted, in particular from Western states, as well as from some of the regional Arab states. And I think this contrast between these two reactions is very telling — on the one hand, total condemnation of Iran on legal issues that are far from clear, and very more muted criticism, more limited criticism of the United States and Israel when it comes to actions they’ve taken that are very clearly unlawful under international law.

I think this says a lot about the ways in which international law is being deployed in this moment as a way of restraining and regulating Iranian behavior, while effectively allowing the United States and Israel a free hand to do what they want against the Iranian government.

Who is breaking international law in the Strait of Hormuz?   Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think this unprovoked war that Israel and the US — this war of choice, as it’s called — have engaged in with Iran has done to international law and people’s perspective view of it around the world, and the consequences when people want to apply international law?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, over the last few years, we’ve seen the ways in which Israel, in particular, with support from the United States, as well as with support from much of the rest of the West, Western governments, has eroded and violated and scoffed at international law, in its actions towards the Palestinians, its actions in Lebanon, its actions in Syria, its actions in Yemen, its other actions in Iran.

And I think that, you know, these actions that Israel has taken has understandably led many to question the utility and importance of international law, whether or not it still exists or not. And, you know, now with this war against Iran, that, those concerns, those fears that international law is really meaningless, have only increased.

In this moment, though, I think what’s also important to understand is that states like Iran are also at the same time saying, “No, international law matters very much, and we expect to be treated as equals under international law.”

Iran, in this moment, is framing a lot of what it’s doing in international law terms, because it understands that if international law is truly going to be thrown into the dustbin, then it’s going to be far more vulnerable on the international stage.

So, we basically see a battle. We see a battle between, on the one side, states like Israel and the United States, states that are, by and large, Western, you know, basically saying, “International law doesn’t apply to us. We can do what we want,” and then other states, like Iran, states of the Global South, saying, “No, we want international law. We value international law. International law is necessary to ensuring that we are sovereign and equal to other states on the international scale. And so, we are not going to let international law just be taken away from us.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about the UN Security Council? You’ve noted multiple resolutions have been introduced to condemn Iran’s regulatory actions in the strait. Who is behind these resolutions? Meanwhile, the Iranian Parliament is reportedly considering legislation that would formalise its regulatory system, including the fee system, as part of its domestic law.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Right. So, there were — there have been multiple resolutions brought before the Security Council since the war started. They have mostly been focused on Iran and Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz. The states that have been the real force behind these resolutions appear to be the Arab Gulf states, in particular Bahrain and the UAE, who have also been the subject of the most attacks by Iran.

What’s, again, very interesting and, I think, important to understand about these resolutions is that they very clearly and absolutely condemned Iran for its regulatory actions within the Strait of Hormuz. As I mentioned, even though those actions do have a legal basis, those resolutions presented them as being fully unlawful.

And one of those resolutions, which, thankfully, was vetoed by China and Russia, would have effectively authorised all UN member states — that’s over 190 states — to go to war with Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, that is a very radical proposition, to basically validate and allow states to engage in armed conflict against another state simply for the purpose of opening a waterway.

So, you know — and again, there were no resolutions that were brought to the Security Council to explicitly condemn the US and Israel for their actions against Iran.

In terms of the domestic legislation inside Iran, you know, that the Iranian Parliament appears to be contemplating, as you mentioned, this legislation would basically make the regulatory scheme within Hormuz, in the Strait of Hormuz, a part of Iranian law.

It’s not entirely clear what the terms of that law are, you know, what the basis for it is, what kind of regulation it will in fact implement. But it does seem to have a fee system as a part of it. So, the Iranians are trying to take this ad hoc fee system that they have developed over the course of the last few weeks and actually institutionalise it within domestic law.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you about [US President Donald] Trump’s comments. On Saturday, he told a reporter at Fox News, “If Iran doesn’t sign this deal, the whole country is getting blown up.” That followed two weeks before, when he warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Professor Jamshidi?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: These comments are absolutely unacceptable. I mean, they are borderline genocidal in their intent and in their implications. To say to the world that you’re going to obliterate an entire civilisation is, in fact, to make very clear that you desire to destroy an entire people.

You know, I don’t know if he thinks that this is an effective negotiating tool, but certainly from a legal perspective, from a moral perspective, it’s beyond the pale.

This article is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That conflation matters.

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

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

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

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

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

He further added:

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

He described this as a “German duty”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went on to write that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#breakthesiege
@globalsumudflotilla
@speakupdotcom

Iran’s ambassador has criticised New Zealand’s failure to condemn the US and Israeli strikes on Iran as damaging the relationship between the two nations, reports 1News.

Interviewed on TVNZ’s Q+A programme by Jack Tame, Ambassador Reza Nazar Ahari said New Zealand’s “silence” would be interpreted as tacit support for the attacks.

He said the relationship between the two nations had “shifted”.

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

Ahari told Tame that New Zealand’s diplomatic “quietness” had damaged the relationship between the two nations, reports 1News.

He said the world had shifted from a “rule of law” to a “rule of the jungle”, where nations had given themselves the right to attack others without authorisation.

“A country like United States [has] made a military attack on Iran, and it is very clear that it is contrary to all international regulations, but New Zealand has not condemned that,” 1News quoted him as saying.

“Then that kind of quietness means that support. In Iranian culture, in many cases, quiet means positive reply,” he said.

Iran ambassador: New Zealand no longer stands up for peace   Video: Q&A

US navy blockade
Peace talks at the weekend between the US and Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, resulted in no new agreement, after six weeks of strikes on Iran and the Islamic Republic’s retaliatory attacks.

US President Donald Trump has declared a navy bockade on Iran after the failed talks and oil prices have surged again amid a fragile two-week ceasefire.

A Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) spokesperson told Q+A on Friday: “Just today, New Zealand has signed onto a joint leaders’ statement with Australia, the UK and other world leaders which calls on all sides to implement the ceasefire, including in Lebanon.”

Minister,

You are about to meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a time of real global tension.

Moments like this define countries.

My great-grandfather fought fascism.

• READ MORE: ‘Complete demolition’: Trump repeats Iran ultimatum as deal deadline looms
• Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

In 1935, when fascist Italy invaded my country of birth, Ethiopia, then Abyssinia, Emperor Haile Selassie warned the world at the League of Nations. Many countries hesitated. New Zealand didn’t.

Under Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, we called for sanctions. We chose principle over power.

We used to be clear about our principles in international politics. We stood against apartheid. We stood against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

In the 2010s, New Zealand went across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia asking for support to sit on the UN Security Council — not as a powerful country, but as a voice for the powerless.

Many countries trusted us and backed us. And for a time, we honoured that trust.

On 23 December 2016, under [then Foreign Minister] Murray McCully, we backed a UN resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal under international law. There was pressure. We stood firm.

On 25 March 2026, the UN voted to recognise slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as among the gravest crimes against humanity. Most countries supported it. New Zealand stepped back.

And as of 2026, we still refuse to recognise the State of Palestine while genocide unfolds in Gaza.

Minister, the current global tensions make this even more important. New Zealand is clear on international law when it comes to Iran. We must be just as clear when it comes to the United States and Israel.

As a small trading nation, our economic, diplomatic and security interests depend on international law being applied consistently. If we pick and choose, we weaken that system and we weaken ourselves.

Our reputation was built by standing up and punching above our weight, even when it was uncomfortable.

That is where our soft power came from. We have the potential to be a superpower in soft power.

Right now, we risk losing that by moving closer to powerful countries, even when they are in the wrong.

Minister, take that history with you into that meeting. Be clear. Be consistent. Stand for international law everywhere, not just where it is easy.

People in New Zealand and around the world are watching. And history has a long memory.

Nureddin Abdurahman is a Tangata Tiriti from Addis Ababa 17 years ago and a Wellington City Councillor. He first won a seat as a Paekawakawa/Southern Ward councillor in 2022 and was re-elected in 2025.

Greenpeace International has announced that the MY Arctic Sunrise — one of its largest vessels — will be taking part in the upcoming Global Sumud Flotilla relaunch in order “to directly challenge Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza”.

The green group said the Arctic Sunrise, an icebreaker that’s been part of Greenpeace’s fleet since 1995, will be “sailing alongside more than 70 vessels and over 1000 participants” in the second Global Sumud Flotilla, which is scheduled to set sail from Barcelona on April 12, with subsequent stops in Syracuse, Italy, and Lerapetra, Greece en route to Gaza.

Greenpeace said the Arctic Sunrise “is providing operational and technical support” for the flotilla.

• READ MORE: Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

“The devastation inflicted on Gaza has become a dangerous doctrine of impunity, now spreading to Lebanon through relentless destruction and deepening human suffering,” Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa executive director Ghiwa Nakat said in a statement.

“The Greenpeace ship is joining this people-led mission to demand safe, unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza and to challenge the illegal blockade that continues to devastate civilian life.

“We stand firmly against war crimes, deliberate starvation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ecocide,” Nakat added.

“This flotilla is a call to governments around the world to end their silence, protect humanitarian action, and act with urgency and principle to uphold international law, human dignity, and justice.”

Specialised medical care
Global Sumud Flotilla organisers said the 2026 mission will focus on specialised medical care, with more than 1000 healthcare professionals aiming to deliver lifesaving medicines and equipment to Gaza, where 29 months of Israeli war and siege have left the Palestinian exclave’s medical infrastructure in ruins.

Last year, dozens of boats carrying hundreds of activists from over 40 nations took part in the last Global Sumud Flotilla — sumud means “perseverance” in Arabic — as it attempted to break Israel’s naval blockade and deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid including food, medicines, and baby formula to starving Gazans amid a growing famine.

Israeli forces intercepted and seized the flotilla vessels in international waters in early October, arresting all aboard the boats and temporarily jailing them in Israel, where some — including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg — said they were physically and psychologically abused by their captors.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition has made numerous attempts to break Israel’s blockade by sea, all of which ended in more or less the same way.

In 2010, Israeli forces raided one of the first convoys carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea. The Israeli attackers killed nine volunteers aboard the MV Mavi Marmara, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan and a 10th died later.

Numerous experts and the entire United Nations Security Council — except the United States — have called the starvation of Gaza deliberately created by Israel, whose Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.

Israel — whose assault and siege of Gaza have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded — is also facing a genocide case in the International Court of Justice filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 countries, including Spain, the mission’s country of departure.

Cycle of destruction
“At this time of escalating war, triggered by US and Israeli militaries and cascading into a cycle of destruction and pain across the Middle East, we are honoured to answer the call to join the Sumud Flotilla,” Greenpeace Spain executive director Eva Saldaña said yesterday.

“While world governments have lacked the courage and conviction to uphold international law and their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza, the Sumud Flotilla has been a shining light of humanitarian solidarity and a symbol of hope in action.”

Global Sumud Flotilla leaders applauded Greenpeace’s decision to participate in its 2026 mission.

“Greenpeace’s history of defending the seas, confronting injustice, and taking action in defence of life makes them a powerful addition to our 2026 spring mission,” said Global Sumud Flotilla steering committee member Susan Abdullah.

“We sail together in the same direction, with a shared determination to help break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza.”

Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Two men are mainly responsible for the war on Iran. And then there are those — such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — who wilfully acquiesce to their murderous whims.

It’s the men. Not their press releases. Not their carefully managed public personas. Not the language their communications teams have stress tested for maximum palatability.

It’s the men themselves.

• READ MORE: Tehran says response to ceasefire proposals formulated, no direct talks
• NZ’s Peters called on to stress Palestine ‘open wound’ with Rubio
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Their records. Their legal jeopardy. And the extraordinary, historically unprecedented fact that the two primary architects of a war now costing ordinary Australians their livelihoods are both, in their own ways, running from accountability while simultaneously running the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Netanyahu is not merely a controversial leader prosecuting a controversial war. He is a criminal defendant. An accused man.

A person who, under the laws of his own country, not the laws of his enemies, not the laws of international tribunals, he can dismiss as biased, stands charged with fraud, breach of trust, and bribery.

His trial has been grinding through Israel’s courts since 2020. It has not concluded. And critics, serious critics, within Israel’s own legal and political establishment, have made the case, with mounting evidence, that the prolongation of this war serves Netanyahu’s personal legal interests at least as much as it serves Israel’s security ones.

Think about what that means.

A man facing prison. A man whose political survival depends on remaining in power. A man for whom a ceasefire, a negotiated peace, a return to normalcy could mean the resumption of court proceedings that his wartime emergency has conveniently disrupted. A man whose far-right coalition partners have made clear they will collapse the government the moment the guns fall silent.

This man, this specific man, in this specific legal and political predicament, has been handed a blank cheque by Washington. Unlimited weapons. Diplomatic cover.

A US veto at the Security Council every time the international community tries to intervene.

And Anthony Albanese calls the objectives of his war appropriate.

ICC arrest warrant
The International Criminal Court did not call them appropriate. It issued an arrest warrant.

A warrant that sits unrequited and unenforced as Western governments, including Australia’s, conduct business as usual with a man the court has found reasonable grounds to prosecute for war crimes. This is not a technicality. This is not a diplomatic inconvenience. It is the most fundamental possible test of whether the rules-based international order that Australia constantly invokes as a guiding principle means anything whatsoever.

And Australia is failing that test, quietly, daily,

with a smile and a press release about shared values.

This is the casus belli we are never allowed to examine. Not the security rationale. Not the stated military objectives. The actual human being in whose name and for whose benefit this catastrophe is being prosecuted. And what that human being is running from.

Donald Trump
Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 carrying more legal and personal baggage than any president in American history.

A convicted felon. Civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And something else, something the mainstream press, particularly in America and Australia, has handled with a caution so extraordinary it constitutes institutional cowardice — the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone predator. He was the centre of a network. A procurement and blackmail operation, almost certainly intelligence connected, that ran for decades across the highest levels of American, British, and Israeli power.

The files released in dribs and drabs, fought over in courts, partially suppressed and heavily redacted, point toward a system of leverage that compromised some of the most powerful men on earth.

Trump’s name appears in those files thousands of times. His association with Epstein was long, documented, and by his own prior admission, enthusiastic. In a 2002 interview, he described Epstein as terrific fun, noting approvingly that he liked beautiful women, many of them on the younger side.

That statement was made publicly. It has not been retracted.

It has simply been absorbed into the general noise of a political culture that has lost the capacity for appropriate disgust.

But the Epstein connection is not merely a personal scandal. It is a geopolitical one.

Epstein’s operation did not exist in a vacuum. Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, convicted and imprisoned, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the media baron confirmed after his death to have been a Mossad asset.

The intelligence dimensions of the Epstein network have been reported by journalists of unimpeachable seriousness across multiple continents. The suggestion that a blackmail operation of this scale, running through the power centres of American political and financial life for decades, had no connection to the intelligence services that specialise precisely in this kind of leverage is not a serious position.

It is wilful blindness.

The Mossad connection
Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence service and one of the most operationally aggressive intelligence agencies on the planet. It has assassinated scientists in foreign countries. It has conducted sabotage operations across the Middle East. It has run networks of influence, surveillance, and covert pressure in Western capitals for decades.

This is not conspiracy. This is its known, partially acknowledged, historically documented record.

What the Epstein network, the Mossad connection, the Maxwell lineage, and the drip feed of suppressed files collectively describe, if you follow the thread honestly and without flinching, is a Western political order in which deference to Israeli policy is not entirely or even primarily explained by shared democratic values and strategic alignment.

Some of it is explained by fear.

Some of it is explained by leverage.

Some of it is explained by the quiet, unspoken, never to be uttered in polite company reality that powerful men in Washington, London, and Canberra have made themselves vulnerable. To networks of kompromat, to relationships they cannot fully disclose, to the specific kind of coercive power that intelligence operations specialising in the exploitation of human weakness have deployed for as long as intelligence operations have existed.

This is why the charge of antisemitism is deployed so rapidly against anyone who raises these questions.

Not because the questions are antisemitic.

They manifestly are not, being questions about the conduct of specific governments, specific intelligence agencies, and specific individuals, not about Jewish people as a whole.

But because the charge works. It silences. It ends careers. It redirects the conversation. And the people with the most to lose from honest answers have every incentive to ensure the conversation never reaches those answers.

The International Criminal Court has issued its warrant. The Epstein files are dripping into the public domain. The Maxwell Mossad connection is confirmed historical record.

The leverage that may explain a generation of Western politicians who cannot bring themselves to say a single word of meaningful criticism of Israeli state conduct is no longer the province of conspiracy forums. It is the subject of serious investigative journalism on three continents.

And Australia’s answer, apparently, is to look away.

Anthony Albanese will not be the one to look squarely at any of this. He has already told us where he stands. On national television, he endorsed the war. He called it constructive. He offered the American justification back to an Australian audience as though it were Australia’s own sovereign conclusion.

It was not. It was obedience dressed as policy. And the men who benefit most from that obedience, a defendant in Tel Aviv and a felon in Washington, are laughing all the way to the next airstrike while ordinary Australians pay the bill, while journalists are prosecuted.

• Tomorrow: How the Murdoch press is running cover for a war and pointing your anger at the wrong man entirely.

New Zealand’s government was taken to task today for its lack of a principled stand against Israel’s Gaza genocide and the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on Iran.

Several speakers at a rally in the heart of Auckland expressed disappointment and anger at Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s failure to condemn the war of aggression against Iran, one of the major supporters of Palestinian self-determination and justice.

The speakers from several cultures were scathing about New Zealand’s weak stance in the rally at Te Komititanga Square with a theme of “Welfare not warfare”.

• READ MORE: US-Israel attacks hit petrochemical, nuclear sites in Iran
• President Trump, don’t listen to your sycophants on Iran, this isn’t reality TV
• US bombing targets bridges and Pasteur Institute – ‘symbols of Iran’s scientific strength’, says spokeswoman
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The criticism comes as US President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking a record $1.5 trillion in “defence” spending for the coming year along with massive social cutbacks, according to a White House details released yesterday, while New Zealand’s budget allows for an unprecedented NZ$12 billion four-year plan to overhaul the country’s military.

Bibi Amena, a twice-displaced refugee from Afghanistan who has experienced the devastation of war and lost family members while resisting the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, said the illegal assassination of a high profile head of state and respected figure among Shia Muslims around the world should have been condemned.

“At the very least our government should have condemned America and Israel in the strongest words possible,” she said.

New Zealand should have distanced itself from America and Israel “and their crumbling empire”.

Helen Clark quoted
She quoted former prime minister Helen Clark who at the beginning of this war described New Zealand’s response as “a disgrace” and that it was in the country’s best interests to keep advocating for international law.

“New Zealand is not a mighty country, and if we trample international law and forego an independent foreign policy, we are left at the mercy of countries far bigger and far stronger than us,” Amena said.

“Let’s be loud and clear when we say that Israel and America’s war on Iran is illegal — it’s illegitimate, unprovoked and immoral.”

A Tehran-born psychology student, Ali Reza, who migrated to New Zealand in 2013, was also strongly critical of the government’s weak stance over the war.

“Some politicians seem to have trouble with their spines. Iran has many excellent spinal surgeons who could help them with that.”

He praised the Palestinian resistance in the face of the 76th years “brutality, occupation, mass murder and mass displacement” by Israel.

“Meanwhile, the Sudanese people were suffering through a devastating civil war caused by the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and its master Israel. The enemy’s lies set records displaying psychotic levels of manipulation and exploitation,” he said.

“The enemy renewed their specialisation in the discipline of evil wrongdoings, pioneering in numerous fields, followed by their murderous campaign in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, all funded by the United States.”

Choice for Aotearoa
Leeann Wahanui-Peters of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) called for a choice for Aotearoa — one between “the security of our whānau and the lies and profits of warmongers and their masters in Wall Street, the City of London, and the shadow bankers of Black Rock and company”.

“A choice between a home, a warm home and weapons,” she said. “A choice between a future of justice, peace and prosperity for all and a past of war and exploitation for the few.

“For decades, we have been told that the world is dangerous and that the only way to be safe is to spend more on the military.”

“This is a lie,” Wahanui-Peters said.

“The greatest threat to the safety of a child in Aotearoa isn’t a missile from a distant land. It is the coldness of a house their parents can’t afford to heat, or living in a car.

“It is their hunger in their stomach because their school lunch has been cut. It is the despair of a future with no jobs and no hope.”

And yet, said Wahanui-Peters, New Zealand’s “coalition regime” chose to be “fiscally irresponsible” and chose military assets ahead of the best interests of the country’s people.

‘Gateway for hell’
Bibi Amena said New Zealand’s silence over Israeli crimes in Palestine “opened the gateway for hell” in Iran.

“In the past 30 days of aggression, Israeli and American bombs have slaughtered over 3000 innocent Iranian children, women and men.

“They have attacked and destroyed energy and water supplies, civilian infrastructure, oil facilities, schools and hospitals. All of these attacks are illegal under international law.

“So why has our government remained silent? Why do we allow America and Israel to commit war crime after war crime with impunity?”

Amena referenced the first day of the illegal war on Iran, an American Tomahawk missile targeting a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab, killing more than 160 girls aged between 7 and 12.

She ended her speech with a short quote “which went viral on social media” by Professor Foad Izadi from the University of Tehran: “Iran is fighting the Epstein class of the world, that either rapes little girls, or bombs little girls.”

Organisers of the Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition said there would be a major rally with the theme “No More Wars” in Auckland’s Aotea Square and a protest march to the US Consulate next Saturday, April 11, at 2pm.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Stephanie Tran

The Albanese government has rejected a proposal to strip tax-deductible status from Australian charities found to be supporting illegal occupations, amid mounting scrutiny over donations flowing to Israeli settlements and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Michael West Media has identified 5 charities either sending money to the IDF or to parties associated with illegal West Bank settlements in Occupied Palestine.

The proposed amendment, introduced by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, would explicitly bar organisations from receiving deductible gift recipient (DGR) status if they are found to have supported an “illegal occupation”.

• READ MORE: Gulf energy sites targeted after Israeli attack on key Iranian gasfield

“The fact that people are sending money to support the war crimes of the Israeli military and to expand illegal, violent settlements in the West Bank is bad enough, but that Australian taxpayers are subsidising these settlements is completely outrageous,” Faruqi said.

“Supporting these heinous crimes deserves investigation, not a tax deduction.”

The amendment, circulated in the Senate as part of the Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice in Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill 2025, would insert a new provision into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 denying DGR endorsement to any entity that has “advocated, prepared, planned, assisted in, financed, fostered, supported … or contributed to the establishment, maintenance or expansion of the illegal occupation”.

It would also empower the foreign affairs minister to formally declare what constitutes an “illegal occupation” for the purposes of the law.

Charities funding illegal settlements
This year, MWM released a series of investigations revealing that Australian charities are funnelling tax-deductible donations to projects linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law, as well as to initiatives supporting IDF soldiers.

In the Senate debate on the amendment, Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne cited the findings of the MWM investigations.

She highlighted figures showing that Jewish National Fund Australia had remitted more than $125 million to Israel since 2009, while the United Israel Appeal Refugee Relief Fund had transferred approximately $376 million since 2013 via Keren Hayesod, with a portion of these funds used for settlement expansion and IDF-linked programmes.

Allman-Payne also referenced the activities of the Chai Charitable Foundation, which earlier this year hosted fundraisers for organisations providing direct support to IDF soldiers and settlement communities, including in Tekoa and Hebron, before removing the campaigns following questioning by MWM.

“It is obviously of significant concern if there are charitable organisations in Australia that are funnelling funds to illegal occupiers and illegal settlements,” Allman-Payne told the Senate.

She noted that the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) had received 896 complaints relating to 88 charities in connection with the Israel-Gaza conflict between October 2023 and December 2025.

“Given that these donations are tax-deductible . . .  that effectively means taxpayers are subsidising illegal occupation and militarisation,” she said.

Government rejects amendment
In response, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher stated that the government would not support the Greens amendment, arguing that existing regulatory frameworks already prohibit unlawful conduct by charities.

“There is no DGR category or purpose that allows charities to support illegal activities at home or abroad,” Gallagher said.

She pointed to the ACNC’s governance standards, which require charities to operate lawfully and remain accountable, as well as external conduct standards governing overseas activities.

However, Gallagher acknowledged a key limitation: those standards require compliance with Australian law, but

do not extend to conduct under international law.

Charities operating overseas must take “reasonable steps” to ensure proper governance and compliance with Australian legal obligations, including sanctions, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws, she said.

Organisations found to be in breach risk losing their charitable registration, which can in turn lead to the loss of DGR status.

Referral for investigation
Gallagher suggested that concerns about specific organisations should be referred to the ACNC for investigation.

Faruqi said the government’s position amounted to wilful inaction.

“The Labor government clearly wants to keep its head in the sand and is looking the other way while this happens,” she said.

“This is just another example of the government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

“It is two-faced for the Government to say it supports a Palestinian state while effectively subsidising its destruction.”

Minister Gallagher and Andrew Leigh (Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury) were contacted for comment.

Regulatory obligations
A spokesperson from Leigh’s office provided the following response:

“The government expects all registered charities to meet their regulatory obligations and to obey all Australian laws. This is a condition of maintaining charitable status.

“The ACNC is the independent regulator of charities and complaints involving conduct that could harm people or involving the misuse of a charity for terrorism purposes or to foster extremism are a compliance priority for the ACNC.

“The ACNC already has powers to revoke the charitable status of charities involved in serious illegal activity.”

Greenpeace delivered the petition to opposition Labour leader Chris Hipkins in Wellington today.

Standing on the steps of Parliament, Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman said: “This war is plainly illegal — it is not an act of self-defence nor is it sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

• READ MORE: Iran fires missiles, drones across Gulf, region remains in war crosshairs
• Thousands call on Christopher Luxon to condemn the illegal attacks on Iran by Trump and Israel
• Other US-Israeli war on Iran reports

“While we have come to expect that the US government approach to international law is more honoured in the breach than the observance, nonetheless international law is critical for the security of everyone on the planet but especially for a small nation like New Zealand.”

Dr Norman said Luxon was expected to advocate in favour of international law and hence condemn “this reckless illegal war”.

“Silence in the face of injustice is complicity, and thousands of New Zealanders agree that Luxon should be standing up to bullies like Trump, who is attempting to destroy any possibility of a rules-based international order.”

Greenpeace delivered the petition to the Parliament opposition who have been open about their condemnation of Trump’s illegal war.

Fossil fuel price war link
Greenpeace also made the link from this illegal war to the escalating price of fossil fuels.

“This illegal war has disrupted oil, gas and fertiliser supplies, exposing Luxon’s Trump-like obsession with outdated fossil fuels, leaving New Zealanders paying the price,” said Dr Norman.

“Luxon has collapsed the EV market by killing the clean car discount, making it cheaper to import gas guzzling cars. He’s ended public transport subsidies for young people, blocked funding for cycleways, but wants to spend billions of dollars to build new roads.”

The Prime Minister now wanted to expose the country even further to the volatile global fossil fuel market by charging New Zealanders a gas tax to build an LNG import terminal.

“The Luxon government should be investing in renewable energy and the electrification of transport to insulate New Zealanders from energy supply shocks and rising energy prices, as well as cutting climate pollution,” said Dr Norman.

Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources — as the Venezuelans know — are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponised.

• READ MORE: Trump threatens NATO if allies fail to help with reopening Strait of Hormuz
• War on Iran: Australia should put trust in its neighbours not a modern Titanic rogue state
• Other US-Israel War on Iran reports

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished.

The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Levers of power
Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in The World After Gaza.

“The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil — the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilised societies — cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers.

They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse.

No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorise the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

‘Intoxication of power’
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in 1984. “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes.

In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery we face
The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalisation, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.

Virtues of empathy
They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza.

Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting licence revoked, as the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country.

They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

• The Chris Hedges Report

ANALYSIS: By Qasim Rashid

This week Donald Trump threatened more war crimes on the people of Iran.

We are now in the most dangerous phase of this crisis, and pretending otherwise is reckless.

As a human rights lawyer, I do not view war as an abstraction, a chessboard, or a television spectacle. I view it in terms of law, civilian life, state accountability, and foreseeable human devastation.

• READ MORE: Oil tankers in Iraq hit amid Iranian attacks on Gulf; Israel bombs Beirut
• Sanitising atrocities by the US or Israel and finding excuses is in the Western media’s DNA
• Other US-Israeli war on Iran reports

If we are honest about the present moment, there are only four plausible scenarios from here. Three are catastrophic.

The fourth is the only one consistent with constitutional government, international law, and basic human survival. It is also the one Donald Trump appears least willing to accept — but one our Congress must rally to ensure happens.

As of today the United States’ and Israel’s illegal war on Iran has killed more than 1300 Iranians, mostly civilians. Up to one third of them are children — including the near 175 children killed by a US military Tomahawk missile.

Iran’s response has targeted military bases, resulting in reportedly 8 US soldiers killed and 13 Israelis. Now, Trump is promising “Death, Fire, and Fury” and “twenty times” the damage if Iran does not unconditionally surrender.

In other words, we are running out of time to end this illegal war and prevent global and irreparable catastrophe. Right now we have four possible paths ahead of us. It is critical we rally and demand Congress act to enact Option Number Four.

Option One
The first scenario is that Trump eventually admits defeat and withdraws from Iran. In purely human terms, that would be preferable to escalation, but it would still come after an illegal war already launched without constitutional authority and under a pretext that has not been substantiated.

The geopolitical consequences would be significant.

A failed American war would further erode US credibility and likely accelerate a broader shift in influence toward China and Russia. Iran, having survived direct US-Israeli assault, would emerge emboldened.

Oil may no longer be pegged to the US dollar as the global currency, devastating the US economy. None of this is favourable, though this is the bed Trump has made so far. But also, compared with what comes next, it is survivable.

Option Two
The second scenario is a ground invasion. Trump has not ruled that out. He has not ruled out a draft either. The Pentagon is already reportedly preparing to seek roughly $50 billion in supplemental funding for Middle East operations, a strong indication that the administration is contemplating a longer and more expensive war footing.

A quick reminder that politicians lie when they say we cannot afford to fund universal healthcare, free public college, free school lunches, or affordable housing.

Anyone speaking casually about invading Iran is either ignorant of the facts or indifferent to the lives that would be destroyed. Invading Afghanistan and Iraq was already catastrophic. As I’ve cited before, a Brown University study documents an estimated 4.6 million civilians killed by Western wars since 2001.

And Iran is not Iraq. Iran is about 1.63 million sq km — which is triple the size of Iraq. I has a population that recent estimates place in the low 90 million range — which is double that of Iraq. It’s largest city, Tehran, has a population of 9.6 million — larger than New York City. It is geographically vast, heavily populated, politically complex, and militarily formidable.

A US ground invasion would not be a quick operation. It would be a regional inferno. Potentially millions could die. The global economy would likely be pushed into a prolonged recession. And because major powers would not passively watch such a war unfold, the risk of a broader world war would rise dramatically. Thus, option three.

Option Three
The third scenario is the use of nuclear weapons by Israel or the United States. That is the scenario many people still resist discussing openly because it sounds too horrible to contemplate. But refusing to contemplate it does not make it less real.

This is not hyperbole. Research published in Nature Food and highlighted by Rutgers found that a large-scale nuclear war could kill more than 5 billion people through famine and system-wide collapse, even apart from the immediate blast deaths. In ordinary language, that means the deaths of four to six billion human beings within a relatively short period are well within the range of expert projections in a full nuclear exchange.

It would be worse than any Hollywood film can imagine because movies still assume that civilisation survives in recognisable form. Nuclear war does not promise survival. It promises planetary ruin. Thus, we must push for Option Four.

That leaves the fourth scenario, which is the only morally serious option:

Option Four
Trump resigns or is impeached, the war is halted, and actual peace negotiations begin. With Trump removed from power, there is at least a possibility of returning to diplomacy, de-escalation, and meaningful non-proliferation efforts. History gives us a model. In the mid-1980s, the United States and Soviet Union moved from existential nuclear hostility toward negotiations that helped reduce the risk of annihilation.

That kind of diplomacy is still possible, but only if the men driving this escalation are stopped. The obstacle, of course, is political cowardice. This would require the Republican Party to develop a spine and fulfill its constitutional duty. It would require Corporate Democrats to grow a spine and demand an end to this war. Instead, Hakeem Jeffries refuses to rule out funding this illegal attack on Iran with another $50 billion.

At present, it seems unlikely that Republicans and Corporate Democrats will grow a spine or a conscience. But unlikelihood is not an excuse for silence when the alternative is mass death.

Here’s the bottom line. This is not red versus blue. This is not left versus right. This is working people versus billionaires, civilians versus war planners, constitutional government versus authoritarian impulse. This is why the culture wars must stop. Because as bad as things are, they can get much worse.

Trump has not ruled out the worst options. He has not ruled out sending American troops into a catastrophic ground war. He has not ruled out escalating further. He has already shown that he will ignore constitutional limits, and too many members of Congress still behave as though strongly worded statements are an adequate response to an unlawful war.

There is also a deeper pattern here that should disturb every serious observer. In 2013, Trump claimed Obama would bomb Iran to distract from his failures. In 2023, J.D. Vance warned against repeating in Iran the same mistake made in Iraq.

Now they are doing exactly what they accused others of doing. That is not irony. It is the operating logic of fascist politics: accuse the other side of the crime you are preparing to commit yourself.

The legal and moral stakes are immense. Congress must act now to stop this war, cut off funding for unauthorised escalation, and reassert that the Constitution is not optional. Military service members must also remember that “I was just following orders” did not excuse unlawful conduct at Nuremberg, and it will not excuse it now.

To those cheering this war from a distance, understand what you are cheering for: possible nuclear confrontation, higher prices for families already struggling, and the deaths of ordinary soldiers while the sons of powerful men remain far from the battlefield.

We need option four, and we need it immediately. Trump must be removed from the machinery of war before his recklessness becomes irreversible. If we fail to stop this now, history will not say we were uninformed. It will say we were warned and did too little.

Qasim Rashid is a Pakistani-born American author, activist, and human rights lawyer. He is a member of the Democratic Party. This article was originally published on his Substack page Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid. under the title “The War On Iran Has Four Possible Outcomes”.

“One can oppose a hateful regime and, at the same time, oppose an unjustified and dangerous military intervention,” says Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

“I once again call for immediate de-escalation, respect for international law, and the urgency of resuming dialogue.”

While some governments around the world have easily managed to express their opposition to the unlawful military attacks by Israel and the US and their opposition to the Iranian regime, shamefully New Zealand has failed to follow their example.

• READ MORE: Neither preemptive nor legal, US-Israeli strikes on Iran have blown up international law
• Tehran fires back as Iran, Lebanon attacked; France downs drones over UAE
• Spain baulks at Trump’s threat to cut off all trade over NATO, Iran stance
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Instead, the government has issued a statement that condemns only Iran; “acknowledges” the military strikes were “designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security”; and calls for “adherence to international law” — apparently blissfully unaware that the attacks comprise multiple breaches of international law.

In an interview on RNZ, the PM repeatedly responded to the question “Does New Zealand support these attacks or not?” by reading out “We think Iran is evil, we think it’s been repressing its own people.

“We think it’s been arming proxies and terrorist organisations. We think it has been developing its ballistic and nuclear programmes and years of diplomacy hasn’t actually paid any fruits.”

He also said more than once that New Zealand’s position was the same as Australia’s — the Australian PM has said they “support the United States acting to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons”.

Bizarre spectre
Which, aside from ignoring the US’s stated desire for forced regime change in Iran, raises the bizarre spectre of two nuclear-armed states attacking another state in case it might develop nuclear weapons — even though Iran is a state party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (#NPT), which Israel is not, and has opened its nuclear facilities to the #IAEA, which Israel has not. Indeed, the only state in the Middle East that does have stockpiles of nuclear weapons (entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is Israel.

New Zealand’s moral failure to condemn these military strikes, but instead to continue describing the Iranian regime as “evil” or “bad actors” as though that somehow makes armed attacks on a sovereign nation to assassinate its leaders to force regime change okay — regardless of civilian casualties — shows how far it has now moved from even the pretence of applying international law to the actions of its military friends and partners.

And what a missed opportunity to point out the urgent necessity for the elimination of ALL #NuclearWeapons — so much for New Zealand’s alleged commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world, and its promotion of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons #TPNW / #NuclearBan and the NPT.

The West is in turmoil over countries’ top legal minds declaring the US-Israel attack on Iran to be illegal, as China did.

But Israel-friendly Western politicians, including Starmer, von der Leyen, Albanese, and others are desperately blocking their ears as they try to justify actual war crimes.

Here’s what the specialists say:

• READ MORE: Iran threatens to torch tankers as US announces six troops killed in action
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

1. The European Journal of International Law is very clear that “this use of force by the US and Israel is manifestly illegal. It is as plain a violation of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as one could possibly have.”

2. Other top European bodies have agreed. “Trump’s strikes on Iran are an illegal war of choice—and Europeans should say so,” said a report published by the European Council of Foreign Relations.

It said leaders must “communicate clearly that this is a war of choice by America, in contravention of the same UN charter the Europeans have themselves invoked to condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and insist on Greenland’s sovereignty.”

3. Arguably even more telling was a statement from the former legal chief at US Central Command, literally the people who are carrying out the bombings on Iran:

“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the US Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Rachel Van Landingham.

Her entire career has been about establishing the difference between legal and illegal attacks by US Centcom, the people doing the attacking.

4. “Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is an illegal act of aggression” was the title of an essay by Kenneth Roth in the UK Guardian: “Their actions are no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…”

This is interesting as Roth is best known as the former head of Human Rights Watch, a US foreign policy tool thinly disguised as an NGO (evidence for that is in a separate report).

5. The same argument, with arguably even more fire, is erupting in the UK. Unpopular Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, known for his pro-Trump and pro-Israel positions, is being taken to task by people speaking for the British people, who tend to be anti-war and are generally not fans of Trump.

Jeremy Corbyn, elder statesman of the UK left, described the US-Israel attack as “illegal, unprovoked and unjustifiable”.

“Peace and diplomacy was possible,” he added. “Instead, Israel and the United States chose war. This is the behaviour of rogue states — and they have jeopardised the safety of humankind around the world with this catastrophic act of aggression.”

6. Even people on Starmer’s own team were clear. Labour MP Emily Thornberry, chairperson of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Press Association: “There is no legal basis for this attack.”

Israel loyalist Starmer pointedly chose not to repeat this point.

7. Patrick Harvie, Scottish parliamentarian, said: “It is part of a pattern of reckless and destructive behaviour from a White House that has shown total contempt for human rights, international law and negotiations… From arming Israel’s genocide against Palestinians to his illegal and immoral coup in Venezuela and his threats against Europe, Trump has acted like a gangster on the world stage.”

8. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a strong backer of the Israeli government, is also in trouble.

Legal experts in Australia have been pointing out the illegality of the attacks on Iran since last year. “Why the US strikes on Iran are illegal and can set a troubling precedent,” was the title of a report by Professor Donald Rothwell of the ANU College of Law, after earlier attacks on Iran.

Many Australians are anti-war, but prominent politicians and the media are pushing a strongly pro-war line.

9. “Israel said the strikes were ‘preventive’, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. But preventive war has no legal basis under international law,” said a statement from two political specialists at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Shannon Brincat and Juan Zahir Naranjo Caceres.

Marko Milanovic, editor of the European Journal of International Law (mentioned above), made the same point. “Even if the broadest possible understanding of anticipatory self-defence was taken as correct, Israel’s use of force against Iran would be illegal,” he said.

10. The point is echoed by multiple experts. “The possibility of acting in self-defence in view of an attack that might be coming is illegal in international law and we’re all very, very clear about that,” said Maria Gavouneli, a professor of international law at Athens University, in an interview with Al-Jazeera.

11. Even in the US, lawmakers on both sides have criticised the attack on Iran as being against the law. Senator Ed Markey called the actions “illegal and unconstitutional”.

12. Former US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes declared the attack to be an illegal war, ‘A war that has no domestic or international legal basis. A war that Americans do not support. A war in response to no imminent threat. A pointless war,’ he wrote on X.

Conclusion
Immediately after the US-Israel attack began, China’s Foreign Ministry said it was “a grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security”.

Legal experts across the Western nations agree.

There is no doubt that the US-Israel attacks on Iran are illegal, as numerous voices from around the world are saying.

Equally, there is also no doubt that the pro-Israel Western elite, who dominate politics and the media, will try to cover up this fact: Trump, von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, and others.

Trouble is brewing in the West, as people realise just how controlled their rulers are.

Nury Vittachi is a Sri Lankan-born author based in Hong Kong and an independent writer. This article was first published on his X page.

New Zealand’s opposition Labour leader Chris Hipkins says he does not support the United States and Israel’s strikes on Iran.

He disagrees with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s stance that it was not New Zealand’s place to comment on the legality of the strikes.

Iran and Israel have continued to trade strikes since joint US and Israeli airstrikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday.

• READ MORE: Iran threatens to torch tankers as US announces six troops killed in war
• 12 reasons why a huge split is opening up in the West over US-Israel’s ‘manifestly illegal’ war on Iran
• Luxon defends NZ’s position on Iran attacks – same as Australia
• RNZ’s live updates
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

US President Donald Trump has warned that “bigger strikes” are to come, and says the conflict could drag out longer than the four to five weeks he initially planned.

New Zealanders in Iran are urged to leave if it is safe to do so, and register on SafeTravel.

Hipkins said he believed the strikes were illegal.

“I think New Zealand government seems to be moving away from what has been a long-standing and principled approach to these issues,” he told RNZ’s Morning Report.

‘International law matters’
“We have been very clear that we think international law matters, and that all parties to these sorts of conflicts should follow international law. That’s not the case here.”

He said it was important that the New Zealand government spoke with authority and in favour of international law.

“New Zealand’s government should stand up for the international system of rules that we rely on for our own security as a country,” Hipkins said.

“If the situation becomes that the countries with the most power can do whatever they like regardless of what international law says, that’s very bad news for a small country like New Zealand.”

Luxon has previously said it would be up to the US and Israel to explain the legal basis for their attacks.

“Issues of legality [are] for Israel and the US to talk to because we’re not party to that information or that intelligence they may have,” he said.

Luxon went on to say it wasn’t guaranteed New Zealand would ever see this intelligence — and his government would not be asking to see it.

‘Long-standing commitment’
“We’ve had a long-standing commitment under successive governments that any actions that stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is a good thing, any actions that take to stop them from sponsoring terrorism is a good thing, any actions that stops them from killing their own people is a good thing,” he said.

“This is not a good regime and that has been a long-standing position of New Zealand governments under different administrations.”

Hipkins said he had been taken aback by Luxon’s language around New Zealand supporting any actions to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

“I was somewhat shocked to see that comment . . .  that does not reflect the position that successive New Zealand governments have taken,” he said.

“Successive New Zealand governments have expressed significant concern about the Iranian regime but that does not justify any action, particularly when it breaches international law.”

Endangers rules-based order
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said the latest conflict in the Middle East endangered the rules-based order New Zealand relied on.

“The idea that we can start encouraging and allowing other countries to invade just because we don’t like their leaders is an incredibly dangerous take for this Prime Minister to support.

“He needs to be up front and declare whether he supports the rule of law, whether he supports countries in the world just willy nilly being able to decide, on vibes, whether they can invade or not.

“That’s really dangerous. That puts us and regions of the world in a really unsafe position.”

Deputy Prime Minister and ACT leader David Seymour is backing Luxon’s stance on the US-Israel attacks on Iran.

“One thing he’s noted that’s important is that New Zealand does not have all of the information that the US and Israel have used to justify their actions,” he told RNZ’s First Up today.

“So, we could spend a lot of time with New Zealand trying to be precise in its position, but I don’t think that’s what the world’s waiting for.”

‘Normal rights’
He said as a result of the strikes, Iranian girls will have an opportunity to “dress as you like, go to school, do things that are normal rights that have been withheld from them by this regime”.

“And finally, for them in Iran and also for all of us around the world, it’s critical that trade is able to continue and resume so that we don’t face price shocks and even more economic peril. Those are the things that I think are important.”

Seymour would not say if he expected advance warning from allies like the UK if New Zealand troops at allies’ bases in the region were in danger.

“That’s something that we constantly talk about with our allies, but I think it’s safe to say that whatever we may or may not be doing won’t be helped by me announcing it on New Zealand radio . . .

“Clearly, the safety of New Zealand personnel is critical, and whatever moves might or might not be afoot, we’re not going to discuss publicly.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand was not given any advance notice of the attack on Iran, and has again urged New Zealanders to leave if it is safe to do so.

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

The joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran represent a further erosion of the international legal order. Under international law, these attacks are neither preemptive nor lawful.

Israel and the United States launched Operation Shield of Judah and Operation Epic Fury while diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Tehran were actively underway on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Just two days earlier, the most intense round of US-Iran talks concluded in Geneva, with both sides agreeing to continue. US President Donald Trump indicated he would give negotiators more time.

• READ MORE:  Death toll in Israeli strike on southern Iran school rises to 165
• Luxon defends NZ’s position on Iran attacks – same as Australia
• Trump says Iran attacks to continue until ‘all objectives’ achieved
• World leaders react cautiously to U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran
• Critics say weak NZ response over US-Israel attacks on Iran a ‘disgrace’
• UN’s Guterres condemns US-Israeli strikes, retaliatory attacks by Iran
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Then came the bombs.

The illegality of the attack
Israel said the strikes were “preventive”, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. But preventive war has no legal basis under international law.

The UN Security Council did not authorise any military action, meaning the sole lawful pathway for the use of force for self-defence was never pursued.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Preemptive self-defence, as we have argued previously, has extremely narrow prescriptions under the Caroline doctrine. It requires a threat to be “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means”.

No such conditions existed with Iran on February 28.

Central to the current crisis is that it was Trump who ended the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, which had regional support for controlling Iran’s nuclear program. The US Director of National Intelligence testified in March 2025 that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, which the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency affirmed.

US intelligence also reportedly indicated it would take three years for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Moreover, US and Israeli strikes on Iran last year had put the program back by months. Trump claimed Iran’s nuclear programme had been obliterated.

Regime change by force is unlawful
Trump said the attacks were intended to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program and bring about regime change. Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government”, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the goal was to “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”.

Forcible regime change violates the foundational principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention under the UN Charter.

The strikes targeted Iran’s supreme leader, president, and military chief of staff, as well as military infrastructure. Deliberately targeting heads of state also crosses a threshold that distinguishes military operations from acts of aggression.

Attacking heads of state is illegal under New York Convention, for obvious reasons of stability. With the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the power vacuum will only increase the hardship on the ground for Iranians.

We obtained the first known satellite image of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s compound in Tehran. There are several destroyed buildings. While the current whereabouts of Iran’s supreme leader are unknown, the compound is generally used as his official residence. : @Airbus pic.twitter.com/48krjclMBL

— Christiaan Triebert (@trbrtc) February 28, 2026

In addition, promises to return the Shah — Iran’s previous monarch — have not considered the authoritarian implications of such rule.

Reports that an airstrike on an elementary school in Minab killed at least 100 girls aged between seven and 12 underscore the human cost of unplanned regime change.

US and Israeli statements imply that regime change is prioritised over any plans of a replacement. But just like the aftermath of the death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi that saw slavery return to Libya, or how Islamic State filled the power vacuum after the death of dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq, regime change requires extremely careful planning.

In this case, there is no obvious plan to rebuild or stabilise Iran after these strikes. Western allies have expressed concern that Washington lacks a coherent strategy for the aftermath of the attacks, noting the minimal preparation for post-conflict reconstruction and government transition.

As Mexico’s representative stated at the UN Security Council following recent US actions in Venezuela, the historical record of regime change shows it has only “exacerbated conflicts and weakened the social and political fabric of nations”. According to The Atlantic, “complete chaos” is likely.

Strikes in Iran

Diplomacy as deception
Launching strikes during active negotiations violates the principle of good faith in Article 2(2) of the UN Charter. As the Arms Control Association noted, Iranian policymakers had already accused the US of bad faith after the June 2025 strikes disrupted previously scheduled talks.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denounced the February 28 attacks as striking during negotiations, violating international law.

World leaders’ response
We should be dismayed by the worrying acceptance of increased brazen illegality by Western leaders, including Australia’s own prime minister. Anthony Albanese has supported the strikes as “acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”. This places Australia, once again, in open contradiction with basic principles of liberal international order.

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.

For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran…

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) February 28, 2026

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement urging Iran to negotiate a solution, condemning Iranian retaliatory attacks. However, they did not directly comment on the US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Their silence is deafening.

Russia and China criticised the US-Israeli actions and urged an immediate end to military operations and a return to diplomatic negotiations.

The international legal order is now in free-fall. When powerful states conduct illegal wars under the guise of prevention, weaponise diplomacy as cover, and openly pursue regime change, the “rules-based order” is literally dead.

Dr Shannon Brincat is senior lecturer in politics and international relations, University of the Sunshine Coast; Juan Zahir Naranjo Cáceres is a PhD candidate, Political Science, International Relations and Constitutional Law, University of the Sunshine Coast. Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

• READ MORE:  Death toll in Israeli strike on southern Iran school rises to 165
• After a sports hall in Iran was bombed, witnesses describe chaos and ‘continuous screaming’
• Luxon defends NZ’s position on Iran attacks – same as Australia
• Neither preemptive nor legal, US-Israeli strikes on Iran have blown up international law
• UN’s Guterres condemns US-Israeli strikes, retaliatory attacks by Iran
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says New Zealand’s stance on the United States and Israeli bombing of Iran mirrors that of Australia.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government supported the United States acting to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

A statement by Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters yesterday “acknowledges” the strikes.

• READ MORE:  Trump says Iran attacks to continue until ‘all objectives’ achieved
• World leaders react cautiously to U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran
• Critics say weak NZ response over US-Israel attacks on Iran a ‘disgrace’
• UN’s Guterres condemns US-Israeli strikes, retaliatory attacks by Iran
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Asked on RNZ’s Morning Report whether New Zealand supported the attacks, Luxon repeatedly refused to say the word, but said it condemned the Iranian regime as evil and as having claimed countless lives.

“We think Iran has been repressing its own people. We think it’s been arming proxies and terrorist organisations. We think it has been developing its ballistic and nuclear programmes and years of diplomacy hasn’t actually paid any fruits,” he said.

“We understand fully why the Americans and Israelis have undertaken the independent action that they have taken to make sure Iran can’t threaten people.”

Pressed on whether the strikes were legally right, Luxon said it would be up to the US and Israel to explain the legal basis for their attacks.

NZ should back international rules
Former Prime Minister Helen Cark has called the government’s stance a “disgrace” and says New Zealand should support a rules-based international order.

Luxon said what was disgraceful was the repressive Iranian regime which had killed thousands of its own people who had taken to the streets calling for freedoms.

“Iran has been a destabilising force. It has supported armed proxies throughout the region. It has seen tens of thousands of people murdered by own government, who were asking for freedom and rights.”

Australia and Canada have openly supported the strikes on Iran.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “genuine dialogue and negotiations” after the US and Israel military strikes across Iran, calling the attacks a grave threat to “international peace and security”.

In a statement on Sunday, Luxon and Foreign Affairs Minister and Winston Peters said New Zealand had consistently condemned Iran’s nuclear programme and its “destabilising activities” in the region and “acknowledged” the strikes.

“Iran has, for decades, defied the will and expectations of the international community. The legitimacy of a government rests on the support of its people. The Iranian regime has long since lost that support,” they said.

“In this context, we acknowledge that the actions taken overnight by the US and Israel were designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.”

Luxon and Peters condemned in the “strongest terms Iran’s indiscriminate retaliatory attacks” on neighbouring states.

The statement also said “we call for a resumption of negotiations and adherence to international law.”

Call out illegal strike
Clark told Morning Report said the statement was a disgrace.

“What was wrong with it was it didn’t call out the illegal strike against Iran in the middle of diplomatic negotiations “which were going quite well and further talks were scheduled,” she said.

“The whole point of international law is to put rules around when force is legitimate.”

“A strike is justified if there is an imminent threat of attack, which clearly there was not.”

She said the initial strikes by the US and Israel violated international law.

“The New Zealand government seems only interested in the Iranian retaliation and not looking at the reason for the retaliation, which was the attack by the United States and Israel,” she said.

“I think it’s consistent with a steady drift in New Zealand foreign policy to realign strongly with the United States, which at this particular time seems even more questionable as a strategy.”

“We’re not putting a stake in the ground in defence of the international rule of law.”

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

Two Extinction Rebellion activists joined the speakers today at an Auckland protest over Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza and occupied Palestine, condemning the “apocalyptic” assault on both people and their living environment.

Caril Cowan, a de facto coordinator of Extinction Rebellion Tāmaki Makaurau, spoke of the climate crisis this month in Aotearoa New Zealand to provide an insight into the Gaza emergency.

“One of our climate scientists, says this is normal — get used to it. We are going to have killing storms over, and over, and over …

• READ MORE: In Gaza, Trump’s Board of Peace met with deep scepticism, little hope
• UN begins clearing of massive waste dump in Gaza
• Freedom Flotilla journalists speak out on Israeli ill-treatment
• Other Gaza reports

“As we are saying, ‘We are all Palestine’, I just think of the people of South America, I think of the people of Africa, I think of Europe, where people are dying now because of the climate.

“They are dying of heat exhaustion, they are dying from floods, they are dying from landslides, like we have been having, not just a few. It’s happening. It is here now.”

After the rally, the protesters marched around the corner from Te Komititanga Square to the US Consulate in Auckland for a “Blood on your hands “ protest over the US role in funding and enabling Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

Cowan was among those protesters who symbolically raised blood on their hands over the “shameful” US role under President Donald Trump and previous presidents.

US pays part UN dues
This week in Washington, a UN spokesperson said the United States had paid about US$160 million (NZ$268 million) of the more than US$4 billion it owes to the UN, just as Trump hosted the first meeting of his so-called “Board of Peace” initiative over Gaza that critics say could undermine the United Nations.

The US is the biggest contributor to the UN budget, but under the Trump administration it has refused to make mandatory payments to regular and peacekeeping budgets, and slashed voluntary funding to UN agencies with their own budgets.

Washington has also withdrawn from dozens of UN agencies.

Another speaker at today’s rally, Adam Jordan, from both Extinction Rebellion and the Palestinian movement, talked about the “connection” between the Gaza genocide and anthropogenic climate breakdown.

“As is so often the case with colonialism, and the capitalist system more generally, ecological destruction has always been inherent to the Zionist, settler-colonial project,” Jordan said.

“From contaminated soil and groundwater to decimated farmland and burning down centuries old olive groves that had been lovingly tended by countless generations of Palestinians.

“Rather than ‘making the desert bloom’ as they often claim, the colonisers are engaged in a process of ‘desertification’ — transforming once fertile and active farmland into an area devoid of both vegetation and biodiversity.”

Damage visible from space
Jordan said that destruction of both people and the land itself in Gaza had reached such “apocalyptic proportions that the damage is visible from space”.

“The people who have not yet been killed by the bunker buster bombs, the forced starvation, disease, sniper fire and autonomous killer drones live in a wasteland of undrinkable water, unexploded munitions, overflowing landfills, contaminated soil and toxic debris, with orchards and fields reduced to dust in which life itself is being rendered impossible for the long term,” he said.

Gaza pollution environmental threats                Video: Al Jazeera

“Ecocide here fuses with genocide in a manner never seen before.”

But where was the real connection between Palestine and the climate crisis?

“Despite all the rhetoric from governments and corporations about how they’re taking climate change seriously, the 2020s have so far seen an accelerated expansion of fossil fuel production, just when it had to be reined in and inverted into a sustained dismantling — for the world to avoid a warming of more than 2°C, and ideally no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline.

“Currently we’re at 1.6°C above that baseline, and this is already proving to be absolutely catastrophic. In fact it’s proving again and again to be deadly,” Jordan said.

“The destruction of Gaza is of course executed by tanks and fighter jets, sending their projectiles that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right path.

“All these military vehicles run on oil. As do the supply flights from the US, UK and Germany.”

Emissions burden
One study had estimated that from October 2023 to January 2025 the emission burden of the Gaza genocide by Israel and the West to be 32 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

“That’s more than the annual emissions of many countries,” Jordan said.

“It has generated more than 36 million metric tonnes of debris from buildings being either severely damaged or completely destroyed. It would take as long as four decades to remove and process all of this debris.”

Jordan said what was happening in Gaza was not just a transnational effort, but “a stain on the so called ‘international law’ that cannot be washed clean”.

“For over two years now we have watched as the corrupt corporate media has dehumanised the victims and attempted to humanise those committing this genocide,” he said.

“We have watched as academic institutions, politicians and governments all over the world have denied or justified the unspeakable horrors taking place in Gaza, just as they deny the severity and the consequences of the climate crisis and justify the continuation of business as usual, no matter how destructive it is to our environmental life support systems.

“But this is just business, this is just how the capitalist system works. Both people and the environment are seen as expendable, here only for the purposes of wealth extraction by the ultra wealthy ruling class — or as I prefer to call them, ‘The Epstein class’.”

New flotilla plans
Among other speakers, Rana Hamida spoke about the new Global Sumud Flotilla plans to break the military siege of Gaza in April.

The flotilla has announced plans to send more than 100 boats carrying up 1000 activists, including medics and war crimes investigators, to the besieged enclave.

Hamida appealed for more volunteers from New Zealand to join the fleet.

The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has called on the New Zealand government to condemn Israel’s desecration of its war graves in Gaza.

Israeli bulldozing of the graves – including two Cook Islander ones – was confirmed last week but the New Zealand government has not responded with any comment.

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

• READ MORE: Revealed: Israel bulldozed part of Gaza war cemetery containing allied graves
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“Common decency demands we condemn Israel for this abuse of our war dead,” PSNA co-chair John Minto said in a statement.

“If it happened anywhere else in the world the government would register shock and be appalled.

“Australia has spoken out but nothing from New Zealand. No protest expressed, no demand Israel apologise, no request for access to inspect the damage.  Nothing.”

Minto said there had also been no response from the New Zealand Returned Services Association.

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

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

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

“The families of these soldiers deserve to hear their government speak out,” Minto said in the statement.

Earlier reports show appalling and deliberate damage and bodies desecrated in at least 16 other cemeteries across Gaza and Canada reported damage to the war cemetery where Canadian soldiers lie alongside New Zealanders.

According to a CNN report:

Cemeteries are given protections as “civilian objects” under international law and are afforded special protections, with limited exceptions.

“Israel has always flouted international law, and the desecration of cemeteries adds to the long list of its war crimes in Gaza,” said Minto.

“There might be some people who believe Israeli excuses that there are tunnels under everything in Gaza, so everything should be bombed or bulldozed flat.”

“But Israel has no right to be there. It is in illegal occupation of Gaza and the other Palestinian Territory of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

“If Israel respected international law, and withdrew its military occupation, the graves would not have been desecrated,” Minto said.

The land for the cemetery was gifted by the people of Palestine.

“We are not aware that any New Zealand politician has ever visited these graves in Gaza so probably the Prime Minister will turn his back on Israeli desecration of our history as he has on the mass killing, starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Dear warmongers:

You are sleepwalking towards a war in the Middle East that could set the whole world ablaze. Do not pretend you don’t know this.

Your generals know it. Your intelligence agencies know it. Financial markets know it. Every citizen with a memory longer than a news cycle can feel it in their bones.

• READ MORE: Iran warns retaliation to US attack will not be limited
• Other Richard David Hames reports
• Other Iran reports

This is an open letter from a species that wishes to survive. I will be blunt.

1. Halt all preparations for a war of choice against Iran or any other state in the region. Freeze strike planning. Pull back offensive deployments. If you really have evidence of an imminent threat, present it to independent, technically competent, international scrutiny. If you will not do that, the world is entitled to assume this is a manufactured crisis.

2. Put in place binding, monitored arrangements to stop accidents turning into cataclysms: naval and air incident protocols, hotlines that actually work, rules of engagement that favour restraint, not bravado. If you cannot even agree to that, you are not avoiding war — you are courting it.

3. Stop playing God with other people’s governments. Regime‑change schemes — whether by bombing, sanctions that strangle civilians, or covert destabilisation — have left a trail of wrecked societies across the Middle East and beyond. You know the record. You just refuse to learn from it.

4. If you possess nuclear weapons, stop using them as toys for your vanity. Commit — publicly, in law — to never being the first to use them. Make it clear that any nuclear use by anyone, anywhere, will be treated as an unforgivable crime. If you cannot do even that, your talk of “values” is a sick joke.

5. Choke off the money pipeline that keeps this war machine humming: end the revolving door between government and arms manufacturers, subject major arms sales to real global oversight, and stop treating conflict as a business model. As long as war pays, someone will always be lobbying for it.

6. Admit that your own house is not in order. Societies riven by inequality, corruption and polarisation are more prone to lash out abroad. Fix the rot at home instead of reaching for foreign enemies to distract your populations.

7. Above all, drop the delusion that domination is leadership. Real leadership today is the courage to restrain your own power when using it would shatter the fragile systems that keep all of us alive.

You are not emperors. You are temporary stewards of a civilisation perched on the edge of multiple tipping points, and you’re not any good at that either.

If you drag us into yet another avoidable war, with nuclear forces in the background, you are gambling with everything that breathes.

So here it is, without poetry or excuse:

Step back from your stupidity. Submit your claims to scrutiny. Rein in your war machines. Protect those who speak truth. Treat nuclear weapons as the abomination they are. Stop feeding the economy of perpetual conflict.

If you cannot do that, then you only have the right to call yourselves fools.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and futurist, and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

Australia’s decision to host Israeli President Isaac Herzog next month has sparked criticism and a wave of planned protests, as Israel remains under international investigation over its war in Gaza, reports One Path Network.

Legal cases are underway at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), examining allegations of war crimes and possible genocide in the war on Gaza.

Critics say welcoming Israel’s President on February 9-12 during these investigations sends the wrong message and risks weakening Australia’s claim that it supports international law and human rights.

• READ MORE: Why the looming visit by Israel’s president may backfire on Anthony Albanese
• ‘Finger on the trigger’: Iran warns of quick retaliation after US threats
• Pacific at risky crossroads – Gaza vs the urgent drug crisis at our door
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The backlash is growing because senior Israeli leaders could face arrest if they travel to some countries that recognise international courts, making Australia’s invitation appear out of step with global accountability efforts.

Herzog’s past comments suggesting Gaza’s population shares responsibility for the war have also drawn condemnation from human rights groups.

The visit also coincides with the introduction of new hate crime laws in Australia, a timing that has raised further concern among civil liberties advocates.

At home, as protests over Gaza are restricted and public anger rises, many are questioning whether the government is placing political alliances above justice, human rights, and the right to speak out.

The internationally recognised Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide has issued severe criticism of Germany.

In a statement dated 13 January 2026, it “condemns the persistent efforts by several high-profile German civil society organisations to deny the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to disseminate disinformation and denialist narratives among German political decision-makers.”

At the same time, the institute accuses major German media corporations of having become “the Israeli government’s most loyal mouthpiece”.

• READ MORE: Rights advocates welcome Canada’s exclusion from Trump’s Gaza ‘Board of Peace’
• Other Gaza genocide reports

German policymakers are likewise criticised for turning away from the “international legal order” — an order “that was created in large part due to the horrors it produced”.

This refers to Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust against European Jews, the genocide of the Sinti and Roma, and the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.

Systematic denial of the Gaza genocide
The institute denounces the fact that, in Germany, the reality continues to be denied that Israel has been responsible for a genocide in the Gaza Strip lasting at least two years since 7 October 2023.

This criticism is directed not only at governing parties and senior political figures, but also at Germany’s leading media outlets: “Germany’s largest media outlets have abandoned their journalistic responsibilities, threatening critical voices and effectively becoming the Israeli government’s most loyal mouthpiece.”

According to the report, this systematic denial of genocide is driven primarily by political pressure from above as well as by Israeli lobbying and disinformation efforts.

The latter are attributed in particular to the Middle East Peace Forum (NAFFO), the Europe Israel Press Association (EIPA), the German-Israeli Society (DIG), and the European Leadership Network (ELNET), including its Forum of Strategic Dialogue (FSD).

“In this symbiosis, organisations deliver the pseudo-arguments that German politicians rely on to legitimise an otherwise untenable political stance.

“In return, these organisations are rewarded with public funding or privileged access to Parliament.

“By financing, platforming, and politically endorsing actors that discredit UN bodies, ignore well-established legal standards, and engage in genocide denial, Germany has turned its back on an international legal order that was created in large part due to the horrors it produced.“

Call for political reversal
The report points out that both Israel and Germany are currently before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — Israel accused of genocide, Germany of possible complicity.

The latter, in particular, continues to be almost entirely ignored in Germany’s public discourse.

Against this backdrop, the Lemkin Institute issues an urgent appeal to German state authorities “to immediately halt all active financing, dissemination, and legitimation of genocide denialist propaganda masked as critical expertise.”

It continues: “We further urge the German government to withdraw public funding and end privileged parliamentary access for organisations and initiatives engaged in genocide denial and the systematic discrediting of international legal institutions.

“We remind Germany and all its political bodies of their obligations under the Genocide Convention, including the duty to prevent and punish genocide and any forms of complicity.

“Above all, we call on the German state to end its complicity in the genocide against Palestinians, including through arms exports to and uncritical diplomatic support for the state committing genocide.“

Connecting global grassroots
The Lemkin Institute is an internationally active NGO based in the United States. It is named after Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist and Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide”.

The institute’s mission is “to connect the global grassroots with the tools of genocide prevention.”

As early as April 2024, the institute stated that the current Israeli genocide was not confined to the Gaza Strip alone, but affected all of Palestine, including the West Bank.

Leon Wystrychowski is a journalist, historian, Middle East scholar and Palestine activist from Germany.

Donald Trump is a classic example of why you don’t let bullies prosper. “Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of ‘the rules-based international order’  — the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the US and its allies.

The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are objects, we are mere “things” to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”. 

I wrote that in January 2025 in this article that I reproduce today. It provides a useful backgrounder, including historical precendents, to help us navigate through the times we are living through right now.

• READ MORE: Denmark sends more troops to Greenland amid tensions with Trump
• Other Greenland reports

What do Panama, Canada and Greenland have in common? Could Trump be getting the US back to brass tacks, to a core strategy of dominating the Western hemisphere? Possibly, and he may be blowing away the fraudulent rhetoric about rules-based international order, territorial integrity, international law and the crusade to expand democracies.

Trump said this week that the US is prepared to use military force to assert control over Panama and Greenland.

“We need Greenland for national security purposes.  People don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it but even if they do they should give it up because I’m talking about protecting the free world,” Trump said.

The world’s largest island is bigger than France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium combined. It’s literally bigger than Texas (300 percent bigger) — and the US wants it.

A greater risk
Think about that.  The US may pose a greater risk to the territorial integrity of the European Union than the Russians do. If they get antsy with the US, Trump will “tariff them”.

The Danes, like the rest of Europe, are frightened of the US. In response to Trump’s Greenland gambit, Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen timidly said this week that Denmark was “open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can cooperate, possibly even more closely than we already do, to ensure that American ambitions are fulfilled”.

To ensure American ambitions are fulfilled. And this was the country that gave us the Vikings. If Ragnar Lodbrok, Eric Bloodaxe or Bjorn Ironside had been around when Donald Trump Junior swooped into Nuuk for his photo op, his skull would have been used as a drinking tankard for a blót sumbl feast that same evening.

Top independent strategists have for years despaired of the strategic brainlessness of US foreign policy — the Midas Touch in reverse, as Professor Mearsheimer calls it.  Wherever they went — from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza — Americans embroiled themselves in conflicts of little strategic worth and left behind piles of bodies, millions of implacable enemies and a litany of failures.

Trump’s rough woo-ing of Canada to become the 51st state, and his threat to use military force to seize both Greenland and the Canal, speak to a back-to-basics focus for American imperialism — a shift in US policy that will bring it closer to its core strategic interests.

That’s quite appropriate for a man who counts President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) as a role model. There is a whiff of the Rough Rider (Roosevelt’s cavalry which kicked over the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898) about Trump’s recent utterances.

Outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York you could see a magnificent statue of Teddy Roosevelt, cowboy kerchief around his neck, six-shooter hanging off his hip, astride a proud steed with two bare-chested Noble Savages — an African and an American Indian — walking on either side of the Great White Man.

Punkish metal spikes
I particularly like the slightly punkish metal spikes sticking out of his hair to stop birds crapping on his head.  After 82 years, the City finally woke up to the fact that this was a racist, colonialist trope and took the statue down in 2021.

It is ironic that just four years after doing so an even bigger monument to Roosevelt is going up: Trump redux is lifting entire passages out of the Roosevelt playbook.

Roosevelt greatly increased the influence and interests of the United States, building on the recent seizures of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, Cuba and Guam.  He wanted to Make America Great and to do so he would,”speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Big stick diplomacy – the willingness to use the military – was increasingly unleashed to assert US hegemony and business interests.

General Smedley D Butler, author of War is a Racket, spent his entire 33-year career (1898-1931) enforcing the rules as defined by Theodore Roosevelt and his successors. Smedley eventually realised he was fighting as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Like thousands of Marines he fought for the US in countries up and down the Americas, Caribbean and Asia, including Cuba (1898), Venezuela, Panama, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and China.

President Roosevelt’s greatest legacy was the building of the Panama Canal. The US intervened militarily in Panama to drive out the Colombians and “liberate” Panama so the US could build the Canal.

‘Literally as one man’
He said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man” — to which a senator retorted, “Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt!”

Is history repeating itself — as tragedy or comedy?  If Trump’s threats all sound either nuts or 19th century it’s because it is both those things — which doesn’t mean they won’t happen.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  I think Trump has a very good point for a number of reasons (clue: none of them relate to international law or respect for the sovereignty of nations).

Greenland has a ton of energy, fishing and mineral resources the Americans would love to lay their hands on. The Arctic maritime routes are slowly opening and if you look at a map of the Arctic you’ll realise the USA has very little real estate, to use Trumpspeak, up there and Russia has a vast amount.

The third reason is equally important: incorporating Canada and Greenland into the US would give the country an enormous boost at a time when it is slipping behind China in all critical areas.

According to the IMF, the Chinese have already overtaken the US in share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity (19-15 percent).  By 2035 this gap will likely explode out to 25 percent to 14 percent in Beijing’s favour.

How should the US respond?  Its current China containment strategy of sanctions, tariffs and threats are failing as China’s manufacturing and tech sectors greatly outperform the US.

Losing its proxy war
Military planners say the US would almost certainly lose a conventional war against China over Taiwan; the US is already losing its proxy war in Ukraine. A course correction seems inevitable.

Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of “the rules-based international order” — the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the US and its allies.

The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are “objects”, we are mere things to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”.

Trump is refreshingly candid: he wants stuff and he’s prepared to dispense with the preachy posturing that we got with Blinken and Biden.  America is not your friend.

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

This article was first published at Solidarity on 11 January 2025 under the title “A man, a plan, a canal:  Trump might be on to something”.

A West Papuan advocacy group has condemned Indonesia over taking up the presidency of the United Nations Human Rights Council, saying it was “totally unfit” and the choice  “makes a mockery” of the office.

Indonesia was the sole candidate for the Asia-Pacific bloc at the council (HRC), which also includes China, Japan and South Korea. It was the group’s turn to propose a leader.

Ambassador Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro succeeds Switzerland and will now lead proceedings at the UN forum for a year after his nomination last week.

• READ MORE: Human Rights Council elects Indonesian candidate President for 2026
• Other West Papua reports

However, a statement by a senior official of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), interim president Benny Wenda, has challenged the nomination, asking: “How can Indonesia lead on human rights, when they are hiding from the world their 66-year occupation of West Papua, with 500,000 men, women, and children dead?”

“How can Indonesia lead on human rights, when their President is a war criminal who is complicit in genocide in East Timor and West Papua?

President Prabowo Subianto “personally tortured East Timorese men, and presided over indiscriminate massacres of Indigenous people from Kraras to Mapenduma”, claimed Wenda whose allegations have been documented in various human rights reports.

‘No apology’
“He has never apologised or been held accountable for his crimes,” said Wenda.

He said Indonesia had not won the presidency due to its human rights record.

“The position rotates around the world, and Indonesia was the only candidate from the Asia Pacific region to put themselves forward,” Wenda said.

“Nonetheless, this appointment makes a mockery of the UN and its claim to uphold international law and human rights.”

Wenda said 105,000 West Papuans were currently displaced due to Indonesian military operations.

“Indonesia holding the presidency of the HRC in 2026 is akin to apartheid South Africa leading it in 1980.”

Instead of leading the HRC, “Indonesia should be a global pariah,” said Wenda.

Refused to admit UN
“For seven years, they have refused to admit the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights [to the Papuan provinces], ignoring the repeated demand of over 110 countries, including all members of the EU commission, the United States, the Netherlands, and the UK.

“In that time, with West Papua closed to the world, they have launched countless military operations in Papua, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people.”

Indonesia’s Minister for Human Rights is a West Papuan, Natalius Pigai.

Wenda said Pigai had stated that Indonesia would use the HRC position to “counter breaches of international law in Venezuela and elsewhere”.

“What about your own people, Mr Pigai? What about Indonesia’s own back yard?” asked Wenda.

Until the world intervened to stop such “egregious hypocrisy” and recognised the “ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide”, there would “be no peace or justice in the Pacific.”

Principal defender
The UN Human Rights Council is the world’s principal defender of vulnerable people worldwide. This is the first time that an Indonesian diplomat has been elected president of the forum.

After his confirmation last Thursday, Ambassador Suryodipuro said Indonesia had been a strong supporter of the council since it began its work 20 years ago, and of the Geneva forum’s predecessor, the Human Rights Commission.

“Our decision to step forward is rooted in our 1945 constitution and that aligns with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter which mandates Indonesia to contribute to world peace based on independence, peace and social justice,” he told delegates.

At the same meeting, delegates also agreed to the appointment of Ecuadorian candidate Ambassador Marcelo Vázquez Bermúdez as vice-president of the council for 2026.

There is much to understand from the dramatic kidnapping — abduction is perhaps a better word — of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores last weekend by the United States armed forces, combined with the military attack on the country’s capital Caracas.

This understanding is greatly helped by the comments of the US’s first elected insurrectionist and convicted felon (fraud and sexual assault) President, Donald Trump, at and following his inauguration for his second term nearly 12 months ago.

Trump singled out the 25th US president, William McKinley, who was first elected 1896 but assassinated early into his second term, for praise. Some of this praise was because of his promotion of tariffs.

• READ MORE: Venezuela: Trump’s war for oil and domination is a war crime
• Trump’s illegal Venezuela assault means global anarchy
• It’s not the Venezuelan oil – it’s Florida

But it was also because McKinley is regarded as the first imperialist American president. He went to war with Spain and China to claim colonial spoils. Annexations included Puerto Rico and the Philippines (where more than 200,000 Filipinos were killed).

Far and hard right politics, fascism and narcissism
For context, the current US government under Trump’s leadership is a mix of far and hard right politics.

I have discussed this in a previous article (November 3) describing how the far right is successfully cannibalising the mainstream rightwing internationally (including its implications for Aotearoa New Zealand).

Residing within the far right is fascism. Considering Trump and some of his cabinet members and key staff to be fascists is a very reasonable conclusion to draw.

One of the characteristics of many fascists is narcissism; a personality disorder recognised as a mental health condition; an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs, often at the expense of others.

Blend narcissism and fascism (or even wider far right beliefs) together and you have an absence of empathy and indifference to harmful consequences of their actions on others.

Even intelligent people within this subset find their narrow paradigms shut out to consideration of the tactical and strategic errors (“own goals”) that might arise out of their decision-making.

Recommended reading and watching
There has been much public commentary on the violent assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping/abduction of its president and First Lady. Three have stood out for me.

One is British leftwing journalist, commentator, author and activist Owen Jones. He speaks with lively empirically based passion. In his Battlelines publication (Substack, January 4) he didn’t pull his punches about global anarchy.

The second commentary digs deep. It is a 31-minute interview by Venezuelanalysis (January 4) with Caracas based analysts Steve Ellner and Ricardo Vaz: Venezuela: Trump’s war for oil and domination is a war crime.

I strongly recommend watching it. In addition to the military violence and abduction, they address Trump’s declaration that Washington will take control of Venezuela’s oil and effectively run the country, warning that the operation constitutes an unlawful use of force.

Venezuela: Trump’s war for oil.

They also refer to the extrajudicial killings on Venezuelan fishing boats at sea as violations of international law and Venezuelan sovereignty.

The third is a recommended read of an online article (January 6) by Helen Yaffe, professor of Latin American political economy (Glasgow University): What is the US doing in Venezuela.

As well as describing the dramatic events, Dr Yaffe puts them in both their historical and current political contexts.

The absurd: Maduro’s machine gun
Trump’s justifications range from the absurd to the manufactured to the overstated. But one justification is absolutely on the mark. His narcissism is ironically beneficial at least from the perspective of analysis.

In openly exposing that that this is all about naked power Trump and his coterie don’t care that he can be easily caught out over fabrication and inconsistencies. If one believes that they are all-powerful, why should they care.

The absurd justification for the legal case against Nicolás Maduro is that he had a machine gun in his possession.

Putting aside the fact that the risk of what might happen (foreign military abduction) did actually occur, arguing this in a country where machine guns are easily and lawfully accessible — really.

The manufactured: narcotrafficking
The biggest fabrication, arguably exceeded the US government’s false “weapons of mass destruction” claim used to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq over two decades ago, was to blame Venezuela, Maduro in particular, for the US fentanyl epidemic.

It even called it a “weapon of mass destruction”.

Consider the following facts that completely discredit Trump’s fabrication:

• In its March 2025 report the US State Department identified Mexico as the sole source of fentanyl entering the United States. United Nations investigations into fentanyl distribution also don’t identify Venezuela as a producer, let alone a supplier.
• Trump claims that Maduro leads a so-called Venezuelan “Cartel of the Suns” that traffics narcotics, including fentanyl, into the US. In fact, this is a politically manufactured fantasy. There is no such organisation as has just been acknowledged in the last few days by the US Department of Justice.
• In 2024, Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in a US court and sentenced to 45 years for conspiring to smuggle over 400 tons of cocaine into the US. Last November, Trump pardoned this narcotrafficker.

The overstated: oil
Many believe that the US invasion is all or primarily about oil. Certainly Trump’s own words and actions encourage this belief. After all, Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

However, since Trump’s sanctions targeting its oil sector back in 2017, Venezuela’s exports to the US have plummeted. Instead, China has become its biggest importer.

Last November, Trump released a US National Security Strategy for Latin America. It declared that “Restoring American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) and reshoring the necessary key energy components is a top strategic priority”.

However, while important, oil profiteering is not the prime driver of the US assault on Venezuelan sovereignty. Although Venezuela has huge oil reserves, it is heavy oil which is more difficult to fully process.

Instead, its oil reserves are a consequence of a wider geopolitical agenda sometimes called “spheres of influence”. While intricately linked, US oil sanctions are more a weapon than a driver of the imperialist assault on Venezuela.

The on the mark justification
Where the United States’  justification was on the mark comes from Donald Trump’s above-mentioned praise for the first “American imperialist president” William McKinley.

Consistent with this praise, through misrepresentation, Trump has drawn upon what is known as the “Munroe Doctrine”.

This Doctrine was named after President James Monroe who was the fifth US president (1817-1825). Munroe was both an original Founding Father of US independence and the last Founding Father to serve as president.

The Munroe Doctrine was issued in 1823, less than 50 years after US independence was declared and 34 years before its constitution was approved. It was a young developing country; not that long ago itself comprising 13 different British colonies.

The Doctrine was a policy of limiting European colonialism in the Americas but not to replace it with American colonialisation because it lacked both the inclination and means to achieve this. It was more aligned in principle with non-colonial states in the region.

However, Trump is reinventing the Doctrine to extend US colonial power throughout the Americas. This is what the National Security Strategy is all about.

The attack on Venezuela is an endeavour — among other things —  to:

• impose US hegemony in Latin America;
• exploit Venezuela’s natural resources (oil, gas, critical minerals, and rare earth elements) as part of an attempt to build a new supply chain in the Western Hemisphere;
• cut off Latin America’s ties with other countries, particularly its biggest competitor China;
• threaten other leftwing or progressive governments in the continent;
• destroy the project of regional integration in Latin America and the Caribbean; and
• sabotage “Global South” unity over supporting Palestine and other liberation struggles.

Where to next?
I have deliberately not discussed related issues such as the nature of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela along with the longstanding United States hostility towards it beginning in the latter part of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the entrenched and violent far right opposition to it.

I have also not discussed the impact of the sudden drop in oil prices in 2014, the impact of accelerating US economic warfare (sanctions) since 2015, and the controversy over last year’s presidential elections.

As an aside these elections in my view were imperfect but legitimate. Further, Trump has been explicit — he isn’t interested in “restoring democracy” or “democratic transition”; nor does he rate the alternative Venezuelan far right led by Maria Corina Machado stating that she didn’t have the support to run the country.

These exclusions are because I don’t want to distract from the greater priority being regional and global seriousness of the US’s military aggression (including abductions) towards the sovereignty of Venezuela and its people.

The US aggression is part of a wider plan to extend US domination across the Americas and beyond, consistent with its above-mentioned National Security Strategy which, in turn, is based on a misrepresentation of the anti-colonial 1823 Munroe Doctrine.

Trump has explicitly signalled Cuba, Mexico, and Columbia as the next likely targets. Brazil and Uruguay can’t be ignored either. Even Greenland is expressly on his list.

Quite simply, the sovereignty of most Latin American and other more vulnerable countries that don’t comply with the US’s narcissistic far right — including fascist — leadership’s agenda are at risk.

What about New Zealand?
New Zealand is in a difficult position. The government’s public response has been underwhelming although not as bad as the sycophantic United Kingdom government.

Luxon’s government, with Winston Peters as foreign minister, has been slowly weaning New Zealand away from its international neutrality position to one increasingly closer to that of the United States.

The extensive exposure of this blatant and violent US display of power-grabbing makes public justifying this policy shift much more difficult.

Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University discusses this in The Conversation (January 5): NZ faces a foreign policy reckoning.

Much more direct is Bryce Edwards’ piece published by the Democracy Project  and Asia Pacific Report (January 7): NZ’s craven stance on the US invasion of Venezuela.

As the narcissism of fascism and the far right continues to push the parameters of their power, an already unsafe world is becoming increasingly more dangerous and our government’s response suggests increasing sycophantic timidity.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

Three people, including former Wellington mayoral hopeful Graham Bloxham, have been arrested at a Venezuela solidarity protest in New Zealand’s capital.

Around 100 people were rallying against the US military action earlier this week outside New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) on Lambton Quay.

During the event Bloxham, who was attempting to film the protest, was seen scuffling with two protesters.

• READ MORE: Trump says he doesn’t need international law amid aggressive US policies

They were taken by officers into a police van and were driven away.

Police break up the protest scuffle in Wellington. Video: RNZ

Bloxham runs the Facebook page WellingtonLive and has faced controversy in the past after being arrested for failing to stop for police, and being told by the Employment Relations Authority to pay a former employee $30,000.

His charges for failing to stop for police were dismissed.

Last year, he also posted on social media that he was the victim of an unprovoked assault in Oriental Bay.

A police spokesperson said three people were arrested for disorder and charges are being considered.

Right to protest
The spokesperson said police recognised the lawful right to protest and maintained a presence to ensure the safety of all involved.

RNZ has contacted Bloxham for comment.

The group was protesting outside MFAT against the US military intervention in Venezuela, and calling for the New Zealand government to take a stronger stance.

Since the attack on Vanezuela and capture of president Nicolás Maduro, there has been one statement from Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, in which he expressed concern at developments and called on all parties to act in accordance with international law.

The prime minister Christopher Luxon is yet to comment.

Valerie Morse from Peace Action Wellington said the United States’ involvement in Venezuela was contrary to international law, and the New Zealand government’s response had been “pathetic”.

“I think they’re obviously very concerned about their relationship with Washington. They do not want to antagonise Donald Trump,” she said.

Eduardo Salazar Moreira from Peru said the the US intervention was about oil, not democracy.

Oil, not democracy
“There’s always been imperialism by the US, especially in Latin America, but they’re going back to this older, more blatant, more explicit version of imperialism that’s way more active.”

He said New Zealand had a voice on the global stage, and should be using it.

“New Zealand does have a voice, and they should use it, because if we’ll let this happen in Latin America, and then it’ll happen everywhere, not just by Trump.

“It’ll happen by other superpowers in this new multipolar world that we have now, and that’s when we’ll be a really small country that can’t do much when we let that happen.”

A small number of counter-protesters were also present.

Nathalie Wierdak, who is from Venezuela, said she disagreed with the protesters, particularly those who had signs calling for Maduro’s release.

She said the protesters should have talked to people from Venezuela first before deciding to rally.

Protest not pro-Maduro
“Maduro is a criminal. He has committed several crimes against many Venezuelans. He has more than 8000 registered cases of human rights violations in our country.

“So I don’t think that it’s right that people who are not Venezuelan are protesting for us and speaking for us, and they’re claiming to Free Maduro who is a criminal and Cilia Flores who is also a criminal.”

Morse said the protest was not pro-Maduro.

“We are not in favour of a violent dictatorship, and that’s what Maduro’s regime was. There’s nobody here supporting Maduro.

“We want freedom and democracy for the people of Venezuela, we just don’t think that the United States’ involvement is likely to deliver that for the people of Venezuela. What it’s likely to deliver is a lot more hardship.”

Protesters and counter-protesters were seen speaking civilly to each other following the rally’s dissolution.

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

US President Donald Trump has claimed that Venezuela’s interim leadership will turn over to the United States as many as 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to be sold at market price, part of a broader, unlawful administration effort to seize the South American nation’s natural resources.

Trump, who authorised the illegal US bombing of Venezuela and abduction of its president this past weekend, said he would control the proceeds of the sale — which could amount to $3 billion.

“Just straight-up piracy and extortion from the US president,” Zeteo journalist and publisher Mehdi Hasan wrote in response.

• READ MORE: Sanctioned oil tanker falsely using Cook Islands flag, authority says
• ‘Anywhere in the world’: US seizes Venezuela-linked Russian oil tanker
• Other Venezuela invasion reports

Consistent with his administration’s conduct since the weekend attack that killed at least 75 people in Venezuela, Trump provided few details on how his scheme would work or how it would comply with domestic and international law, both of which the president has repeatedly disregarded and treated with contempt.

Where are our humane profiles of the families of these murder victims?

Where are the calls being amplified in the media to “Free the Hostages”?

As we all know by now, not all lives matter.

“State funeral in Venezuela to bury the 80 people murdered by American troops who… https://t.co/FXSyujFdcx

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) January 7, 2026

It is also not clear that Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s acting president and an ally of Nicolás Maduro, has agreed to Trump’s plan, which he announced on social media as his administration worked to entice US oil giants to take part in its effort to exploit the South American nation’s vast reserves.

Ahead of the US attack on Venezuela, the Trump administration imposed a blockade on sanctioned oil tankers approaching or leaving Venezuela, pushing the country closer to economic collapse.

The New York Times noted yesterday that Trump’s decision to “begin targeting tankers carrying Venezuelan crude to Asian markets had paralysed the state oil company’s exports.”

Floating storage facilities
“To keep the wells pumping, the state oil company, known as PDVSA, had been redirecting crude oil into storage tanks and turning tankers idling in ports into floating storage facilities,” the Times reported. During Trump’s first White House term, he banned US companies from working with PDVSA.

Trump wrote in his social media post yesterday that the tens of millions of barrels of oil “will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.”

“I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately,” Trump wrote.

The Trump administration is also pushing Venezuela’s interim leadership to meet a series of US demands before it can pump more oil, ABC News reported.

Trump has illegally threatened to launch another attack on Venezuela, and target more of its politicians, if the country’s leadership does not follow his administration’s orders.

According to ABC, the Trump administration has instructed Venezuela to “kick out China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba and sever economic ties.”

“Second, Venezuela must agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and favour America when selling heavy crude oil,” ABC added, citing unnamed sources.

“According to one person, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers in a private briefing on Monday that he believed the US can force Venezuela’s hand because its existing oil tankers are full.

Rubio also told lawmakers that the US estimated that Caracas has only a couple of weeks before it would become financially insolvent without the sale of its oil reserves.”

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished from Common Dreams.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, New Zealand responded with unusual speed. Sanctions followed. Condemnations were issued. The language was unambiguous.

We were told this was about defending the “rules-based international order” — a phrase our politicians have grown remarkably fond of. Winston Peters has deployed it frequently in his time as Foreign Minister.

So where is that principled clarity now?

• READ MORE: Malcolm Evans: What have we become that we accept such brigandry?
• Trump says Venezuela to hand over up to 50m barrels of oil to US
• Fact-checking Trump on promised US oil company investment in Venezuela
• US says military ‘always an option’ in Greenland as Europe rejects threats
• ‘I am still president of my country,’ kidnapped Nicolas Maduro tells US court

On Saturday, the United States attacked the Venezuelan capital Caracas, seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and spirited them away to face charges in New York.

President Donald Trump then declared that America would “run” Venezuela — including, he made abundantly clear, its oil reserves. He threatened the acting president with a fate “probably worse than Maduro” if she failed to cooperate.

This is, by any reasonable definition, an invasion. An act of aggression against a sovereign state. A violation of Article Two of the UN Charter. The kind of thing New Zealand normally objects to, or used to.

Peters’ response? After about 24 hours, he made a brief statement on social media: “New Zealand is concerned by and actively monitoring developments in Venezuela and expects all parties to act in accordance with international law.”

That’s it. “Concerned”. “Monitoring”. Expecting all parties to behave. One party has just bombed a capital city, kidnapped a head of state, and announced it will control the country’s resources. But sure, let’s urge “all parties” to play by the rules.

The Prime Minister’s Office, when asked for a response at the highest level, simply referred journalists back to Peters’ tweet. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon himself has said nothing.

As Geoffrey Miller, the independent geopolitical analyst, observed: “Luxon will probably be grateful to escape the media spotlight by virtue of the weekend’s events falling in the depths of New Zealand’s typically elongated summer holidays.”

The language tells you everything
Pay attention to the words politicians choose and the words they avoid. Peters didn’t name the United States. He didn’t describe what happened as an invasion, an attack, or even an intervention. The carefully crafted statement avoids assigning responsibility to anyone. It’s diplomatic jelly.

Compare this to how other countries have responded. Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay issued a joint statement expressing “deep concern and rejection of the military actions carried out unilaterally in the territory of Venezuela, which contravene fundamental principles of international law.”

They warned that “such actions set an extremely dangerous precedent for regional peace and security and for the rules-based international order.”

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was equally direct: “Spain did not recognise the Maduro regime. But neither will it recognise an intervention that violates international law and pushes the region toward a horizon of uncertainty and belligerence.”

Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide put it simply: “International law is universal and binding for all states. The American intervention in Venezuela is not in accordance with international law.”

Even Singapore, which is hardly known for picking diplomatic fights, issued a statement saying it was “gravely concerned” and “strongly condemned any unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country under any pretext.” That echoes the language Singapore used after Russia invaded Ukraine.

New Zealand? “Concerned” and “monitoring”.

The vested interests behind timidity
Maduro is no martyr; he is a dictator who ran his country into the ground. He lost the 2024 election by an enormous margin and then stole it. His regime was corrupt, authoritarian, and responsible for the flight of eight million Venezuelans from their own country. No tears should be shed for him personally.

But that’s not the point. The question isn’t whether Maduro deserved power. He didn’t. The question is whether the United States can bomb sovereign nations, kidnap their leaders, and declare control of their natural resources whenever it feels like it.

The answer, if you believe in national sovereignty or the rules-based order our government claims to defend, should be an emphatic no.

Why can’t New Zealand say so? The answer lies in vested interests: both American and our own.

Start with Washington. Trump’s intervention is not primarily about narcotics or democracy.

As Professor Robert Patman of Otago University has noted, Venezuela is not at the centre of America’s drug problems. Fentanyl and other drugs mainly come from places like China and Mexico. Trump’s announcement that America would “run” Venezuela and take its oil reserves revealed the true motivation.

At his news conference, Trump made clear his major objective was securing Venezuela’s oil resources, which he claims the United States “owns”. This from the man who once said America made a mistake in not grabbing Iraq’s oil reserves after the 2003 invasion.

The vested interests of American corporations are driving this policy, dressed up in the language of law enforcement and regional security. The military is simply being used to secure assets for private corporations.

And what about New Zealand’s own vested interests in staying quiet? Here the picture becomes clearer. Our farming and export sectors have already been hit by Trump’s tariff regime. An initial 10 percent rate in April was raised to 15 percent.

A November decision to roll back tariffs on food imports provided some relief, but American trade policy remains a constant threat. India has been hit with 50 percent tariffs for buying Russian oil. Brazil was targeted because of its prosecution of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

Our agricultural and export lobby groups watch these retaliatory tariffs nervously. Any government criticism of Trump risks placing New Zealand next on the punishment list. This explains why Peters has been so careful not to name the United States in his statement.

The economic interests of New Zealand’s export sector — farmers, meat processors, dairy companies — are being prioritised over principles. It’s the politics of fear, wrapped in the language of diplomacy.

Stephen Nagy, a professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo, put it bluntly when explaining why America’s Asian allies have been so reluctant to criticise Trump: “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” This is what happens when a country’s foreign policy becomes subordinate to its immediate economic interests.

The double standard is breathtaking
Consider how this would play out if the roles were reversed. Imagine China had just bombed Taipei, sent special forces to capture Taiwan’s leader, and declared it would “run” the island.

Would Winston Peters be tweeting about how New Zealand “expects all parties” to respect international law? Would Chris Luxon be hiding behind his summer holiday?

Of course not. The response would be immediate, forceful, and unambiguous. We would be told that Chinese aggression cannot be tolerated. Gordon Campbell made this point sharply: “If the Chinese military were blowing up merchant shipping in the South China Sea, bombing Taipei and sending in special forces to kidnap Taiwan’s leader . . .  New Zealand wouldn’t be meekly asking both sides to show restrained respect for international law. We would be outraged.”

The same double standard has been on display over Gaza. Peters’ line about expecting “all parties” to respect international law has been the government’s exact position there too, as if both sides in that conflict have been equally responsible for bombing hospitals and blocking humanitarian aid.

Only last week, New Zealand opted not to join a joint statement by foreign ministers from Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom calling for Israel to abide by ceasefire terms. Peters sat that one out.

Opposition voices show what’s possible
Not everyone in New Zealand politics has been so timid. Phil Twyford of the Labour Party issued a stronger statement, actually naming the United States and describing the action as a violation of international law.

It’s not revolutionary language (more like stating the obvious) but in the context of the government’s mealy-mouthed response, it stands out. Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins should be speaking out likewise.

Helen Clark has been characteristically direct, telling RNZ that the US attack was “clearly illegal under the UN Charter.” When former prime ministers speak more clearly than current foreign ministers, something has gone badly wrong.

Professor Patman told RNZ that New Zealand’s response should be “firm and robust” and noted that the days of “softly, softly diplomacy” with Trump are over. Patman says: “New Zealand has persisted for the last 12 months in what I call softly, softly diplomacy towards Trump. The idea is if we keep our heads beneath the radar, we say nice things, we have photo opportunities with the great men at international meetings, he will soften and we’ll be able to nudge him in a more moderate direction. I’m afraid that’s over.”

He labelled Peters’ statement as “limp”.

The credibility at stake
The consequences of this craven approach go beyond the immediate crisis. Geoffrey Miller warned that the inconsistency between how Western allies responded to Russia and how they’re responding to America “may come back to haunt them, particularly when it comes to their credibility with the Global South.”

He’s right. Countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are watching. They’ve heard endless lectures from Western nations about the importance of the rules-based order, about sovereignty, about international law.

Now they’re watching those same nations stay quiet — or worse, make excuses — when the violator is the United States. Beijing and Moscow will exploit this at every opportunity. They’ll point to Venezuela whenever anyone raises Ukraine or Taiwan. And they’ll have a point.

As Nathalie Tocci wrote in The Guardian, the European failure to condemn Trump’s action “embodies the law of the jungle so dear to dictators such as Putin. For Europeans to silently condone such a vision is not just unethical. It is plain stupid.”

After all, Trump is now speaking out loud about annexing Greenland too. And increasingly, the concept of “Spheres of Influence” seems to be rising, whereby military superpowers such as the US, Russia, China, etc can operate on a “might is right” basis to intervene however they want in their own regions.

If the world reverts to such “Spheres of Influence”, New Zealand is left exposed. If the US can claim the Americas, what is to stop a superpower from claiming the Pacific?

New Zealand has spent years positioning itself as “a good international citizen”. It has sought seats on the UN Security Council. It has championed multilateralism. It has talked endlessly about the importance of small states having a voice in international affairs.

How does that square with staying silent when a great power simply ignores international law because it can?

The integrity test New Zealand is failing
This is ultimately a question of integrity — the kind of integrity New Zealand claims to stand for on the world stage. Either international law applies to everyone, or it doesn’t. Either sovereignty matters, or it’s just a convenient talking point when it suits politicians.

Either New Zealand is willing to call out violations regardless of who commits them, or else the politicians are just selective critics who only speak up when the target is someone they already dislike.

Winston Peters once prided himself on being willing to speak uncomfortable truths. New Zealand First has long positioned itself as independent-minded, unwilling to simply follow the crowd. Where is that independence now?

What we’re seeing instead is a government so afraid of offending Trump, and so captured by the economic interests of our export sector, that it can’t even name the United States in a statement about an American military attack.

As Professor Patman observed: “Foreign policy in this country has been traditionally bipartisan. We have stood up for the rule of law internationally.” If that’s true, then it’s certainly time to show some element of independence from the US and Five Eyes.

But doing so requires the New Zealand government to put principles ahead of the vested interests of farmers and exporters, and ahead of the political calculation that offending Trump carries too high a price.

Murray McCully, not exactly a darling of the left, showed more backbone when he championed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 on Israeli settlements in 2016. As Gordon Campbell observed, the current situation almost makes you yearn for the days when McCully was foreign minister.

That’s a damning indictment of how far New Zealand has fallen.

So, as we head towards an election year, foreign policy needs to be made a major issue. Voters now deserve to know whether New Zealand will continue to subordinate its principles to its perceived economic interests.

Dr Bryce Edwards is a political commentator and analyst. He is director of the Democracy Project, focused on scrutinising and challenging the role of vested interests in the political process. Republished with the author’s permission.

What have we become if to survive in our so-called “free world” we must turn a blind eye to cold-blooded genocide, must arm ourselves to oppose our major trading partner, must support a contrived war to defeat an adversary that no longer exists, (lest its new form otherwise achieves its potential) must sanction some and not others, trade with some and not others — and now must, yet again, be silent as another sovereign nation is brazenly plundered for its wealth.

US President Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela is not a “police operation” against a criminal “fugitive,” nor is it part of an “escalating pressure campaign” against a hostile regime.

It’s none of the things that the White House and our media claims, faithfully copying and pasting stories supplied by The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post.

• READ MORE: Trump says Venezuela to hand over up to 50m barrels of oil to US
• Fact-checking Trump on promised US oil company investment in Venezuela
• US says military ‘always an option’ in Greenland as Europe rejects threats
• ‘I am still president of my country,’ kidnapped Nicolas Maduro tells US court

Blithely asserting the right to “run” Venezuela and “take” the country’s vast oil reserves, in a textbook example of the 19th century colonialism, Trump’s actions brazenly violate international law and numerous entrenched conventions. And all of it whitewashed by our media in euphemistic pseudo-legalese, to impress those gullible enough.

With Trump not only flouting the US Constitution but no longer even pretending that this is about anything other than the theft of another country’s resources, bragging that US oil companies will begin “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” what does it say about us that we accept such brigandry?

How, in God’s name, have we allowed ourselves to be swayed by the dribblings of a scurrilous misogynist, the associate of a convicted paedophile and a creature so altogether odious that, in any other context, we wouldn’t be seen dead with him?

Brandishing his big black marker, Trump, the unabashed narcissist, has changed the US Constitution from; “We the People . . . ” to now read: “ME the People”!

When can we expect those we have entrusted to defend the principles we claim to represent, to stand up and say something?

Or is it simply a matter of us being too gutless ourselves, too intimidated, too craven, to break ranks, step forward and say: “The Emperor has no clothes!”

Malcolm Evans is an independent New Zealand award-winning cartoonist and commentator.

Amid widespread condemnation of the United States over its brazen weekend attack on Venezuela around the world and in the UN Security Council today, Senator Bernie Sanders has posted on social media six reasons why the operation to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro on Venezuela was very wrong.

Abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro told a packed New York City courtroom that he was “innocent”, a “decent man”, and that he had been “kidnapped”, in his first public comments since the US attack, reports Al Jazeera.

Members of the 15-strong UN Security Council (UNSC), including key US allies, condemned Washington and warned that the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife by US special forces could be a precedent-setting event for international law.

• READ MORE: ‘I’m still president,’ says Venezuela’s abducted leader Maduro in NYC court
• US critics and allies condemn Maduro’s abduction at UN Security Council
• Trump’s gift-wrapped Maduro package has done the world a favour – revealing what a lie US foreign policy really is

The reasons Senator Sanders (Democrat-Vermont) has given why Trump’s actions were wrong are:

1. It is illegal and unconstitutional. Congress did not authorise or even know about this military action.
2. It will make the world less safe. If international law is ignored, any nation or terrorist organisation can justify violent attack by pointing to Trump’s actions in Venezuela. This was Putin’s logic in Ukraine.
3. It is blatant imperialism. Powerful nations do not have the legal or moral right to invade smaller countries to steal their natural resources. Venezuela’s oil belongs to the people of Venezuela, not US corporations.
4. At a time when the entire world is moving away from fossil fuels for cheaper and non-polluting sustainable energies, protecting the interests of Big Oil is bad for the climate and bad economics.
5. Maduro is corrupt and anti-democratic. So is MBS of Saudi Arabia. So are many other leaders around the world. Just because we do not like a country’s leader does not mean we have the right to overthrow their government.
6. Trump ran for president as a “peace candidate” who believed in “America First”, not someone who was going to “run” another country. At a time when 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, maybe he should try doing a better job running this country [United States], not taking over Venezuela.

As New Zealand pro-Palestinian protesters prepared for demonstrations across the country today to mark the UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, they awoke to news of Israel attacking three countries in the Middle East — Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

This is the 112th consecutive week that the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has held protests over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network has also held frequent rallies in defiance of Fiji police restrictions.

At least 13 Syrians have been killed and others wounded during an Israeli ground incursion and air strikes on the town of Beit Jinn, southwest of Syria’s capital Damascus.

• READ MORE: Israel strikes Palestine, Lebanon, Syria threatening stability
• Other Gaza reports

Palestine’s Foreign Ministry is demanding action from the international community to halt Israel’s “war crime” as it continues its large-scale military assault on the occupied West Bank.

Ibrahim Olabi, Syria’s representative to the UN, has condemned Israel’s latest attack on the southern town of Beit Jinn, saying it further exposes Israel’s disregard for international law and reflects its fear of a strengthening Syria.

The incident is “yet another indication to the world of which country in the region is the one abiding by international law and which isn’t,” Olabi told Al Jazeera.

It highlights “who really wants a peace deal, a security agreement — who wants to be able to get the region into stability — and who doesn’t,” he said.

Israel is acting out of anxiety over Syria’s trajectory and its growing “regional and international prominence” he said.

‘Israel is terrified’
“Israel is terrified by a strong and prosperous and stable Syria. We are heading in that direction no matter what.”

Olabi described Israel’s latest assault as a signal aimed not only at Syria, but also at its allies.

The attack indicated Israel was “running out of options”.

Since the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel has violated the agreement many times with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people.

The Government Media Office in Gaza said Israel shot at civilians 142 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 21 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 228 times, and demolished people’s property on 100 occasions.

Israeli forces have also detained 35 Palestinians in Gaza over the past month, and continue to block vital humanitarian aid and destroy homes and infrastructure across the Strip.

Last night, New Zealand photojournalist Cole Martin spoke of daily life in the occupied Palestine Territories as he experienced Israeli brutality during six months based in Bethlehem in an inspiring public kōrero at Saint Matthew-in-the-City Cathedral, Auckland, and offered a “what now?” prescription of hope for the future.

He is also speaking at today’s UN solidarity rally in Te Komititanga Square at 2pm and will give another kōrero at 7pm tonight at Cityside Baptist Church, 8 Mt Eden Road.

List of AoNZ’s peaceful, family-friendly events for Palestine for week 1⃣1⃣2⃣
(North to South): https://t.co/BcbWFD7cnD
(by time & date): https://t.co/mJDjQxkbHr pic.twitter.com/fvXcLNF8tG

— Bruce King (@CrowdvBank) November 27, 2025

A news report highlighting Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown yelling “free beer” at pro-Palestine protesters at an Auckland Council governing body meeting on Tuesday has stirred an angry response over the failure to face up to a serious human rights issue.

Mayor Brown was called a ”shameful man” by protesters after they were refused an opportunity to speak at the meeting over ethical procurement policies in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

At the start of the meeting, the mayor said a request from the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) to speak had been declined, saying the governing body did not have responsibility for Palestine.

• READ MORE: Mayor says ‘free beer’ to pro-Palestine group after refusing their request to speak
• Other Gaza genocide reports

A point of order was then raised by Councillor Mike Lee, who questioned the decision and asked for an explanation, said a Stuff news report.

Two other councillors also challenged the mayor, but Brown doubled down on his refusal to allow the PSNA deputation to speak.

When protesters started chanting “free Palestine”, Brown shouted “free beer”.

Brown again reiterated that the governing body did not have responsibility for Palestine, said the Stuff report.

‘Depraved comment’
“It’s hard to know who is more to blame for this story in Stuff,” said PSNA co-chair John Minto to supporters in a social media post.

“Is it Wayne Brown’s depraved comment ‘free beer’ in response to genocide in Gaza or is it the mainstream media which presents such a half-arsed account of our request to speak at the council meeting?”

Minto pointed out that so far the Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington and Palmerston North city councils — as well as Environment Canterbury and Environment Southland — had passed motions to exclude from their procurement policies any company on the United Nations Human Rights Council list of companies building and maintaining illegal Israeli settlements on illegally occupied Palestinian land.

“Brown is happy for Auckland ratepayer money to be spent on companies involved in flagrant violations of international law and is refusing to allow the council to discuss this,” Minto said.

“We will be back.”

Other pro-Palestinian protesters added comments in support.

West Coast environmental activist Pete Lusk wrote: “That’s like the age-old comment ‘get a job’. Such an ignorant man is Wayne Brown.”

Brown lacked ‘compassion’
In a lengthy response, Nancy McShane wrote in part: “I find Mr Brown’s cavalier response of ‘free beer’ entirely inappropriate. It’s a pity he was unable to demonstrate an appropriate level of concern, insight and compassion towards the Palestinian people, and engage constructively with this group of PSNA members who were advocating on their behalf.

“PSNA has worked extremely hard to ensure our local bodies are vigilant in ensuring they are not supporting genocide through poor purchasing choices.

“Aucklanders should be concerned that, unlike many other councils around New Zealand, their own council has refused to even have a discussion on this issue, let alone adopt an ethical, genocide-free procurement policy.

“Once upon a time, our country had a proud reputation as a progressor and defender of human rights. That is rapidly disappearing.

“New Zealanders should think carefully about how this shift away from our foundational values of peace, justice and equality will shape the future of Aotearoa.”

Civil society forces in Chile are preparing to launch an international campaign to demand the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations.

This is based on Article 6 of the United Nations Charter against the backdrop of what the campaign describes as “continuous and systematic violations” of international law and resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

The official launch of the campaign is due to take place tomorrow during a public event in the capital Santiago while a collection of signatures by electronic petition has already begun.

• READ MORE: Israel kills four Palestinians in Gaza — resistance fighters recover body of captive
• Other Gaza reports

Campaign data indicated that the petition addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had already exceeded 57,000 signatures, with a goal of quickly reaching 100,000 signatures.

The organisers of the civil society initiative say the rapid response reflects a “broad popular response” to the dire humanitarian situation in Palestine, and embodies “international civil pressure” to get the international system moving after decades of inaction.

At the media event introducing the initiative, lawyer and former Chilean ambassador Nelson Haddad presented the legal framework for the campaign, explaining that Israel had become a “pariah state according to the definitions of international law,” and that it “does not abide by UN resolutions, nor by the basic rules of international humanitarian law, and practises systematic violations that have been ongoing for more than seven decades”.

Campaign organisers say this mechanism has been used in historical moments, such as the Korean War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that activating it now could constitute an “institutional pressure tool” capable of overcoming obstruction within the UN Security Council.

‘Reforming the UN’
The organisers also believe that the goal is not limited to imposing measures against Israel, but extends to “reopening the file of reforming the structure of the United Nations”, restricting the power of the veto, and restoring the principle of legal equality between states in order to limit the ability of one state to “disrupt international justice.”

The petition read as follows:

“We, the undersigned, respectfully but firmly appeal to you to initiate formal procedures to expel the State of Israel from the Organisation, in accordance with Article 6 of the Charter of the United Nations, because of its repeated violations of the principles contained therein.”

The letter continues:

“Emphasising that Israel, through official statements, declares its intention to eliminate the State of Palestine with all its inhabitants, infrastructure, and memory, and accuses every party that criticises its policies of ‘anti-Semitism,’ and practices repression even against Jewish citizens who oppose genocide, thus making its violations extensive, deep, and directed against everyone who disagrees with its orientations.”

The letter describes what is happening in the Gaza Strip as a “complex war crime,” noting that the occupying state is killing “Palestinians with bombs and missiles, destroying medical infrastructure, and exterminating nearly two million people through hunger and thirst”.

‘Starving population, poisoning the land’
Israel is also depriving the population of water, food, and medicine, and destroying and poisoning the land, representing “one of the most serious documented crimes in the modern era”.

The letter adds that the continued dealings of international and academic institutions with Israel are “unjustified and unacceptable”, and that “Israel must be immediately expelled from all international activities, all institutional relations with it must be severed, and a comprehensive arms embargo imposed that contributes to the continuation of the genocide.”

The message concluded by saying: “With Gaza, humanity dies too. We want Palestine to live, for it is the heart of the world.”

UNSC Resolution 2803 is unequivocally rejected. It is a direct contravention of international law itself, imposed by the United States with the full knowledge and collaboration of Arab and Muslim states.

These regimes brutally turned their backs on the Palestinians throughout the genocide, with some actively helping Israel cope with the economic fallout of its multi-frontal wars.

The resolution is a pathetic attempt to achieve through political decree what the US and Israel decisively failed to achieve through brute force and war.

• READ MORE: A shameful mandate for force: What the UNSC’s Gaza resolution means in practice
• Other Gaza reports

It is doomed to fail, but not before it further exposes the bizarre, corrupted nature of international law under US political hegemony. The very country that has bankrolled and sustained the genocide of the Palestinians is the same country now taking ownership of Gaza’s fate.

It is a sad testimony of current affairs that China and Russia maintained a far stronger, more principled position in support of Palestine than the so-called Arab and Muslim “brothers.”

The time for expecting salvation from Arab and Muslim states is over; enough is enough.

Even more tragic is Russia’s explanation for its abstention as a defence of the Palestinian Authority, while the PA itself welcomed the vote. The word treason is far too kind for this despicable, self-serving leadership.

Recipe for disaster
If implemented and enforced against the will of the Palestinians in Gaza, this resolution is a recipe for disaster: expect mass protests in Gaza, which will inevitably be suppressed by US-led lackeys, working hand-in-glove with Israel, all in the cynical name of enforcing “international law”.

UNSC Resolution 2803 is unequivocally rejected. It is a direct contravention of international law itself, imposed by the United States with the full knowledge and collaboration of Arab and Muslim states. These regimes brutally turned their backs on the Palestinians throughout the…

— Ramzy Baroud (@RamzyBaroud) November 18, 2025

Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about the history of Palestine knows that Res 2803 has hurled us decades back, resurrecting the dark days of the British Mandate over Palestine.

Another historical lesson is due: those who believe they are writing the final, conclusive chapter of Palestine will be shocked and surprised, for they have merely infuriated history.

The story is far from over. The lasting shame is that Arab states are now fully and openly involved in the suppression of the Palestinians.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London). He has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015) and was a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page.

It’s now more than a week since Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced his government had begun to formally consider New Zealand’s position on the recognition of a Palestinian state.

That leaves two weeks until the UN General Assembly convenes on September 9, where it is expected several key allies will change position and recognise Palestinian statehood.

Already in a minority of UN member states which don’t recognise a Palestinian state, New Zealand risks becoming more of an outlier if and when Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom make good on their recent pledges.

• READ MORE: ‘Moral imperative’: Hundreds of UK business leaders demand action on Israel

Luxon has said the decision is “complex”, but opposition parties certainly don’t see it that way. Labour leader Chris Hipkins says it’s “the right thing to do”, and Greens co-leader Chloë Swarbrick has called on government MPs to “grow a spine” (for which she was controversially ejected from the debating chamber).

Former Labour prime minister Helen Clark has also criticised the government for trailing behind its allies, and for appearing to put trade relations with the United States ahead of taking a moral stand over Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Certainly, those critics — including the many around the country who marched last weekend — are correct in implying New Zealand has missed several opportunities to show independent leadership on the issue.

The distraction factor
While it has been open to New Zealand to recognise it as a state since Palestine declared its independence in 1988, there was an opportunity available in May last year when the Irish, Spanish and Norwegian governments took the step.

That month, New Zealand also joined 142 other states calling on the Security Council to admit Palestine as a full member of the UN. But in a subsequent statement, New Zealand said its vote should not be implied as recognising Palestinian statehood, a position I called “a kind of muddled, awkward fence-sitting”.

It is still not too late, however, for New Zealand to take a lead. In particular, the government could make a more straightforward statement on Palestinian statehood than its close allies.

The statements from Australia, Canada and the UK are filled with caveats, conditions and contingencies. None are straightforward expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian right of self-determination under international law.

As such, they present political and legal problems New Zealand could avoid.

Politically, this late wave of recognition by other countries risks becoming a distraction from the immediate starvation crisis in Gaza. As the independent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese have noted, these considered and careful diplomatic responses distract from the brutal truth on the ground.

This was also Chloë Swarbrick’s point during the snap debate in Parliament last week. Her private members bill, she noted, offers a more concrete alternative, by imposing sanctions and a trade embargo on Israel. (At present, it seems unlikely the government would support this.)

Beyond traditional allies
Legally, the proposed recognitions of statehood are far from ideal because they place conditions on that recognition, including how a Palestinian state should be governed.

The UK has made recognition conditional on Israel not agreeing to a ceasefire and continuing to block humanitarian aid into Gaza. That is extremely problematic, given recognition could presumably be withdrawn if Israel agreed to those demands.

Such statements are not exercises in genuine solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, which is defined in UN Resolution 1514 (1960) as the right of peoples “to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”.

Having taken more time to consider its position, New Zealand could now articulate a more genuine statement of recognition that fulfils the legal obligation to respect and promote self-determination under international law.

A starting point would be to look beyond the small group of “traditional allies” to countries such as Ireland that have already formally recognised the State of Palestine. Importantly, Ireland acknowledged Palestinian “peaceful self-determination” (along with Israel’s), but did not express any other conditions or caveats.

New Zealand could also show leadership by joining with that wider group of allies to shape the coming General Assembly debate. The aim would be to shift the language from conditional recognition of Palestine toward a politically and legally more tenable position.

That would also sit comfortably with the country’s track record in other areas of international diplomacy — most notably the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, where New Zealand has also taken a different approach to its traditional allies.

Dr Treasa Dunworth is professor of law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

ANALYSIS: By Paul Heywood-Smith

The recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia, leading, it is hoped, to full UN member state status, is an important development.

What has followed is a remarkable demonstration of ignorance and/or submission to the Zionist lobby.

Rewarding Hamas
Let us consider aspects of the response. One aspect is that recognising Palestine is rewarding the resistance organisation Hamas.

• READ MORE: Qatar confirms Hamas ‘positive’ response to Gaza ceasefire proposal
• Eugene Doyle: Saving Palestine’s Marwan Barghouti is our duty
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

There are a number of issues involved here. The first issue is that Hamas is branded as a “terrorist organisation”. So much is said, apparently, by eight nations compared to the overwhelming majority of UN recognised states which do not so regard it.

May I suggest that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation: refer P&I, October 23, 2022, Australia must overturn its listing of Hamas as a terrorist organisation. Hamas is a Palestinian Islamist political party which chose to fight apartheid by calling for one state.

That was Hamas’s objective when it fought the election against Fatah in 2006.

As an aside, it now results in the lie that it is ridiculous that the Albanese government would recognise Palestine as part of a two-state solution when Hamas rejects a two-state solution. This is just yet another attempt to demonise Hamas.

Hamas leaders have repeatedly said they would accept a two-state solution. It has only recently done so again.

On 23 July last, when Hamas responded to a US draft ceasefire framework the Hamas official, Basem Naim, affirmed Hamas’s publicly stated pledge that it would give up power in Gaza and support a two-state solution on the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestine.

These are the very borders stipulated by international law — see hereunder.

The Palestinians constituting Hamas are residents of an illegally occupied territory. International law affords to them the right to resist: Geneva Conventions I-IV, 1949.

The hypocrisy associated with the demonisation of Hamas is massive. Much is made of hostages having been taken on 7 October 2023 — a war crime according to international law. Those militants who took the hostages might be forgiven for thinking that it was minimal compared with the seven years of non-compliance with Security Council Resolution (SCR) 2334 calling for the end of occupation and removal of settlements.

The second issue is that Hamas commenced the events in Gaza by its horrific, unprovoked, attack on 7 October 2023. As to October 7 being unprovoked, see P&I, October 9, 2023 Palestinians, pushed beyond endurance, defend their homeland against violent apartheid.

The events of October 7 are, in any event, shrouded in doubt. This follows from Israel’s suppression of evidence concerning what happened. What we do know is that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases on October 7.

In addition, the Hannibal Directive justified IDF slaughter of Israelis potentially being taken as hostages. It is also accepted that allegations of rape and beheading of babies by Hamas militants were false. The disinformation put out by Israel, and Israel’s refusal to allow journalists on site, or to interview participants, make it impossible to form any clear or credible understanding of what happened on October 7.

It is accepted that Hamas militants attacked three Israeli military bases, no doubt with the intention that those bases should withdraw from their positions relative to Gazan territory. Such action can be understood as consistent with an occupied citizenry resisting such illegal occupation.

Compounding the uncertainty over October 7 is the continuing conjecture, leakage, of information suggesting that the IDF had advance warning of the proposed Hamas attack but chose, for other purposes, to take no action. These uncertainties are never adverted to by our press which repeatedly attributes responsibility for all Israeli deaths on the day to the actions of Hamas militants, which actions are presented as an “abomination, barbarity”. Refer generally to P&I, November 5, 2023 (Stuart Rees) Expose and dismiss the domination Israeli narrative; P&I, January 4, 2024 Israeli general killed Israelis on 7 October and then lied about it.

The third issue, the major hypocrisy, is that Hamas is being rewarded. Consider the position of Israel. Israel is, and has been, illegally occupying Palestinian territory since 1967. This is undisputed according to international law as articulated in the following instruments:

• 1967 – SCR 242;
• 2004 – the ICJ decision concerning The Wall;
• Dec. 2016 – SCR 2334, not vetoed by Obama, recognising the illegal occupation and calling for its end; and
• 2024 – the Advisory Opinion of the ICJ of 19 July.

Israel has done nothing to comply with any of these instruments. It is set on a programme of gradual acquisition.

The result is that now there are illegal settlements all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. When Israel is told: the West Bank and East Jerusalem are to be part of a Palestinian state, it will scream, “But large parts are occupied by Jewish Israelis!” These are “facts on the ground”.

Supporters of Israel ignore the fact that occupation by settlers occurred in the full knowledge that international law branded such occupation as illegal. If the settlements are considered as a “done deal”, that would be rewarding knowingly illegal conduct — some might say, Israeli terrorism.

So that there can be no doubt about the import of the position it is appropriate to specify the critical parts of SCR 2334:

The Security Council

1. Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace;
2. Reiterates its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard;
3. Underlines that it will not recognise any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations;
4. Stresses that the cessation of all Israeli settlement activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution, and calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the negative trends on the ground that are imperilling the two-State solution;.

Following the ICJ Advisory Opinion of July 19, the UN General Assembly in adopting the same set 17 September 2025 as the deadline for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory.

Negotiated settlement
And when Israel now says, “Recognition now is going to prevent a negotiated settlement”, it is ignoring the fact that in the six, 12, 20 months, two, three, four years until such negotiated settlement occurs, many more settlements would have been commenced, which of course, are more “facts on the ground”.

Then we have the response of the Coalition, which demonstrates how irrelevant the Opposition is in today’s Australia. That response is that the recognition will inhibit a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.

The Coalition, however, says nothing about the fact that the Israeli government has repeatedly stated that there will never be a Palestinian State. Indeed, Israel has legislated to that effect and is moreover periodically purporting to annex Palestinian land.

So how does the Coalition believe that a negotiated settlement will come about? Well, one way, over which Israel may have no say, is for Palestine to become a full member State of the UN. One UN member state cannot occupy the land of another.

Failure of our press to ask any question of pro-Israel interviewees about the end of occupation is a disgrace.

Next challenge
Now for the next challenge — to bring about the end of occupation. Israel will not accede readily. Sanctions must be the first step. Such sanctions must be immediate, concrete and crippling.

They must result in the immediate suspension of trade. That can be the first step.

Watch this space.

Paul Heywood-Smith is an Adelaide SC (senior counsel) of some 20 years. He was the initial chairperson of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association, an incorporated association registered in South Australia in 2004. He is the author of The Case for Palestine, The Perspective of an Australian Observer (Wakefield Press, 2014). This article was first published by Pearls & Irritations and is republished with permission.

Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change Adaptation, Ralph Regenvanu, has welcomed the historic International Court of Justice (ICJ) climate ruling, calling it a “milestone in the fight for climate justice”.

The ICJ has delivered a landmark advisory opinion on states’ obligations under international law to act on climate change.

The ruling marks a major shift in the global push for climate justice.

• READ MORE: UN’s highest court finds countries can be held legally responsible for emissions
• ICJ climate crisis ruling: Will world’s top court back Pacific-led call to hold governments accountable?
• Do countries have a duty to prevent climate harm? The world’s highest court is about to answer this crucial question
• Other climate crisis reports

Vanuatu — one of the nations behind the campaign — has pledged to take the decision back to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to seek a resolution supporting its full implementation.

Climate Change Minister Regenvanu said in a statement: “We now have a common foundation based on the rule of law, releasing us from the limitations of individual nations’ political interests that have dominated climate action.

“This moment will drive stronger action and accountability to protect our planet and peoples.”

The ICJ confirmed that state responsibilities extend beyond voluntary commitments under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement.

It ruled that customary international law also requires states to prevent environmental and transboundary harm, protect human rights, and cooperate to address climate change impacts.

Duties apply to all states
These duties apply to all states, whether or not they have ratified specific climate treaties.

Violations of these obligations carry legal consequences. The ICJ clarified that climate damage can be scientifically traced to specific polluter states whose actions or inaction cause harm.

As a result, those states could be required to stop harmful activities, regulate private sector emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and provide reparations to affected states and individuals.

“The implementation of this decision will set a new status quo and the structural change required to give our current and future generations hope for a healthy planet and sustainable future,” Minister Regenvanu added.

He said high-emitting nations, especially those with a history of emissions, must be held accountable.

Despite continued fossil fuel expansion and weakening global ambition — compounded by the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — Regenvanu said the ICJ ruling was a powerful tool for campaigners, lawyers, and governments.

“Vanuatu is proud and honoured to have spearheaded this initiative,” he said.

‘Powerful testament’
“The number of states and civil society actors that have joined this cause is a powerful testament to the leadership of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and youth activists.”

The court’s decision follows a resolution adopted by consensus at the UNGA on 29 March 2023. That campaign was initiated by the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and backed by the Vanuatu government, calling for greater accountability from high-emitting countries.

The ruling will now be taken to the UNGA in September and is expected to be a central topic at COP30 in Brazil this November.

Vanuatu has committed to working with other nations to turn this legal outcome into coordinated action through diplomacy, policy, litigation, and international cooperation.<

“This is just the beginning,” Regenvanu said. “Success will depend on what happens next. We look forward to working with global partners to ensure this becomes a true turning point for climate justice.”

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

In 2019, a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific, frustrated at the slow pace with which the world’s governments were moving to address the climate crisis, had an idea — they would take the world’s governments to court.

They arranged a meeting with government ministers in Vanuatu and convinced them to take a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ top court, where they would seek an opinion to clarify countries’ legal obligations under international law.

Six years after that idea was hatched in a classroom in Port Vila, the court will today (early Thursday morning NZT) deliver its verdict in the Dutch city of The Hague.

• READ MORE: Other climate crisis reports

If successful — and those involved are quietly confident they will be — it could have major ramifications for international law, how climate change disputes are litigated, and it could give small Pacific countries greater leverage in arguments around loss and damage.

Most significantly, the claimants argue, it could establish legal consequences for countries that have driven climate change and what they owe to people harmed.

“Six long years of campaigning have led us to this moment,” said Vishal Prasad, the president of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, the organisation formed out of those original students.

“For too long, international responses have fallen short. We expect a clear and authoritative declaration,” he said.

“[That] climate inaction is not just a failure of policy, but a breach of international law.”

More than 100 countries — including New Zealand, Australia and all the countries of the Pacific — have testified before the court, alongside civil society and intergovernmental organisations.

And now today they will gather in the brick palace that sits in ornate gardens in this canal-ringed city to hear if the judges of the world’s top court agree.

What is the case?
The ICJ adjudicates disputes between nations and issues advisory opinions on big international legal issues.

In this case, Vanuatu asked the UN General Assembly to request the judges to weigh what exactly international law requires states to do about climate change, and what the consequences should be for states that harm the climate through actions or omissions.

Over its deliberations, the court has heard from more than 100 countries and international organisations hoping to influence its opinion, the highest level of participation in the court’s history.

That has included the governments of low-lying islands and atolls in the Pacific, which say they are paying the steepest price for a crisis they had little role in creating.

These nations have long been frustrated with the current mechanisms for addressing climate change, like the UN COP conferences, and are hoping that, ultimately, the court will provide a yardstick by which to measure other countries’ actions.

“I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity,” Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change Ralph Regenvanu said in his statement to the court last year.

“Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”

But major powers and emitters, like the United States and China, have argued in their testimonies that existing UN agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, are sufficient to address climate change.

“We expect this landmark climate ruling, grounded in binding international law, to reflect the critical legal flashpoints raised during the proceedings,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the US-based Centre for International Environmental Law (which has been involved with the case).

“Among them: whether States’ climate obligations are anchored in multiple legal sources, extending far beyond the Paris Agreement; whether there is a right to remedy for climate harm; and how human rights and the precautionary principle define States’ climate obligations.”

What could this mean?
Rulings from the ICJ are non-binding, and there are myriad cases of international law being flouted by countries the world over.

Still, the court’s opinion — if it falls in Vanuatu’s favour — could still have major ramifications, bolstering the case for linking human rights and climate change in legal proceedings — both international and domestic — and potentially opening the floodgates for climate litigation, where individuals, groups, Indigenous Peoples, and even countries, sue governments or private companies for climate harm.

An advisory opinion would also be a powerful precedent for legislators and judges to call on as they tackle questions related to the climate crisis, and give small countries a powerful cudgel in negotiations over future COP agreements and other climate mechanisms.

“This would empower vulnerable nations and communities to demand accountability, strengthen legal arguments and negotiations and litigation and push for policies that prioritise prevention and redress over delay and denial,” Prasad said.

In essence, those who have taken the case have asked the court to issue an opinion on whether governments have “legal obligations” to protect people from climate hazards, but also whether a failure to meet those obligations could bring “legal consequences”.

At the Peace Palace today, they will find out from the court’s 15 judges.

“[The advisory opinion] is not just a legal milestone, it is a defining moment in the global climate justice movement and a beacon of hope for present and future generations,” said Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat in a statement ahead of the decision.

“I am hopeful for a powerful opinion from the ICJ. It could set the world on a meaningful path to accountability and action.”

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

Groups that have declined to join the government-sponsored “harmony accord” signed yesterday by some Muslim and Jewish groups, say that the proposed new council is “misaligned” with its aims.

The signed accord was presented at Government House in Auckland.

About 70 people attended, including representatives of the New Zealand Jewish Council, His Highness the Aga Khan Council for Australia and New Zealand and the Jewish Community Security Group, reports RNZ News.

• READ MORE: ‘Gaza is not a religious issue’: Advocates split on government harmony accord
• Explainer – background to the decision over not joining the “harmony accord” (scroll down the page)

The initiative originated with government recognition that the consequences of Israel’s actions in Gaza are impacting on Jewish and Muslim communities in Aotearoa, as well as the wider community.

While agreeing with that statement of purpose, other Muslim and Jewish groups have chosen to decline the invitation, said some of the disagreeing groups in a joint statement.

They believe that the council, as formulated, is misaligned with its aims.

“Gaza is not a religious issue, and this has never been a conflict between our faiths,” Dr Abdul Monem, a co-founder of ICONZ said.

‘Horrifying humanitarian consequences’
“In Gaza we see a massive violation of international law with horrifying humanitarian consequences.

“We place Israel’s annihilating campaign against Gaza, the complicity of states and economies at the centre of our understanding — not religion.

“The first action to address the suffering in Gaza and ameliorate its effects here in Aotearoa must be government action. Our government needs to comply with international courts and act on this humanitarian calamity.

“That does not require a new council.”

The impetus for this initiative clearly linked international events with their local impacts, but the document does not mention Gaza among the council’s priorities, said the statement.

“Signatories are not required to acknowledge universal human rights, nor the courts which have ruled so decisively and created obligations for the New Zealand government. Social distress is disconnected from its immediate cause.”

The council was open to parties which did not recognise the role of international humanitarian law in Palestine, nor the full human and political rights of their fellow New Zealanders.

‘Overlooks humanitarian law’
Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices said: “It has broad implications to overlook our rights and international humanitarian law.

“As currently formulated, the council includes no direct Palestinian representation. That’s not good enough.

“How can there be credible discussion of Aotearoa’s ethnic safety — let alone advocacy for international action — without Palestinians?

“Law, human rights and the dignity of every person’s life are not opinions. They are human entitlements and global agreements to which Aotearoa has bound itself.

“No person in Aotearoa should have to enter a room — especially a council created under government auspices — knowing that their fundamental rights will not be upheld. No one should have to begin by asking for that which is theirs.”

The groups outside this new council said they wished to live in a harmonious society, but for them it was unclear why a new council of Jews and Muslims should represent the path to harmony.

“Advocacy that comes from faith can be a powerful force. We already work with numerous interfaith community initiatives, some formed at government initiative and waiting to really find their purpose,” said Dr Muhammad Sajjad Naqvi, president of ICONZ.

Addressing local threats
“Those existing channels include more of the parties needed to address local threats, including Christian nationalism like that of Destiny Church.

“Perhaps government should resource those rather than starting something new.”

The groups who declined to join the council said they had “warm and enduring relationships” with FIANZ and Dayenu, which would take seats at this council table.

“All of the groups share common goals, but not this path,” the statement said.

ICONZ is a national umbrella organisation for New Zealand Shia Muslims for a unified voice. It was established by Muslims who have been born in New Zealand or born to migrants who chose New Zealand to be their home.

Alternative Jewish Voices is a collective of Aotearoa Jews working for Jewish pluralism and anti-racism. It supports the work of Palestinians who seek liberation grounded in law and our equal human rights.

New Zealand has joined 24 other countries in calling for an end to the war in Gaza, and criticising what they call the inhumane killing of Palestinians.

The countries — including Britain, France, Canada and Australia plus the European Union — also condemed the Israeli government’s aid delivery model in Gaza as “dangerous”.

“We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

• READ MORE: At least 65 killed in Gaza attacks as Israel sends tanks into Deir el-Balah
• UK, France and 23 other nations demand Israel’s war on Gaza ‘must end now’
• PSNA calls on NZ to urgently condemn Israeli weaponisation of starvation
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

They said it was “horrifying” that more than 800 civilians had been killed while seeking aid, the majority at food distribution sites run by a US- and Israeli-backed foundation.

“We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life saving work safely and effectively,” it said.

“Proposals to remove the Palestinian population into a ‘humanitarian city’ are completely unacceptable. Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law.”

The statement said the countries were “prepared to take further action” to support an immediate ceasefire.

Reuters reported Israel’s foreign ministry said the statement was “disconnected from reality” and it would send the wrong message to Hamas.

“The statement fails to focus the pressure on Hamas and fails to recognise Hamas’s role and responsibility for the situation,” the Israeli statement said.

Having NZ voice heard
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Morning Report, New Zealand had chosen to be part of the statement as a way to have its voice heard on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza.

“The tipping point was some time ago . . .  it’s gotten to the stage where we’ve just lost our patience . . . ”

Peters said he wanted to see what the response to the condemnation was.

“The conflict in the Middle East goes on and on . . .  It’s gone from a situation where it was excusable, due to the October 7 conflict, to inexcusable as innocent people are being swept into it,” he said.

“I do think there has to be change. It must happen now.”

The war in Gaza was triggered when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent air and ground war in Gaza has killed more than 59,000 Palestinians — including at least 17,400 children, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry, while displacing almost the entire population of more than 2 million and spreading a hunger crisis.

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

Israel has rejected a statement by 25 countries calling for an end to the war on Gaza as a move “disconnected from reality and sends the wrong message to Hamas.”

LIVE updates: https://t.co/iILghl87p3 pic.twitter.com/McUxk6PYMr

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 21, 2025