With a ceasefire in force in Gaza for a week, the Israeli army and settlers have intensified their attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog programme The Listening Post.
Amid the exchange of captives, images showing legions of Hamas reinforcements puncture the narratives in Israeli media.
Presenter Richard Gizbert, a Canadian broadcaster and creator of The Listening Post series, pays tribute to Palestinian journalists and critiques the failure of Western journalists to support their colleagues under fire in Gaza.
“None of which bodes well for the Palestinians who have survived Israel’s vengeful war on Gaza, including journalists, some of whom symbolically shed their helmets and flak jackets when the ceasefire was announced — only to put them back on when Israel’s attacks resumed,” Gizbert says.
“More than 200 of their colleagues have been killed, many of them targeted, a number that dwarfs the journalistic casualty figures in any other conflict in modern history.
“And there has been a noticeable lack of outcry on that from Western media outlets, a large scale failure to show solidarity.
“Of all the crimes committed against journalists during this war, the one-side pro-Israeli narratives coming out of capitals like Washington, London and Berlin, this one should stick.
‘Against the odds’
“If journalists cannot even bring themselves to defend their own, what is the point?”
Senior Palestine analyst Tahani Mustafa of the Crisis Group says: “Palestinian journalists have been indispensable, despite all the odds against them of the Israeli onslaught, or the lack of integrity of the Western media, the complete silence over the fact that their fellow journalists on the ground in Gaza are being targeted . . . ”
“This just feels like a pause in the killing machine.”
Executive director of Sarah Leah Whitson of Dawn says: “If I was working in Gaza as a journalist, I would not remove my helmet or my flak jacket. I have no doubt that Israeli military forces in Gaza will continue to gun down journalists.”
Associate professor Dalal Iriqat of the Arab American University Palestine says: “Their target is not really Hamas but the Palestinian people, the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian rights.
“That’s why they have been targeting media, they have been targeting anybody who tells the truth.”
Contributors: Dalal Iriqat – Associate professor, Arab American University Palestine
Daniel Levy – President, US/Middle East Project
Tahani Mustafa – Senior Palestine analyst, Crisis Group
Sarah Leah Whitson – Executive director, DAWN
The Listening Post programme of 25 January 2025. Video: Al Jazeera
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
A co-founder of a national Palestinian solidarity network in Aotearoa New Zealand today praised the “heroic” resilience and sacrifice of the people of Gaza in the face of Israel’s ruthless attempt to destroy the besieged enclave of more than 2 million people.
Speaking at the first solidarity rally in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau since the fragile ceasefire came into force last Sunday, Janfrie Wakim of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) also paid tribute to New Zealand protesters who have supported the Palestine cause for the 68th week.
“Thank you all for coming to this rally — the first since 7 October 2023 when no bombs are dropping on Gaza,” she declared.
“The ceasefire in Gaza is fragile but let’s celebrate the success of the resistance, the resilience, and the fortitude — the sumud [steadfastness] — of the heroic Palestinian people.
“Israel has failed. It has not achieved its aims — in the longest war [15 weeks] in its history — even with $40 billion in aid from the United States. It has failed to depopulate the north of Gaza, it has a crumbling economy, and 1 million Israelis [out if 9 million] have left already.”
Wakim said that the resistance and success in defeating Israel’s “deadly objectives” had come at a “terrible cost”.
“We mourn those with families here and in Gaza and now in the West Bank who made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives — 47,000 people killed, 18,000 of them children, thousands unaccounted for in the rubble and over 100,000 injured.
Grieving for journalists, humanitarian workers
“We grieve for but salute the journalists and the humanitarian workers who have been murdered serving humanity.”
Janfrie Wakim speaking at today’s Palestine rally in Tamaki Makaurau. Video: APR
She said the genocide had been enabled by the wealthiest countries in the world and the Western media — “including our own with few exceptions”.
“Without its lies, its deflections, its failure to report the agonising reality of Palestinians suffering, Israel would not have been able to commit its atrocities,” Wakim said.
“And now while we celebrate the ceasefire there’s been an escalation on the West Bank — air strikes, drones, snipers, ethnic cleansing in Jenin with homes and infrastructure being demolished.
“Checkpoints have doubled to over 900 — sealing off communities. And still the Palestinians resist.
“And we must too. Solidarity. Unity of purpose is all important. Bury egos. Let humanity triumph.”
Palestinian liberation advocate Janfrie Wakim . . . “Without its lies, its deflections, its failure to report the agonising reality of Palestinians suffering, Israel could not have been able to commit its atrocities.” Image: David Robie/APR
90-year-old supporter
During her short speech, Wakim introduced to the crowd the first Palestinian she had met in New Zealand, Ghazi Dassouki, who is now aged 90.
She met him at a Continuing Education seminar at the University of Auckland in 1986 that addressed the topic of “The Palestine Question”. It shocked the establishment of the time with Zionist complaints and intimidation of staff which prevented any similar academic event until 2006.
Wakim called for justice for the Palestinians.
“Freedom from occupation. Liberation from apartheid. And peace at last after 76 years of subjugation and oppression by Israel and its allies,” she said
She called on supporters to listen to what was being suggested for local action — “do what suits your situation and energy. Our task is to persist, as Howard Zinn put it”.
“When we organise with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress,” she said.
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
Introduced to the Auckland protest crowd today . . . Ghazi Dassouki, who is now aged 90.
As a symbol for peace and justice in Palestine, slices of water melon and dates were handed out to the crowd.
Calls to block NZ visits by IDF soldiers
Among many nationwide rallies across Aotearoa New Zealand this weekend, were many calls for the government to suspend entry to the country from soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
“New Zealand should not be providing rest and recreation for Israeli soldiers fresh from the genocide in Gaza,” said PSNA national chair John Minto.
“We wouldn’t allow Russian soldiers to come here for rest and recreation from the invasion of Ukraine so why would we accept soldiers from the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel?”
As well as the working holiday visa, since 2019 Israelis have been able to enter New Zealand for three months without needing a visa at all.
This visa-waiver is used by Israeli soldiers for “rest and recreation” from the genocide in Gaza.
Minto stressed that IDF soldiers had killed at least 47,000 Palestinians — 70 percent of them women and children.
“All these red flags for genocide have been visible for months but the government is still giving the green light to those involved in war crimes to enter New Zealand,” Minto said.
Last month, PSNA again wrote to the government asking for the suspension of travel to New Zealand for all Israeli soldiers and reservists.
Meanwhile, 200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails have been set free under the terms of the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Seventy of them will be deported to countries in the region, reports Al Jazeera.
Masses of people have congregated in Ramallah, celebrating the return of the released Palestinian prisoners.
A huge crowd waved Palestinian flags, shouted slogans and captured the joyful scene with their phones and live footage shows.
The release came after Palestinian fighters earlier handed over four female Israeli soldiers who had been held in Gaza to the International Red Cross in Palestine Square.
The smiling and waving soldiers appeared to be in good health and were in high spirits.
The Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network (FPSN) and its allies have called for “justice and accountability” over Israel’s 15 months of genocide and war crimes.
The Pacific-based network met in a solidarity gathering last night in the capital Suva hosted by the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre and issued a statement.
“A moment of reflection . .. for us as we welcome the ceasefire but emphasise that true peace requires justice and accountability for the Palestinian people,” it said.
“There can be no just and lasting peace without full accountability for the war crimes and human rights violations committed against the Palestinian people.”
The temporary ceasefire began last Sunday with an exchange of three Israeli women hostages held by the freedom fighter movement Hamas for 90 Palestinian women and children held by the Israeli military — most of them without charge or trial — and a massive increase in humanitarian aid.
The Fiji solidarity network said the path to peace must address the root causes — “Israel’s ongoing colonisation of Palestine, its apartheid system and illegal occupation that began with the Nakba 77 years ago.”
The network appealed for continued pressure for Palestinian statehood.
“We urge all supporters of justice and human rights to continue to stand up for Palestine and maintain pressure on our government and institutions until Palestine is free,” it said.
The Al Jazeera Network has condemned the arrest of its occupied West Bank correspondent by Palestinian security services as a bid by the Israeli occupation to “block media coverage” of the military attack on Jenin.
Israeli soldiers have killed at least 12 Palestinians in the three-day military assault that has rendered the refugee camp “nearly uninhabitable” and forced displacement of more than 2000 people. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said the Jenin operation was a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and human rights”.
Al Jazeera said in a broadcast statement that the arrest of its occupied West Bank correspondent Muhammad al-Atrash by the Palestinian Authority (PA) could only be explained as “an attempt to block the media coverage of the occupation’s attack in Jenin”.
We’re following with concern the arrest of journalist Mohammed Al-Atrash by the Palestinian security forces in connection with his work at Al Jazeera and call for his immediate release./1 pic.twitter.com/M2ZcEoWqJl
“The arbitrary actions of the Palestinian Authority are unfortunately identical to the occupation’s targeting of the Al Jazeera Network,” it said.
“We value the positions and voices that stand in solidarity and defend colleague Muhammad al-Atrash and the freedom of the press.”
The network said the journalist was brought before a court in Hebron after being arrested yesterday while covering the events in Jenin “simply for doing his professional duty as a journalist”.
“We confirm that these practices will not hinder our ongoing professional coverage of the facts unfolding in the West Bank,” Al Jazeera’s statement added.
The Israeli occupation has been targeting Al Jazeera for months in an attempt to gag its reporting.
Calling for al-Atrash’s immediate release, the al-Haq organisation (Protecting and Promoting Human Rights & the Rule of Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory) said in a statement: “Freedom of opinion and expression cannot be guaranteed without ensuring freedom of the press.”
Rage over AJ ban
Earlier this month journalists expressed outrage and confusion about the PA’s decision to shut down the Al Jazeera office in the occupied West Bank after the Israeli government had earlier banned the Al Jazeera broadcasting network’s operation within Israel.
“Shutting down a major outlet like Al Jazeera is a crime against journalism,” said freelance journalist Ikhlas al-Qarnawi.
He said a December 26 press statement by the Israeli army attempted to “justify a war crime”.
“It unabashedly admitted that the military incinerated five Palestinian journalists in a clearly marked press vehicle outside al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza Strip,” Kuttab said in an op-ed article.
Many Western publications had quoted the Israeli army statement as if it was an objective position and “not propaganda whitewashing a war crime”, he wrote.
“They failed to clarify to their audiences that attacking journalists, including journalists who may be accused of promoting ‘propaganda’, is a war crime — all journalists are protected under international humanitarian law, regardless of whether armies like their reporting or not.”
Israel not only refuses to recognise any Palestinian media worker as being protected, but it also bars foreign journalists from entering Gaza.
“It has been truly disturbing that the international media has done little to protest this ban,” wrote Kuttab.
“Except for one petition signed by 60 media outlets over the summer, the international media has not followed up consistently on such demands over 15 months.”
The International Court of Justice heard last month that after reconstruction is factored in Israel’s war on Gaza will have emitted 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A figure equivalent to the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.
It seems somehow wrong to be writing about the carbon footprint of Israel’s 15-month onslaught on Gaza.
The human cost is so unfathomably ghastly. A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet put the death toll due to traumatic injury at more than 68,000 by June of last year (40 percent higher than the Gaza Health Ministry’s figure.)
An earlier letter to The Lancet by a group of scientists argued the total number of deaths — based on similar conflicts — would be at least four times the number directly killed by bombs and bullets.
Seventy-four children were killed in the first week of 2025 alone. More than a million children are currently living in makeshift tents with regular reports of babies freezing to death.
Nearly two million of the strip’s 2.2 million inhabitants are displaced.
Ninety-six percent of Gaza’s children feel death is imminent and 49 percent wish to die, according to a study sponsored by the War Child Alliance.
Truly apocalyptic
I could, and maybe should, go on. The horrors visited on Gaza are truly apocalyptic and have not received anywhere near the coverage by our mainstream media that they deserve.
The contrast with the blanket coverage of the LA fires that have killed 25 people to date is instructive. The lives and property of those in the rich world are deemed far more newsworthy than those living — if you can call it that — in what retired Israeli general Giora Eiland described as a giant concentration camp.
The two stories have one thing in common: climate change.
In the case of the LA fires the role of climate change gets mentioned — though not as much as it should.
But the planet destroying emissions generated by the genocide committed against the Palestinians rarely makes the news.
Incredibly, when the State of Palestine — which is responsible for 0.001 percent of global emissions — told the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, last month, that the first 120 days of the war on Gaza resulted in emissions of between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon and other greenhouse gases it went largely unreported.
For context that is the equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 of the lowest-emitting states.
Fighter planes fuel
Jet fuel burned by Israeli fighter planes contributed about 157,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Transporting the bombs dropped on Gaza from the US to Israel contributed another 159,000 tonnes of CO2e.
Those figures will not appear in the official carbon emissions of either country due to an obscene exemption for military emissions that the US insisted on in the Kyoto negotiations. The US military’s carbon footprint is larger than any other institution in the world.
Professor of law Kate McIntosh, speaking on behalf of the State of Palestine, told the ICJ hearings, on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, that the emissions to date were just a fraction of the likely total.
Once post-war reconstruction is factored in the figure is estimated to balloon to 52 million tonnes of CO2e — a figure higher than the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.
Far too many leaders of the rich world have turned a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza, others have actively enabled it but as the fires in LA show there’s no escaping the impacts of climate change.
The US has contributed more than $20 billion to Israel’s war on Gaza — a huge figure but one that is dwarfed by the estimated $250 billion cost of the LA fires.
And what price do you put on tens of thousands who died from heatwaves, floods and wildfires around the world in 2024?
The genocide in Gaza isn’t only a crime against humanity, it is an ecocide that threatens the planet and every living thing on it.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and his Towards Democracy blog is at Substack.
Israeli forces have been ramping up operations in the occupied West Bank– mainly the Jenin refugee camp – to “distract” from the Gaza ceasefire deal, says political analyst Dr Mohamad Elmasry.
The Qatari professor said the ceasefire was being viewed domestically as a “spectacular failure” for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The ceasefire in Gaza was kind of a defeat for Netanyahu. Israeli media reports are calling it an embarrassment for him to have Hamas, after all these months, still very much alive and well and operational in Gaza,” Dr Elmasry, professor of media studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera in an interview.
“Now what the Israeli government is doing is trying to distract from that and sort of overcompensate by escalating in the West Bank.”
Elmasry highlighted that since the ceasefire began on Sunday, Israel had made dozens of arrests in the West Bank, — offsetting the release of 90 prisoners under the agreement so far.
“This is a way for the Israeli government to show its ardent supporters and especially those on the right wing that this is only temporary in Gaza and [Israel is] still able to do whatever we wants in the West Bank,” he said.
Dr Elmasry also said indications were growing that Israel was not taking the terms of the ceasefire seriously and was planning to restart fighting in Gaza before phase two of the agreement comes into effect.
“What we have to keep our eye on is violations,” Dr Elmasry said.
“Yesterday, there was video circulating of [Israeli forces] shooting a Palestinian [in Gaza]. It’s a clear violation, but we didn’t hear any sort of condemnation from the US, [which] is supposed to be sort of ensuring that the ceasefire continues.
“The other thing we have to keep an eye on,” Dr Elmasry added, “is what happens after phase one.
“There are increasing indications that Israel has every intention of continuing the war. They’ve apparently said as much. And then we’ve got US President Donald Trump after his inauguration saying: ‘Look, it’s their war’.
“I read that as a statement that the US is kind of washing its hands — it’s not going to intervene.”
‘Starting lives from scratch’
Meanwhile, one of several Palestinian journalists reporting on the ground for Al Jazeera, Hind Khoudary, said from Nuseirat, central Gaza:
“You can’t imagine how destroyed the infrastructure across the Gaza Strip is. Sewage is filling the streets.
“In some places, there’s a lack of water. Desalination plants are not working any more. The infrastructure has completely collapsed.
“Yesterday was the first day Israel let in heavy machinery. But civil defence teams, engineers and others working [on recovery efforts] do not know where to start.
“In every single street, neighbourhood, city infrastructure is destroyed. Palestinians are going to have to start their lives from scratch.”
Celebration time. Some Palestinian prisoners have been released. A mother reunited with her daughter. A young mother reunited with her babies.
Still in prison are people who never received a fair trial, people that independent inquirers say are wrongly imprisoned. Still in prison kids who cursed soldiers who walked into their villages wielding guns.
Still imprisoned far too many Palestinians who threw stones against bullets. Still imprisoned thousands of Palestinian hostages.
Many of us never knew how many hostages had been stolen, hauled into jails by Israel before 7 October 2023. We only heard the one-sided story of that day. The day when an offence force on a border was taken by surprise and when it panicked and blasted and bombed.
When that army guarding the occupation did more to lose lives than save lives.
Many never knew and perhaps never will know how many of the Palestinians who were kidnapped before and after that day had been beaten and tortured, including with the torture of rape.
We do know many have been murdered. We do know that some released from prison died soon after. We do not know how many more Palestinians will be taken hostage and imprisoned behind the prison no reporter is allowed to photograph.
Israelis boast over prison crime
The only clue to what happens inside is that Israelis have boasted this crime on national television. The clue is that Israeli soldiers have been tried for raping their own colleagues.
Make no mistake, this is a mean misogynist mercantile army. No sensible rational caring person would wish to serve in it.
No mother on any side of this conflict should lose her child. No father should bury his daughter or son. No grandparent should grieve over the loss of a life that should outlive them.
The crimes need to be exposed. All of them. Our media filters the truth. It does not provide a fair or full story. If you want that switch for pity’s sake go to Al Jazeera English.
The Palestinian people were forced to flee their homes in Gaza. Those who were never responsible for any crime were bombed out of their homes, they fled as their families were murdered, burned to death, shot by snipers. They fled while soldiers mocked their dead children.
They return home to ashes. If we want peace we must face the truths that create conflict. We are all connected in peace and war and peace.
Peace is the strongest greeting. It sears the heart and soars the soul.
It can only be achieved when we recognise and stop the anguish that causes oppression.
Saige England is a freelance journalist and author living in the Aotearoa New Zealand city of Ōtautahi.
COMMENTARY:By Steven Cowan, editor of Against The Current
New Zealand’s One News interviewed a Gaza journalist last week who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
For some 15 months, the Western media have framed Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza as a “legitimate” war.
Pretending to provide an objective and impartial view of “the Gaza War”, the Western media has failed to report on the atrocities that the Israel has committed in Gaza. The true face of Israel’s genocidal assault has been hidden behind the Western media’s determination to sanitise genocide.
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed’s appeal to the world and the Western media. Video: Dawn News
Even the deliberate targeting of journalists by the Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF), a war crime, has not moved the Western media to take action. More than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza and the Western media has remained silent.
The New Zealand and Pacific media also have nothing to be proud of in their coverage of events in Gaza. They, too, have consistently framed Israel’s genocidal rampage as a legitimate war and swept Israel’s war crimes under the carpet.
Some news outlets, like NZ’s Newstalk ZB, have gone as far as to defend Israel’s actions.
With the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza last week, One News, for the first time since Israel began its murderous assault, chose to talk live to a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. That journalist was 22-year-old Abubaker Abed.
Ignored by Western media
While One News introduced him as a reporter for the Associated Press, most of Abed’s reports have been for Palestinian news outlets like The Electronic Intifida.
On January 11, Abed made a speech condemning the Western media’s complicity in genocide. While the speech has been widely circulated in the social media, it has been ignored by the Western media.
In New Zealand, the important speech has failed to make it to the One News website.
One News interviewing Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
This article was first published on Steven Cowan’s website Against The Current. Republished with permission.
A litmus test of Israel’s commitment to abandon genocide and start down the road towards lasting peace is whether they choose to release the most important of all the hostages, Marwan Barghouti.
During the past 22 years in Israeli prisons he has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian — a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
As reported last week, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas are all insisting Barghouti, the most popular leader in Palestine, be among the thousands of Palestinian hostages to be freed as part of the ceasefire agreement.
His release or retention in captivity will say volumes about which path the US and Israel wish to take: either more land thieving, more killings, more lawlessness or steps towards ending the occupation and choosing peace over territorial expansion.
Why is Barghouti potentially so important? Despite long years in Israeli jails, he is a political giant who bestrides the Palestinian cause. He is an intellectual and both a fighter and a peace activist.
He is respected by all factions of the Palestinians. He is by far the most popular figure in Palestine and as such he is almost uniquely positioned to complete the vital task of uniting his people.
Back in July last year the Chinese government pulled off a diplomatic masterstroke by getting 14 factions, including Hamas and Fatah, to successfully come together for reconciliation talks and ink the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity. Now they need a unifying leader to move forward together.
Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas is despised as a US-Israeli tool by most Palestinians, 90 percent of whom, according to polling, want him gone. Hamas has represented the most effective resistance to Israel but the time may have come for them to accept partnership with, even leadership by, someone who can negotiate peace.
How Gaza and the West Bank is governed should be determined by the Palestinian people not by anyone else, especially not by Israeli leaders currently under investigation for genocide or US leaders who should join them in the dock for arming them.
Hypocritical rejection of Hamas
Barghouti, however, could untie the Gordian knot that has formed around the West’s hypocritical rejection of Hamas on one hand and the Palestinian people’s determination not to be dictated to by their oppressors on the other.
Barghouti may also be a saviour for the Israelis. Their society has turned into a psychotic perversion of the great hope Jews around the world placed in the Israeli state.
Israel is now the greatest killer of journalists in the history of war, the remorseless destroyer of hospitals and their patients and staff, the desecrator of countless churches and mosques. Tens of thousands of women have been killed for the sake of killing.
Israel is guilty of the crime of crimes — genocide — and needs a way out of the mess it has created.
For all these reasons Marwan Barghouti is a very dangerous man to Netanyahu and the most fanatical Zionists. He believes in peace.
In my profile of him a year ago I quoted his wife, lawyer and activist Fadwa Barghouti: “Marwan’s goal has always been ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Marwan Barghouti believes in politics. He’s a political and national leader loved by his people.
‘Fought for peace’ “He fought for peace with bravery and spent time on the Palestinian street advocating for peace. But he also believes in international law, which gives the occupied people the right to fight for their independence and freedom.”
Alon Liel, formerly Israel’s most senior diplomat, proposed freeing Barghouti because he is “the ultimate leader of the Palestinian people,” and “he is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in.”
Marwan Barghouti has the moral, political and popular stature to reach out to the Israelis, to see past their crimes and to sit down with them. If only. If only. If only.
The horrible reality is Israel and the US have been led by war criminals who fail to grasp the fact that peace is only possible if they abandon the vilification of the Palestinian people and their leaders; that a better world is only possible if the Palestinians are finally given freedom and dignity.
It will be a relief to everyone to see the remaining few dozen Israelis held by Hamas and other groups released. They deserve to be home with their families.
It will be a relief that thousands of Palestinian hostages be freed, many of them, according to Israel’s leading human rights organisation B’tselem, victims of torture, sexual violence and medieval conditions. Hundreds of Palestinian child hostages — all of them traumatised — will be returned to their families.
All these are welcome developments. Strategically, however, Marwan Barghouti stands apart.
Palestinian Marwan Barghouti . . . a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz/
Uniquely suited to lead Palestine
Long considered the “Palestinian Mandela” — not least because of his 22-years continuous imprisonment — the former Fatah leader, the former military leader, has attributes that make him almost uniquely suited to lead Palestine to freedom — if Israel and the US are prepared to abandon the Greater Israel project and accept peace can only come with justice for all.
He has lived for more than 22 years in conditions far more barbaric than the great South African leader had to endure on Robben Island. According to Israeli human rights groups, family and international lawyers, Barghouti has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian – a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resistance to the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
Marwan Barghouti is the same age as me — 65 — and it fills me with horror that a man who has spent decades fighting for freedom, and, if possible, peace, has been subjected to the horrors of an Israeli gulag for so long.
I am not sure I would have had the physical or mental strength to endure what he has but — like Mandela — he kept his humanity and has remained an advocate for peace.
We should never forget that seven million Palestinians remain as hostages held in brutal conditions by the US and Israel. Most are hostages without human rights, political rights, territorial rights.
As Palestinians have pointed out: imprisonment is now part of Palestinian consciousness. But — as Marwan Barghouti has shown with his iron will, his human decency, his determination to continue to be an advocate for peace with Israel — you can imprison the Palestinians but not their struggle.
I’ll give the last word to his son, Arab Barghouti who told Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo this week, “My father used to always tell me that hope is sometimes a privilege, but being ‘hope-less’ is a privilege that we can’t have as Palestinians.”
In the same interview he also said:
“If any Israeli leader really wants an end to this and to have peace for the region, they would see that my father is someone that would bring that and is someone who still believes in the tiny chance left for the two-state solution.”
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. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
The Paris-based world media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called for international journalists to be given open access to the besieged Gaza Strip enclave and has reaffirmed its demand that the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutes the perpetrators of Israeli war crimes against journalists.
RSF has already filed four complaints with the ICC and has declared it will continue its efforts to work for justice and support Palestinian journalism.
In 15 months of the Israeli war on Gaza, the military has killed more than 150 Palestinian journalists — the Gazan Media office says more than 210 — including at least 41 who were killed while working.
The ceasefire that began on Sunday has ended — for the moment — the war that turned Palestine into the “most dangerous territory” in the world for journalists, according to RSF’s 2024 Round-up.
“For 15 months, journalists in Gaza have been displaced, starved, slandered, threatened, injured, and killed by the Israeli army,” said RSF’s director-general Thibaut Bruttin.
“Despite these dangers, they have continued to inform their fellow citizens and the world while foreign journalists were denied access to the territory.
“Gaza’s reporters are the pride of journalism. With the ceasefire agreement, the work of local and international reporters is more crucial than ever — it will go hand in hand with the work of the justice system.
Independent access needed
“To this end, international journalists must be given independent access to the besieged territory as quickly as possible.
“To avoid increasing this war’s terrible death toll, the Israeli authorities must immediately authorise the hospitalisation of journalist Fadi al-Wahidi outside the Gaza Strip.”
Bruttin said that RSF, which had filed four complaints with the ICC since 7 October 2023, called on the court once again to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes against journalists in Gaza.”
Al Jazeera journalist Fadi al-Wahidi, who was gravely injured on 9 October 2024 while reporting from the Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip, is fighting for his life as the Israeli authorities continued to refuse his transfer to a hospital abroad, despite repeated calls from RSF.
Also, two Palestinian photojournalists, Haytham Abdel Wahed and Nidal al-Wahidi, have been missing since 7 October 2023.
Need to rebuild media Gazan journalists have been working in makeshift newsrooms in tents set up near hospitals in order to have access to electricity and internet.
Despite their incredible hardship, they have continued to inform the world from a devastating landscape.
“If the ceasefire agreement is to translate into lasting peace, considerable resources will need to be allocated to rebuilding the infrastructure of Gaza’s media,” RSF said in a statement.
This reconstruction cannot take place without concrete action against impunity for the crimes Israel continued committing for over a year.
On 24 September 2024, RSF filed its fourth complaint with the ICC for war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza by the Israeli army; the first complaint was filed on 1 November 2023.
Arrests in West Bank, pressure in Israel Overshadowed by Israel’s offensive in Gaza, the West Bank has been the target of multiple abuses by Israeli authorities and settlers that did not spare journalists and media outlets.
According to RSF’s 2024 Round-up, the arrests of Palestinian journalists in the West Bank have made Israel one of the world’s largest jails for media professionals.
The far-right Israeli government has used the state of war as an excuse to strengthen its grip on the media landscape.
In an op-ed published in Haaretz, The Seventh Eye and Le Monde, RSF condemned draft laws that repress the media as well as the intimidation of Israeli journalists who criticise their government’s actions.
Scenes of fully armed Hamas fighters in their green headbands escorting the three Israeli women hostages to their handover on the first day of the ceasefire and patrolling the streets of Gaza are embarrasing for the Israeli government, says an academic.
Mohamad Elmasry, a media studies professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, says Israeli media are now focusing on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the 15-month war on Gaza which has killed almost 47,000 Palestinians,
“Back in April, Netanyahu said, ‘We are one step away from eliminating Hamas.’
“Then in June he doubled down on that and said, ‘We’re almost there. We almost eliminated Hamas.’
“And now he has to watch, on all the TV screens, Hamas fighters dressed in their fatigues escorting Israeli captives to their vehicles.
“He’s watching as Hamas will continue to govern Gaza and oversee the security situation, the humanitarian aid situation, and all elements of this ceasefire.
Hamas ‘has not been eliminated’
“Hamas has not been eliminated, and this is very embarrassing for Netanyahu.”
Three women hostages were exchanged for 90 Palestinian captives — mostly women and children, many of them detained by the Israeli military without charge — on the opening day of the ceasefire.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, said neither Hamas’s political nor military infrastructure had been entirely eradicated despite Netanyahu repeatedly citing it as the main goal of the war.
“Yes, Hamas was degraded, even decimated, militarily but they’re still standing up.
“So in that respect, short of occupying the entire Gaza Strip – which is something Israel never wanted to do – he did not attain that goal,” Pinkas told Al Jazeera.
“As for turning the Palestinians against Hamas, in order to do that he needs to offer them some sort of silver lining, some kind of alternative.
“Let’s not forget, it was Netanyahu’s deliberate, by-design policy to strengthen Hamas in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and say ‘what do you know, I’ve got no one to talk to about a peace process.’”
99 rescuers killed Meanwhile, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency has provided an update on the devastation in the besieged Strip, including the fact that Israeli attacks killed 99 and wounded 319 of its rescuers. Dozens suffered permanent injuries.
The Israeli military forces also detained 27 rescuers and their fate is unknown.
Civil defence crews recovered more than 97,000 injured Palestinians from bombed sites during the war.
About 2840 bodies were reported to have “evaporated without a trace” from Israeli weapons that unleashed temperatures between 7000-9000 degrees Celsius – “melting all at the centre of the explosion”.
Searching continues for an estimated more than 10,000 bodies buried under the rubble of bombed houses and buildings.
An Al-Jazeera Arabic special report translated by The Palestine Chronicle staff details how Israel’s military strategy in Gaza, aimed at dismantling Hamas and displacing Palestinian civilians, has failed after 470 days of conflict.
ANALYSIS: By Abdulwahab al-Mursi
On May 5, 2024, nearly seven months into Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the main goal of the war was to destroy Hamas and prevent it from controlling Gaza.
However, over 250 days since this statement, and 470 days into the Israeli aggression, it has become clear that Netanyahu’s promises have faded into illusions.
In the early hours of the first phase of the ceasefire on Sunday, Israeli military radio reported that Hamas forces were reasserting their control over Gaza, stating that Hamas, which had never lost control of any part of the territory during the war, was using the ceasefire to strengthen its grip.
This development highlights the gap between Israel’s strategic objectives and the reality on the ground, as images from Gaza continue to reveal widespread devastation and loss of life, yet Hamas remains firmly in control.
Popular Support: The backbone of Hamas Military literature highlights the concept of “Center of Gravity” (COG) for military organisations, a concept that can vary depending on the organisation and context.
In the case of Hamas and Palestinian Resistance, the central element of their strength lies in the support of the local population.
This grassroots support provides Hamas with invaluable social depth, a continuous supply of human resources, and strong strategic backing.
The popular support and belief in the resistance’s strategic choices and leadership have allowed Hamas to maintain its popular mandate to achieve Palestinian national goals.
Recognising this, Israel has targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure both militarily and psychologically, aiming to raise the costs of supporting the resistance and weaken Hamas’s popular base.
Israel has treated Gaza’s entire civilian infrastructure as military targets, believing that expanding the death toll among civilians and inflicting maximum suffering would force the population to turn against Hamas.
Yet, despite these efforts, images of celebrations in Gaza, even in areas heavily targeted by Israel, underscore the exceptional nature of the Gaza situation, where resistance culture is deeply rooted and unyielding.
The strategic consciousness of Gaza’s people There appears to be a collective strategic awareness among Gaza’s people to maintain a victorious image at all costs, even in the midst of devastating humanitarian crises.
This desire to project an image of resistance and triumph, despite the overwhelming tragedy, has led to spontaneous public displays of support for Hamas and resistance forces, reinforcing their resolve against the Israeli onslaught.
Failure of forced displacement plans In the initial weeks of the war, Israel revealed its plan to forcibly relocate Gaza’s population.
Israeli media outlets reported in October 2023 that Netanyahu had proposed relocating Gaza’s residents to other countries.
However, after months of war, Gaza’s residents have shown an unshakable determination to remain, with displaced individuals in refugee camps celebrating their return to their homes, despite the widespread destruction they have suffered.
In northern Gaza, particularly in Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and Shuja’iyya, Israel’s attempts to prevent the return of displaced residents became a significant obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, delaying it for months.
Israel’s plan, known as the “Generals’ Plan” by former Israeli military advisor Giora Eiland, aimed to create a buffer zone in northern Gaza by applying immense military and living pressures on the population.
However, as evident from the ongoing images from the region, the displaced population continues to resist and return, undermining Israel’s relocation goals.
Hamas’s military structure endures One of Netanyahu’s primary goals was to dismantle Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
However, in the early hours of the first phase of the ceasefire, images showed Hamas fighters organising military parades in southern Gaza, signalling the resilience of Hamas’s military structure even before the ceasefire officially began.
Despite Israeli claims of killing thousands of Hamas fighters and destroying significant portions of Gaza’s tunnel network, the rapid and organized emergence of Al-Qassam forces on the ground suggests that these Israeli claims may have been aimed more at reassuring the Israeli public about the progress of the war, rather than reflecting the true situation on the ground.
Failure of post-war plans In December 2023, Netanyahu rejected Palestinian proposals that Hamas be included in Gaza’s post-war governance, insisting, “There will be no Hamas in the post-war period; we will eliminate them.”
Throughout the war, Israel attempted various unilateral methods to manage Gaza, including direct military administration and creating a new technocratic authority with local leaders, but all efforts failed.
Israeli military attempts to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza also proved ineffective, as the army struggled to manage these operations.
As the conflict nears what is supposed to be its final phase, the governance structure in Gaza has not changed.
Hamas’s leadership, especially the Al-Qassam Brigades, continues to operate effectively, and the ceasefire agreement has allowed for the resumption of local security forces.
Even after Israel’s targeted assassinations of 723 members of Gaza’s police and security apparatus, the resilience of Gaza’s security forces has remained evident.
This failure of Israel’s post-war vision was highlighted by a comment from a political analyst on Israeli i24 News, who questioned the results of the prolonged military operation: “What have we achieved in a year and five months?
“We destroyed many homes, lost many of our best soldiers, and in the end, the result is the same: Hamas rules, aid enters, and the Qassam Brigades return.”
Republished from The Palestinian Chronicle with permission.
An almost three-hour delay for the start of the temporary ceasefire — due to “technical difficulties”, said the resistance movement Hamas — hardly daunted thousands of euphoric Palestinians who took to the streets of Gaza on Sunday to celebrate and try to move back to bombed-out homes in spite of the dangers.
This in turn will trigger freedom for 95 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had been jailed without charges or being tried in Israeli lawcourts, at the start of the 42-day first stage of the three-phase ceasefire deal.
Israel currently detains 10,400 Palestinian prisoners in jails, according to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
This figure does not include those detained from Gaza during the last 15 months of conflict. Hamas and allied resistance groups are reported to be holding 94 hostages captured on 7 October 2023, with 34 of those believed to be dead.
At least 19 people were killed on Sunday and 36 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza during the truce delay according to Gazan Civil Defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal
One person was killed in Rafah, six people were killed in Khan Younis, nine were killed in Gaza City and three in the north, he said in a statement.
Ceasefire start announced
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office announced the ceasefire with Hamas would start at 11:15am local time (09:15 GMT) after the delay by Hamas in naming the three Israeli women captives to be freed as Romi Gonen, 24, Doron Steinbrecher, 31, and Emily Damari, 28.
One was reported to be of dual Romanian nationality and another of British nationality.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said it had 4000 truckloads of humanitarian aid ready to enter the Gaza Strip — “half of them carry food and water”, announced UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini in an X post.
UNRWA has 4,000 truckloads of aid ready to enter #Gaza — half of them carry food and flour.
Attacks on aid convoys in the Gaza Strip could decline as humanitarian relief comes in following a #ceasefire, says @UNLazzarini.https://t.co/yRt1NxWuXS
Two of the Palestinian reporters covering the truce from inside Gaza for Al Jazeera spoke of the joy and celebrations in spite of the uncertainty over the delayed truce start.
“Palestinians are taking a deep breath from all the atrocities they have been going through for the past 470 days. And today is a day of celebration,” said Hind Khoudary, reporting from Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
“Thousands of Palestinians are getting ready to go to the areas that they were not supposed to go, like the eastern parts, Jabalia, the areas that have been witnessing an Israeli ground invasion — and also Rafah.
A bouquet for the Gaza ceasefire in Auckland’s Te Komititanga square on Saturday previewing the ceasefire. . . on the reverse of the Palestine flag is the West Papuan Morning Star flag of independence, another decolonisation issue. Image: APR
‘Their houses are not even there’
“We also saw a lot of people putting their luggage to start going back, but many know that their houses are not even there.
“Most of their houses are not standing any more, but most of the people said that they’re going to put their tents on top of the rubble in their neighbourhoods.
Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah, Gaza, said that despite the ceasefire delay, people had been celebrating.
“People here, as soon as the clock hit 8:30am, burst out into celebration and festivities. We heard shotguns a few times as well as people using fireworks.
“They are hoping that the coming hours are going to show them more promises and that the list of captives has been resolved and they can go on to start piecing their lives together in a more stable and safer environment.”
In Auckland on Saturday, about 200 demonstrators gathered in the heart of New Zealand’s biggest city to welcome the Gaza ceasefire, but warned they would continue to protest until justice is served with an independent and free Palestinan state.
Jubilant scenes of dancing and Palestinian folk music rang out across Te Komititanga square amid calls for the Israeli ambassador to be expelled from New Zealand and for the government to halt holiday worker visas for “Zionist terrorist” soldiers or reservists.
Protesters at the Gaza ceasefire rally in Auckland on Saturday. Image: APR
I have wrestled with what to say in this urgent moment, long yearned for and that often appeared beyond reach during these last 15 hideous months.
One of the questions that I grappled with was this: What could I possibly share with readers that would even remotely capture the meaning and profundity of an apparent agreement to stop the wholesale massacre of Palestinians?
I had not suffered. My home is intact. My family and I are alive and well. We are warm, together and safe.
So, the other pressing dilemma I confronted was: Is it my place to write at all? This space should be reserved, I thought, for Palestinians to reflect on the horrors they have endured and what is to come.
Their voices will, of course, be heard here and elsewhere in the days and weeks ahead. My voice, in this context, is insignificant and, under these grievous circumstances, borders on being irrelevant.
Still, if you and, in particular, Palestinians will oblige me, this is what I have to say:
I think that there are four words that each, in their own way, bear some significance to Wednesday’s happy news that the guns are poised to go silent.
The first and perhaps most fitting word is “relief”.
There will be ample time and opportunity for the “experts” to draw up their predictable scorecards of the “winners” and “losers” and the broader short- and long-term strategic implications of Wednesday’s deal.
There will, as well, be ample time and opportunity for more “experts” to consider the political consequences of Wednesday’s deal in the Middle East, Europe and Washington, DC.
My preoccupation, and I suspect the preoccupation of most Palestinians and their loved ones in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, is that peace has arrived finally.
How long it will last is a question best posed tomorrow. Today, let us all revel in the relief that is a dividend of peace.
Palestinian boys and girls are dancing with relief. After months of grief, loss and sadness, joy has returned. Smiles have returned. Hope has returned.
Let us enjoy a satisfying measure of relief, if not pleasure, in that.
There is relief in Israel, too.
The families of the surviving captives will soon be reunited with the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, they have longed to embrace again.
They will, no doubt, require care and attention to heal the wounds to their minds, souls and bodies.
That will be another, most welcomed, dividend of peace.
The next word is “gratitude”.
Those of us who, day after dreadful day, have watched — bereft and helpless as a ruthless apartheid state has gone methodically about reducing Gaza to dust and memory — owe our deepest gratitude to the brave, determined helpers who have done their best to ease the pain and suffering of besieged Palestinians.
We owe our everlasting gratitude to the countless anonymous people, in countless places throughout Gaza and the West Bank, who, at grave risk and at the expense of so many young, promising lives, put the welfare of their Palestinian brothers and sisters ahead of their own.
We must be grateful for their selflessness and courage. They did their duty. They walked into the danger. They did not retreat. They stood firm. They held their ground. They rebuffed the purveyors of death and destruction who tried to erase their pride and dignity.
They reminded the world that humanity will prevail despite the occupier’s efforts to crush it.
The third word is “acknowledge”.
The world must acknowledge the steadfast resistance of Palestinians.
The occupier’s aim was to break the will and spirit of Palestinians. That has been the occupier’s intent for the past 75 years.
Once again, the occupier has failed.
Palestinians are indefatigable. They are, like their brethren in Ireland and South Africa, immovable.
They refuse to be routed from their land because they are wedded to it by faith and history. Their roots are too deep and indestructible.
Palestinians will decide their fate — not the marauding armies headed by racists and war criminals who cling to the antiquated notion that might is right.
It will take a little more time and patience, but the sovereignty and salvation that Palestinians have earned in blood and heartache is, I am convinced, approaching not far over the horizon.
The final word is “shame”.
There are politicians and governments who will forever wear the shame of permitting Israel to commit genocide against the people of Palestine.
These politicians and governments will deny it. The evidence of their crimes is plain. We can see it in the images of the apocalyptic landscape of Gaza. We will record every name of the more than 46,000 Palestinian victims of their complicity.
That will be their decrepit legacy.
Rather than stop the mass murder of innocents, they enabled it. Rather than prevent starvation and disease from claiming the lives of babies and children, they encouraged it. Rather than turn off the spigot of arms, they delivered them. Rather than shout “enough”, they spurred the killing to go on and on.
We will remember. We will not let them forget.
That is our responsibility: to make sure that they never escape the shame that will follow each and every one of them like a long, disfiguring shadow in the late-day sun.
Shame on them. Shame on them all.
Andrew Mitrovica is an award-winning writer and journalism educator at the University of Toronto. He has been an investigative reporter for a variety of news organisations and publications, including the CBC, CTV, Saturday Night Magazine, Reader’s Digest, the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. He is also a columnist for Al Jazeera.
With the temporary ceasefire agreement, we should take our hats off to the Palestinian people of Gaza who have withstood a total military onslaught from Israel but without surrendering or shifting from their land.
Over 15 months Israel has dropped well over 70,000 tonnes of bombs on this tiny 360 sq km strip of land, home to 2.3 million people.
This is more than the combined total of bombs dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the six years of the Second World War.
PSNA national chair John Minto’s “human spirit” letter in solidarity with Palestinians. Image: The Press
Just as we saw in Vietnam and Afghanistan the determination to resist has proven itself more decisive than the overwhelming military firepower of Israel and the US.
Palestinian courage, tenacity and sumud (steadfastness) represent a triumph of the human spirit against overwhelming odds.
For New Zealand, the great tragedy has been our government [Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s National-led three-party coalition] response which has been to condemn every act of Palestinian resistance but refuse to condemn even the most blatant of Israeli war crimes.
Mr Luxon has put us on the wrong side of yet another human struggle for justice.
John Minto National Chair Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA)
Letter published in the The Press, Christchurch, on 18 January 2025.
About 200 demonstrators gathered in the heart of New Zealand’s biggest city Auckland today to welcome the Gaza ceasefire due to come into force tomorrow, but warned they would continue to protest until justice is served with an independent and free Palestinan state.
Jubilant scenes of dancing and Palestinian folk music rang out across Te Komititanga square amid calls for the Israeli ambassador to be expelled from New Zealand and for the government to halt holiday worker visas for “Zionist terrorist” soldiers or reservists.
While optimistic that the temporary truce in the three-phase agreement agreed to between the Hamas resistance fighter force and Israel in Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday would be turned into a permanent ceasefire, many speakers acknowledged the fragility of the peace with at least 116 Palestinians killed since the deal — mostly women and children.
New Zealand Palestinian Dr Abdallah Gouda speaking at today’s Gaza ceasefire rally . . . “We want to rebuild Gaza, we will rebuild hospitals . . . we will mend Gaza.” Image: David Robie/APR
“We have won . . . won. We are there, we are here. We are everywhere,” declared defiant Gaza survivor Dr Abdallah Gouda, whose family and other Palestinian community members in Aotearoa have played a strong solidarity role alongside activist groups during the 15-month genocidal war waged on the besieged 365 sq km enclave.
He said the struggle would go on until Palestine was finally free and independent; Palestinians would not leave their land.
“They’re [Israelis] killing us. But Palestinians decided to fight [back] . . . No Palestinians want to leave Gaza. They want to stay . . .”
‘We want to rebuild Gaza’
Dr Gouda said in both Arabic and English to loud cheers, “We promise God, we promise the people that we will never leave.
“We can be starved, we can be killed , but we will never leave.
Dr Abdallah Gouda speaking at today’s rally. Video: APR
“We want to rebuild Gaza, we will rebuild hospitals, we will rebuild schools, we will rebuild churches . . .
“We will mend Gaza. It’s not too difficult because Gaza was beautiful, we will rebuild Gaza as the best!”
His son Ali, who has been the most popular cheerleader during the weekly protests, treated the crowd to resounding chants including “Free, free Palestine” and “Netanyahu, you can’t hide”.
PSNA’s Neil Scott speaking. Video: APR
Commenting on the ceasefire due to start tomorrow, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national secretary Neil Scott said: “This is just the end of the beginning — and now we will fight for justice.”
Scott said the continued struggle included the BDS — boycott, divest, sanctions — campaign. He appealed to the crowd to check their BDS apps and then monitor their “cupboards at home” to remove and boycott Israeli-sourced products.
He also said the PSNA would continue to keep pressing the NZ government to ban Israelis with military service visiting New Zealand on working holiday visas.
“Even now, stop allowing young Zionist terrorists — because that’s what they are — to come to Aotearoa to live among the decent people of New Zealand and wash the blood off their hands and feel innocent again,” Scott said.
“Not a chance, we are pushing this government to end that working holiday visa.”
Speakers also called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from New Zealand.
Ali Gouda’s flagwaving challenge to the crowd. Video: APR
New Palestine documentary
In his final chant, Ali appealed to the crowd: “Raise and wave your Palestinian flags and keffiyeh.”
Future rallies will include protest marches in solidarity with Palestine.
RNZ reports that New Zealand’s Justice for Palestine co-convenor Samira Zaiton said she would only begin to breathe easy when the ceasefire began on Sunday.
“It feels as though I’m holding my breath and there’s a sigh of relief that’s stuck in my throat that I can’t quite let out until we see it play out.”
In Sydney, Australian Jewish author Antony Loewenstein, who visited New Zealand in 2023 to speak about his award-winning book, The Palestine Laboratory, has been a consistent and strong critic of Israel throughout the war.
“I often think about what Israel has unleashed in Gaza — the aim is complete devastation, and Palestinians there have a long history of suffering under this arrogant and criminal war-making,” he said today in a post on X.
“My first visit to Gaza was in July 2009, six months after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead war, and I made a short film about what I saw and heard:”
Gaza Reflections. Video: Antony Loewenstein
His new documentary based on his book, The Palestine Laboratory, will be broadcast by Al Jazeera later this month.
Protesters at today’s Gaza ceasefire rally in Auckland today. Image: David Robie/APR
The United Nations tasked with providing humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza — and the only one that can do it on a large scale — says it is ready to provide assistance in the wake of the ceasefire tomorrow but is worried about the impact of being “outlawed” by Israel.
A spokesperson, Tamara Alrifai, for the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) said: “We’re extremely eager to see the humanitarian part of the ceasefire, actioned as of tomorrow morning.”
However, Alrifai also told Al Jazeera that UNRWA was “extremely worried” that if UNRWA was prevented from being able to work “then the glue that brings together the entire complex humanitarian operation might not be able to function”.
In October, Israel passed a law banning UNRWA from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban is set to take effect next month.
Alrifai said UNRWA was continuing to work in Gaza, with UNRWA staff managing shelters and distributing food.
“Not only is UNRWA the backbone of the humanitarian response with our shelters, our people, our personnel, our trucks and our warehouses . . . but the minute the ceasefire kicks in, it is of utmost priority to bring over 600,000 children back to some form of learning,” she added.
Another aid agency, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said that while the ceasefire deal was a “relief”, it was coming too late and political leaders had “failed” the people of Gaza.
“Searching for bodies’
“For more than 15 months, hospital rooms have been filled with patients with severed limbs and other life-altering trauma, caused by strikes, and distressed people searching for the bodies of their family members,” MSF said in a statement.
Lazzarini: Can UNRWA survive Israel’s attacks? Video: Al Jazeera
The agency, which said eight of its workers had been killed since the start of the war, described humanitarian needs in the besieged and bombarded territory as having reached “catastrophic levels”.
“The Israeli government, Hamas, and world leaders have tragically failed the people of Gaza, by not agreeing and imposing a sustained ceasefire sooner,” it said.
“The relief that this ceasefire brings is far from enough for people to rebuild their lives, reclaim their dignity and to mourn for those killed and all that’s been lost.”
Meanwhile, the Health Ministry in Gaza has released its latest daily casualties update from Israeli attacks, indicating that the number of people killed since the start of the war had risen by 23 to 46,899 in the latest 24-hour reporting period.
Another 83 people were wounded over the same period, bringing the total to 110,725.
Israel plays a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that ensure it immediately gets what it wants. It then violates every subsequent phase and reignites its military assault.
ANALYSIS:By Chris Hedges
Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game.
It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace.
It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.
If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.
The Israeli Cabinet delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza — but finally agreed to the deal. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the first 24 hours after the ceasefire was declared.
The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.”
He warned that his cabinet would not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”
Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.
The deal includes three phases.
The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages — 33 Israelis who were captured on October 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for up to 1000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt.
It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.
But it is Netanyahu’s office that appeared to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire.
“In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice,” while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza.
Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.
Israeli military ground operations in the Gaza Strip in November 2023. Image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even with the Israelis finally accepting the agreement, threaten to implode it.
Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily.
There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable.
There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced.
There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.
Camp David
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), the late US President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after the Camp David Peace Accords signing ceremony at the White House on September 17, 1978. Image: US National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
But the subsequent phases, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never honored.
Oslo Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people; and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn.
It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed.
Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C.
The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, September 13, 1993. Image: Vince Musi, White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law– was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians”.
The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps”.
There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.
The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo …
“a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s national security minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform — for her husband’s murder.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on the day he was assassinated, giving a speech in favour of the Oslo Peace agreement in Tel Aviv. Image: Israel Press and Photo Agency, Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn”.
These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).
Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory strike by Hamas, which fired crude rockets and mortar shells into Israel.
The Hamas barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military strike on the “right to defend itself”.
Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which saw Israel carry out a ground and aerial assault over 22 days, with the Israeli air force dropping over 1000 tons of explosives on Gaza, killed 1,385 — according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children.
Four Israelis were killed over the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, four of whom were victims of “friendly fire.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that “Operation Cast Lead” had been prepared over the previous six months.
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli military, wrote that:
“the brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesman…their propaganda is a pack of lies…It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men.
“Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers.”
A child in Gaza City during the ceasefire after the 2008–2009 conflict. Image: andlun1, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
These series of attacks on Gaza were followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defence and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven week campaign that left 2251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
These assaults by the Israeli military were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as The Great March of Return, along Gaza’s fenced-in barrier. Over 266 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli soldiers and 30,000 more were wounded.
In May 2021, Israel killed more than 256 Palestinians in Gaza following attacks by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque took place in April 2023.
And then the breaching of the security barriers on October 7, 2023 that enclose Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for over 16 years in an open air prison.
The attacks by Palestinian gunmen [Al-Aqsa Deluge] left some 1200 Israeli dead — including hundreds killed by Israel itself — and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to lay waste to Gaza, in its Swords of Iron War.
This horrific saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged — the erasure of Palestinians from their land. This ceasefire is one more cynical chapter. There are many ways it can and, I suspect, will fall apart.
But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass slaughter will stop.
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 article is republished from his X account.
Israel plays a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that ensure it immediately gets what it wants. It then violates every subsequent phase and reignites its military assault.
ANALYSIS:By Chris Hedges
Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game.
It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace.
It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.
If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.
The Israeli Cabinet delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza — but finally agreed to the deal. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the first 24 hours after the ceasefire was declared.
The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.”
He warned that his cabinet would not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”
Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.
The deal includes three phases.
The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages — 33 Israelis who were captured on October 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for up to 1000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt.
It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.
But it is Netanyahu’s office that appeared to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire.
“In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice,” while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza.
Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.
Israeli military ground operations in the Gaza Strip in November 2023. Image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even with the Israelis finally accepting the agreement, threaten to implode it.
Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily.
There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable.
There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced.
There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.
Camp David
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), the late US President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after the Camp David Peace Accords signing ceremony at the White House on September 17, 1978. Image: US National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
But the subsequent phases, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never honored.
Oslo Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people; and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn.
It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed.
Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C.
The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, September 13, 1993. Image: Vince Musi, White House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law– was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians”.
The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps”.
There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.
The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo …
“a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s national security minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform — for her husband’s murder.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on the day he was assassinated, giving a speech in favour of the Oslo Peace agreement in Tel Aviv. Image: Israel Press and Photo Agency, Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn”.
These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).
Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory strike by Hamas, which fired crude rockets and mortar shells into Israel.
The Hamas barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military strike on the “right to defend itself”.
Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which saw Israel carry out a ground and aerial assault over 22 days, with the Israeli air force dropping over 1000 tons of explosives on Gaza, killed 1,385 — according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children.
Four Israelis were killed over the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, four of whom were victims of “friendly fire.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that “Operation Cast Lead” had been prepared over the previous six months.
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli military, wrote that:
“the brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesman…their propaganda is a pack of lies…It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men.
“Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers.”
A child in Gaza City during the ceasefire after the 2008–2009 conflict. Image: andlun1, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
These series of attacks on Gaza were followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defence and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven week campaign that left 2251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
These assaults by the Israeli military were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as The Great March of Return, along Gaza’s fenced-in barrier. Over 266 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli soldiers and 30,000 more were wounded.
In May 2021, Israel killed more than 256 Palestinians in Gaza following attacks by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque took place in April 2023.
And then the breaching of the security barriers on October 7, 2023 that enclose Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for over 16 years in an open air prison.
The attacks by Palestinian gunmen [Al-Aqsa Deluge] left some 1200 Israeli dead — including hundreds killed by Israel itself — and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to lay waste to Gaza, in its Swords of Iron War.
This horrific saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged — the erasure of Palestinians from their land. This ceasefire is one more cynical chapter. There are many ways it can and, I suspect, will fall apart.
But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass slaughter will stop.
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 article is republished from his X account.
A ceasefire in Gaza is not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. Legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.
ANALYSIS:By David Hearst
When push came to shove, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blinked first.
For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.
That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left for the army to do in Gaza.
Still Netanyahu persisted. Last May, he rejected a deal signed by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an offensive on Rafah.
In October, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan, aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be treated as a “terrorist”.
It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war, that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war crime and ethnic cleansing.
Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the Israeli border to the sea.
The Netzarim Corridor would have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third and become its new northern border. No Palestinian pushed out of northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.
Red lines erased No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this plan. Not US President Joe Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza; nor Antony Blinken, his Secretary of State, who earned the dubious distinction of being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.
Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement, Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the truth.
Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay in coming to this one.
It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war.
In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will
After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in military gear – now a wanted man by the ICC . . . “After one meeting, the red lines that he had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.” Image: AJ screenshot APR
As Israeli pundit Erel Segal said: “We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is being forced upon us . . . We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza, that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.”
This is emerging as a consensus. The mood in Israel is sceptical of claims of victory.
“There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the emerging ceasefire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it has no choice but to accept it,” columnist Yossi Yehoshua wrote in Ynet.
The circulating draft of the ceasefire agreement is clear in stating that Israel will pull back from both the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor by the end of the process, stipulations Netanyahu had previously rejected.
Even without this, the draft agreement clearly notes that Palestinians can return to their homes, including in northern Gaza. The attempt to clear it of its inhabitants has failed.
This is the biggest single failure of Israel’s ground invasion.
Fighting back There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza.
A senior Israeli Air Force official has admitted that planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been resupplied by the US.
It is sinking into Israeli public opinion that the war is ending without any of Israel’s major aims being achieved.
Netanyahu and the Israeli army set out to “collapse” Hamas after the humiliation and shock of its surprise attack on southern Israel in October 2023. They demonstrably haven’t achieved this goal.
“But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have ‘cleansed’ the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.” Image: AJ screenshot APR
Take Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza as a microcosm of the battle Hamas waged against invading forces. Fifteen months ago, it was the first city in Gaza to be occupied by Israeli forces, who judged it to have the weakest Hamas battalion.
But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have “cleansed” the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.
Hamas kept on emerging from the rubble to fight back, turning Beit Hanoun into a minefield for Israeli soldiers. Since the launch of the most recent military operation in northern Gaza, 55 Israeli officers and soldiers have perished in this sector, 15 of them in Beit Hanoun in the past week alone.
If any army is bleeding and exhausted today, it is Israel’s. The plain military fact of life in Gaza is that, 15 months on, Hamas can recruit and regenerate faster than Israel can kill its leaders or its fighters.
“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the [Israeli army] is eradicating them,” Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, told the Wall Street Journal. He added that Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, “is managing everything”.
If anything demonstrates the futility of measuring military success solely by the number of leaders killed, or missiles destroyed, it is this.
Against the odds In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will. It is not the battle that matters, but the ability to keep on fighting.
In Algeria and Vietnam, the French and US armies had overwhelming military advantage.
Both forces withdrew in ignominy and failure many years later. In Vietnam, it was more than six years after the Tet Offensive, which like the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was perceived at the time to be a military failure. But the symbol of a fightback after so many years of siege proved decisive in the war.
In France, the scars of Algeria last to this day. In each war of liberation, the determination of the weak to resist has proved more decisive than the firepower of the strong.
In Gaza, it was the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land — even as it was being reduced to rubble — that proved to be the decisive factor in this war. And this is an astonishing feat, considering that the 360 sq km territory was entirely cut off from the world, with no allies to break the siege and no natural terrain for cover.
Hezbollah fought in the north, but little of this was any succour to Palestinians in Gaza on the ground, subjected to nightly bombing raids and drone attacks shredding their tents.
Neither enforced starvation, nor hypothermia, nor disease, nor brutalisation and mass rape at the hands of their invaders, could break their will to stay on their land.
Never before have Palestinian fighters and civilians shown this level of resistance in the history of the conflict — and it could prove to be transformative.
Because what Israel has lost in its campaign to crush Gaza is incalculable. It has squandered decades of sustained economic, military and diplomatic efforts to establish the country as a liberal democratic Western nation in the eyes of global opinion.
Generational memory Israel has not only lost the Global South, in which it invested such efforts in Africa and South America. It has also lost the support of a generation in the West, whose memories do not go back as far as Biden’s.
The point is not mine. It is well made by Jack Lew, the man Biden nominated as his ambassador to Israel a month before the Hamas attack.
In his departing interview, Lew, an Orthodox Jew, told the Times of Israel that public opinion in the US was still largely pro-Israel, but that was changing.
With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict
“What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state, or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even.
“It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”
Biden, Lew said, was the last president of his generation whose memories and knowledge go back to Israel’s “founding story”.
Lew’s parting shot at Netanyahu is amply documented in recent polls. More than one-third of American Jewish teenagers sympathise with Hamas, 42 percent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent sympathise with the Palestinian people as a whole.
This is not a new phenomenon. Polling two years before the war showed that a quarter of American Jews agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”, and a plurality of respondents did not find that statement to be antisemitic.
“The antiwar protests, condemned by Western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.” Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
Deep damage The war in Gaza has become the prism through which a new generation of future world leaders sees the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a major strategic loss for a country that on 6 October 2023 thought that it had closed down the issue of Palestine, and that world opinion was in its pocket.
But the damage goes further and deeper than this.
The antiwar protests, condemned by Western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.
Israel is in the dock of international justice as never before. Not only are there arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant on war crimes, and a continuing genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but a myriad of other cases are about to flood the courts in every major western democracy.
A court action has been launched in the UK against BP for supplying crude oil to Israel, which is then allegedly used by the Israeli army, from its pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkiye.
In addition, the Israeli army recently decided to conceal the identities of all troops who have participated in the campaign in Gaza, for fear that they could be pursued when travelling abroad.
This major move was sparked by a tiny activist group named after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in January 2024. The Belgium-based group has filed evidence of war crimes with the UCJ against 1000 Israelis, including video, audio, forensic reports and other documents.
A ceasefire in Gaza is thus not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. These legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.
Internal divisions At home, Netanyahu will return from war to a country more divided internally than ever before. There is a battle between the army and the Haredim who refuse to serve.
There is a battle between secular and national religious Zionists. With Netanyahu’s retreat on Gaza, the settler far right are sensing that the opportunity to establish Greater Israel has been snatched from the jaws of military victory.
All the while, there has been an unprecedented exodus of Jews from Israel.
Regionally, Israel is left with troops still in Lebanon and Syria. It would be foolish to think of these ongoing operations as restoring the deterrence Israel lost when Hamas struck on 7 October 2023.
Iran’s axis of resistance might have received some sustained blows after the leadership of Hezbollah was wiped out, and after finding itself vastly overextended in Syria. But like Hamas, Hezbollah has not been knocked out as a fighting force.
And the Sunni Arab world has been riled by the Gaza genoicide and the ongoing crackdown in the occupied West Bank as rarely before.
Israel’s undisguised bid to divide Syria into cantons is as provocative to Syrians of all denominations and ethnicities, as its plans to annex Areas B and C of the West Bank are an existential threat to Jordan.
Annexation would be treated in Amman as an act of war.
Deconfliction will be the patient work of decades of reconstruction, and Trump is not a patient man.
Hamas and Gaza will now take a backseat. With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict.
Gaza has shown all Palestinians — and the world — that it can withstand total war, and not budge from the ground upon which it stands. It tells the world, with justifiable pride, that the occupiers threw everything they had at it, and there was not another Nakba.
Gaza tells Israel that Palestinians exist, and that they will not be pacified until and unless Israelis talk to them on equal terms about equal rights.
It may take many more years for that realisation to sink in, but for some it already has: “Even if we conquer the entire Middle East, and even if everyone surrenders to us, we won’t win this war,” columnist Yair Assulin wrote in Haaretz.
But what everyone in Gaza who stayed put has achieved is of historic significance.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. This article has been republished from the Middle East Eye under Creative Commons.
Māori politicians across the political spectrum in Aotearoa New Zealand have called for immediate aid to enter Gaza following a temporary ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.
The ceasefire, agreed yesterday, comes into effect on Sunday, January 19.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand welcomed the deal and called for humanitarian aid for the strip.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer … “This ceasefire must be accompanied by a global effort to rebuild Gaza.” Image: Te Pāti Māori
“There now needs to be a massive, rapid, unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.“
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer echoed similar sentiments on behalf of her party, saying, “the destruction of vital infrastructure — homes, schools, hospitals — has decimated communities”.
“This ceasefire must be accompanied by a global effort to rebuild Gaza,” she said.
Teanau Tuiono, Green Party spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, specifically called on Aotearoa to increase its aid to Palestine.
‘Brutal, illegal Israeli occupation’
“[We must] support the reconstruction of Gaza as determined by Palestinians. We owe it to Palestinians who for many years have lived under brutal and illegal occupation by Israeli forces, and are now entrenched in a humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions,” he said.
“The genocide in Gaza, and the complicity of many governments in Israel’s campaign of merciless violence against the Palestinian people on their own land, has exposed serious flaws in the international community’s ability to uphold international law.
“This means our country and others have work to do to rebuild trust in the international system that is meant to uphold human rights and prioritise peace,” said the Green MP.
With tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the 15 month war, negotiators reached a ceasefire deal yesterday in Gaza for six-weeks, after Hamas agreed to release hostages from the 7 October 2023 attacks in exchange for Palestinian prisoners — many held without charge — held in Israel.
“The terms of the deal must now be implemented fully. Protection of civilians and the release of hostages must be at the forefront of effort.
“To achieve a durable and lasting peace, we call on the parties to take meaningful steps towards a two-state solution. Political will is the key to ensuring history does not repeat itself,” Peters said in a statement.
Tuiono called it a victory for Palestinians and those within the solidarity movement.
“However, it must be followed by efforts to establish justice and self-determination for Palestinians, and bring an end to Israeli apartheid and the illegal occupation of Palestine.
“We must divest public funds from illegal settlements, recognise the State of Palestine, and join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, just as we joined Ukraine’s case against Russia.”
Ngawera-Packer added that the ceasefire deal did not equal a free Palestine anytime soon.
“We must not forget the larger reality of the ongoing conflict, which is rooted in decades of displacement, violence, and oppression.
“Although the annihilation may be over for now, the apartheid continues. We will continue to call out our government who have done nothing to end the violence, and to end the apartheid.
“We must also be vigilant over these next three days to ensure that Israel will not exploit this window to create more carnage,” Ngarewa-Packer said.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Egyptian, Palestinian and Israeli authorities to allow foreign journalists into Gaza in the wake of the three-phase ceasefire agreement set to to begin on Sunday.
The New York-based global media watchdog urged the international community “to independently investigate the deliberate targeting of journalists that has been widely documented” since the 15-month genocidal war began in October 2023.
“Journalists have been paying the highest price — with their lives — to provide the world some insight into the horrors that have been taking place in Gaza during this prolonged war, which has decimated a generation of Palestinian reporters and newsrooms,” the group’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement.
According to a CPJ tally, at least 165 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began. However, according to the Gaza Media Office, the death toll is much higher — 210.
CPJ welcomes the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in #Gaza and calls on authorities to grant unconditional access to journalists and independent human rights experts to investigate crimes committed against the media during the 15-month long war.https://t.co/9zloRVYhSf
Israel and the Palestinian resistance group Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire deal with Israel after more than 460 days of a war that has devastated Gaza, Qatar and the United States announced.
After the ceasefire comes into effect on Sunday, Palestinians in Gaza will be left with tens of thousands of people dead and missing and many more with no homes to return to.
The war has killed at least 46,707 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. Among the “horrifying numbers” released by the Gaza Government Media Office last week:
1600 families wiped off of the civil registry
17,841 children killed
44 people killed by malnutrition
Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said that the ceasefire deal would come into effect on Sunday, but added that work on implementation steps with Israel and Hamas was continuing.
How the Gaza ceasefire deal was reported by the Middle East-based Al Jazeera news channel on its website. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Israel said that some final details remained, and an Israeli government vote is expected today.
Gazans celebrate but braced for attacks
However, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza that while Gazans celebrated the ceasefire news, they were braced for more Israeli attacks until the Sunday deadline.
“This courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which has seen many funerals and bodies laid on the ground, turned into a stage of celebration and happiness and excitement,” he said.
“But it’s relatively quiet in the courtyard of the hospital now.
“At this time, people are back to their tents, where they are sheltering because the ceasefire agreement does not take effect until Sunday.”
That left time for the Israeli military to continue with the attacks, Mahmoud said.
“As people were celebrating here from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, we could clearly hear the sound of heavy artillery and bombardment on the Bureij refugee camp and Nuseirat.
“So these coming days until Sunday are very critical times, and people here expect a surge in Israeli attacks.”
Gaza ceasefire a ‘start’
Sheikh Mohammed said the Gaza deal came after extensive diplomatic efforts, but the ceasefire was a “start”, and now mediators and the international community should work to achieve lasting peace.
“I want to tell our brothers in the Gaza Strip that the State of Qatar will always continue to support our Palestinian brothers,” the Qatari prime minister said.
Welcoming the ceasefire deal, a Hamas official said Palestinians would not forget the Israeli atrocities.
The resistance movement’s Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya said Palestinians would remember who carried out mass killings against them, who justified the atrocities in the media and who provided the bombs that were dropped on their homes.
“The barbaric war of extermination . . . that the Israeli occupation and its backers have carried out over 467 days will forever be engraved in the memory of our people and the world as the worst genocide in modern history,” al-Hayya said.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was “imperative” that the ceasefire removed obstacles to aid deliveries as he welcomed the deal that includes a prisoner and captive exchange.
“It is imperative that this ceasefire removes the significant security and political obstacles to delivering aid across Gaza so that we can support a major increase in urgent life-saving humanitarian support,” Guterres said.
‘In Gaza, only UNRWA has the infrastructure to distribute aid to scale, such as vehicles, warehouses, distribution centres and staff. However, Israeli authorities are making this extremely difficult,’ writes Chris Gunness.
In the last week of January, two Knesset bills ending Israel’s “cooperation” with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) are scheduled to come into force.
If they do, UNRWA’s activities in the territory of the state of Israel would be illegal under Israeli law and any Israeli official or institution engaging with the agency would be breaking the law.
In a letter to the president of the General Assembly in October, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, revealed he had written to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging his government to take the necessary steps to avoid the legislation being implemented.
He also expressed concern that these laws would harm UNRWA’s ability to deliver life-saving services in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
This provoked a detailed response from Israel’s UN Ambassador in New York, Danny Dannon, who responded laying out Israel’s strategic planning pursuant to the Knesset bills.
UNRWA to be expelled from Jerusalem Much about Israel’s strategy was already known, for example its plan to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza and deliver services through a combination of other UN agencies, such as the World Food Programme (WFP) along with the Israeli military and private sector companies.
Dannon made clear that the occupying authorities plan to take over UNRWA facilities in Jerusalem.
According to UNRWA’s website, these include 10 schools, three primary health clinics and a training centre. Students would likely be sent to Israeli schools for the Palestinian population of occupied East Jerusalem, whose curricula have been subject to “Judaisistation” in contravention of Israel’s international humanitarian law obligations to the occupied population.
There is also a major question mark over UNRWA’s massive headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah.
The UNRWA compound, which contains several huge warehouses for humanitarian goods, has been subjected to arson attacks in recent months, which forced it to shut down.
Nonetheless, it seems UNRWA’s Jerusalem HQ may be shut down in the face of Israeli threats, violence and pressure. Staff are being told to relocate to offices in Amman as a result of a performance review and UNRWA says its Jerusalem HQ was only ever temporary.
But a recent communication from UNRWA to its donors makes clear that the agency is ceding to Israeli intimidation: “While the review of HQ functions has been underway for a number of years, the review and decision has been fast-tracked as a result of the administrative and operational challenges experienced by the agency throughout 2024, including visa issuance, visa duration and lack of issuing diplomatic ID cards.
“These challenges have inhibited our effectiveness to work as a Headquarters in Jerusalem.”
De facto annexation If UNRWA is expelled from East Jerusalem, this would have potentially devastating impact on over 63,000 Palestinian refugees who depend on its services.
Moreover, it would have profound political significance, particularly for the global Islamic community because it would set the seal on Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem, home to Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.
It would also be a violation of the ruling last July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanding that the occupation ends.
The annexation of Jerusalem as the “eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state” which began with the occupation in 1967, would become another illegal fact on the ground.
Crucially, Jerusalem will have been unilaterally removed from whatever is left of the Middle East Peace Process.
Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia and Jordan, must therefore act now, and decisively, to save their holy city. The loss of Jerusalem will undoubtedly provoke a violent reaction among Palestinians and likely lead to calls for jihad more widely. In the context of an explosive Middle East this can only engender further destabilising tensions for governments in the region.
I therefore call on Saudi Arabia to make the scrapping of the Knesset legislation a precondition in the normalisation negotiations with Israel. The Saudi administration must make this clear to Netanyahu and insist that for Muslims, Jerusalem is sacrosanct, and that the expulsion of UNRWA is a step too far.
The Trump transition team has already been warned of the looming catastrophe if Israel is allowed to destroy UNRWA’s operations, and I urge Arab leaders to insist with their Saudi interlocutors that the regional fallout from this feature prominently in the normalisation talks.
Lack of contingency planning Meanwhile, the senior UN leadership has adopted the position that the responsibility to deliver aid is Israel’s as the occupying power. To the consternation of UNRWA staffers, substantive inter-agency discussions across the humanitarian system about a UN-led day-after plan have effectively been banned.
For Palestinians against whom a genocide is being committed, this feels like abandonment and betrayal — a sense compounded by suspicions that UNRWA international staff may be forced to leave Gaza at a time of mass starvation.
Similar conclusions were reached by Dr Lex Takkenberg, senior advisor with Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), and other researchers who have just completed an as yet unpublished assessment of the implications of Israel’s ban on UNRWA, based on interviews with a large number of UNRWA staff and other experts.
Their study confirms that with the lack of contingency planning, the suffering of the Palestinian population, particularly in Gaza, will increase dramatically, as the backbone of the humanitarian operation crumbles without an alternative structure in place.
Contrary to UNRWA, Israel has been doing a great deal of contingency planning with non-UNRWA agencies such as WFP, which are under strong US pressure to take over aid imports from UNRWA. As a result, the amount of aid taken into Gaza by UNRWA has reduced significantly.
In Gaza, only UNRWA has the infrastructure to distribute aid to scale, such as vehicles, warehouses, distribution centres and staff.
However, Israeli authorities are making this extremely difficult. They claim to be “deconflicting” aid deliveries, but according to UN sources there is clear evidence that Israeli soldiers are firing on vehicles and allowing criminal gangs to plunder convoys with impunity.
Thus Israeli officials are able to say to journalists whom they have barred from seeing the truth in Gaza, that they are allowing in all the aid Gaza needs, but that UNRWA is unfit for purpose. This lie has gone unchallenged in the international media.
Further implications According to Takkenberg, “Mr Guterres’s strategy of calling on Israel as the occupying power to deliver aid has backfired and is inflicting untold suffering on the Palestinians.
“The strategy also feels misplaced, given that Israel is accused of genocide in the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, and is facing expulsion from the UN General Assembly”.
He adds that Israel “has exploited the UN’s strategy as part of its campaign of starvation and genocide.”
In the face of this, I call on the Secretary-General to mobilise the UN system. He has said repeatedly that UNRWA is the backbone of the UN’s humanitarian strategy, that the agency is indispensable and key to regional stability.
It is time for the UNSG to walk the walk.
He must use his powers under Article 99 of the UN charter, granted precisely for these circumstances, to call the Security Council into emergency session and make his demand that the Knesset legislation must not be implemented the top agenda item. The General Assembly which gives UNRWA its mandate must also be called into session.
Though Guterres faces huge pressure from Israel’s powerful allies, he must stand up on behalf of a people the UN is mandated to protect and double down on those who are complicit in genocide.
The UN’s policy in Gaza along with acceptance of Jerusalem’s annexation with impunity for Israel, has major implications for its credibility and I confidently predict it will lead to further attacks by Israel on other UN agencies, such as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which has long been an irritant to the Tel Aviv administration.
The de facto annexation of Jerusalem will also see an erosion of the international rule of law.
In its advisory opinion in July last year, the ICJ concluded that Israel is not entitled to exercise sovereign powers in any part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory on account of its occupation. In addition, the expulsion of UNRWA would be in violation of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which obliges Israel as a signatory, to cooperate with UN Agencies such as UNRWA.
The UN’s historic responsibility to the Palestinians Already, through its attack on UNRWA Israel is attempting unilaterally to remove the Palestinian refugees, their history, their identity and their inalienable right of return from the peace process.
As I have argued many times, this will fail. So must Israel’s unilateral attempt to take Jerusalem off the negotiating table by expelling UNRWA and completing its illegal annexation of the city.
That would see the international community and the UN abandoning its historic responsibilities to the Palestinian people and can only lead to further suffering and instability in a chronically unstable Middle East. The Muslim world must act decisively and swiftly. The clock is ticking.
Chris Gunness served as UNRWA’s Director of Communications and Advocacy from 2007 until 2020. This article was first published in The New Arab.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to Gaza, where Israel’s assault on the besieged strip continues despite ongoing talks over a possible ceasefire. Palestinian authorities say 5000 people are missing or have been killed in this first 100 days of Israel’s siege of north Gaza.
Since Monday morning, 33 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera Arabic reports, including five people who died in an Israeli attack on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City.
On Friday, Saed Abu Nabhan, a Palestinian journalist for the Cairo-based Al-Ghad TV, was killed by Israeli forces while reporting in the Nuseirat refugee camp, his funeral was held on Saturday. This is his colleague Mohammed Abu Namous:
MOHAMMED ABU NAMOUS: [translated] It is clear that the Israeli occupation wants to target the journalist body that exposes its crimes, while the occupation had utiliSed its media to say that they only target the resistance and their weapons, until the Palestinian journalists have exposed the truth to the world, saying that this occupation targets children, women and unarmed civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports more than 200 journalists have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023. More than 400 others have been wounded or arrested.
On Thursday, Palestinian journalists held a news conference outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where they decried the hypocrisy and neglect of international media organisations. This is reporter Abubaker Abed:
ABUBAKER ABED: We are just documenting a genocide against us. It’s enough, after almost a year and a half. We want you to stand foot by foot with us, because we are like any other journalists, reporters and media workers all across the globe, no matter the origin, the color or the race.
Journalism is not a crime. We are not a target.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, journalist Abubaker Abed joins us now from Gaza. He used to be a football — a soccer — commentator, but now he calls himself an “accidental” war correspondent. His new piece for Drop Site News is headlined “What It’s Truly Like to Sleep in a Damp, Frigid Tent: A Report From Gaza.”
He’s joining us from Deir al-Balah, where that news conference was held.
Abubaker Abed, thank you for joining us again. You’re 22 years old. You didn’t expect to be a war correspondent, but that’s what you are now. Talk more about what you were demanding on Thursday, surrounded by other Palestinian journalists, demanding of the Western media, of all international journalists.
‘Journalism is not a crime.’ Video: Democracy Now!
ABUBAKER ABED: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
So, what I demanded was very simple: just the basic human rights as any other people across the globe, particularly for journalists here, who have been subjected to sheer violence, brutality and barbarism over the past almost year and a half — particularly if we talk about, if we have a bit of a comparison between us and any other journalist across the globe.
As I said in this press briefing, that we are working in makeshift tented camps and workplaces. I personally talk about myself here.
I just spent long hours just trying to finalise a story, or finalise a report, just to tell people the truth, and sometimes we don’t have the internet connection.
We have been through starvation. We have been through freezing temperatures. We have been taking shelter in dilapidated tents. We haven’t been given any sort of a human right at all.
So, this is what I really demanded, because what I’ve been seeing for the past 14 months from international media outlets is absolutely enraging.
Like, I do have the same rights. What if we were in another spot in the world? The world would absolutely be standing with us and giving us everything we wanted.
But why, when it comes to Palestinians, it’s a completely different story? We understand, and we’ve been taught as a young man, I’ve been always taught, that the world cares about the human rights of every single person in the world.
But I haven’t seen any of those human rights as a Palestinian. What have I got to do with this war so I was subjected to this scale of barbarism and this starvation and this cold and just all of these diseases?
Right now while I’m talking you, Amy, I’ve been diagnosed with bronchitis. I’m still recovering from it. There are no proper medications inside any of the pharmacies here in Deir al-Balah, where more than a million people are taking shelter.
Even if we’re talking about it in detail, the lack of medical supplies and aid inside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital here, which serves more than 1.5 million people in central Gaza, — apart from the everyday casualties — is literally insane.
When we talk about that, when we talk about the Palestinian journalists, we’ve lost around 210. And even after the press briefing, another journalist was killed.
So, you talk to an absolutely dead conscience of the world. You’re talking about — like … the world just keeps turning a blind eye and deaf ear to what is happening, as if we are talking to ourselves.
It’s completely enraging and unacceptable, because, again, we are like any other reporters, media workers and journalists across the globe, and we have the right to be given access to all media equipment, access to the world, and our voices must be amplified, because, again, we are not any party to this war.
And we must be protected by all international laws, because that’s what has been enshrined in international laws and human rights that have always been taught to the entire world.
AMY GOODMAN: We should make clear that all media has access to journalists on the ground in Gaza.
Our Democracy Now! viewers and listeners know we go regularly to Gaza, almost unheard of in the rest of the American corporate media. Yes, they are banned. And that should be raised every time they report on Israel and Gaza, that they are not allowed there.
Abubaker Abed, what would it mean if there was more attention brought to the journalists on the ground in Gaza? According to a number of reports, well over 150 — nearly 250 — journalists have been killed, most recently this weekend in Nuseirat, is that right, Abubaker?
ABUBAKER ABED: Yes. I mean, like, the reports are always horrific. Even when we go to a particular place to report on a specific event in the continuously deteriorating humanitarian situation, we know that this might be the end.
We know that even everything we’re doing right now to report on or anything we’re trying to tell, any story that we are trying to relate to the outside world, is going to cost our lives.
But we want to tell the world. We want to live in dignity. We want to live in peace, in calm, because that’s what we really deserve, as any other people across the globe. You said it in the beginning, that I shouldn’t have been an accidental war correspondent, but that’s what I’ve evolved into, because this is my homeland, and this is something that I have to defend wholeheartedly.
But, yes, even when I’m trying to do this, I’m not given the basic things. I’m not given the basic human rights.
So, every journalist here, that is working tirelessly, that has been working relentlessly since the outbreak of this genocidal assault on Gaza, has faced unimaginable horrors. We have — I, myself, lost my very dearest friend, lost family members and lost many of my friends and many of my loved ones.
But I still continue to hope. I still continue to endure the harsh, stark realities of living inside Gaza, because Gaza is now a hellscape. Absolutely, it’s the apocalyptic hellscape of the world. It’s not livable at all.
Children particularly, because I’ve been talking to many children and reporting on them, we can see the children are painful, are barefoot. They are traumatised. Their clothes are ripped apart.
And they are desperately needing just a sip of water and a bite of food, but that is not available because Israel continues, continues applying the collective punishment on all people of the Gaza Strip.
And again, I just want to reaffirm that half of the Gaza population is children. So, what have these children got to do with such a genocidal assault on Gaza?
They should have the right to educate because they have been deprived of their education for the past year and a half almost. They have been deprived of every basic right, even their their necessities and their childhood and everything about them.
The same for us as young men. I should have completed my studies. Unfortunately, my university has been reduced to rubble. Everything about Gaza, everything about my dreams, my memories has also been razed to the ground and has also been reduced to ashes.
Amid the growing news of a possible ceasefire on the line, on the horizon, I can tell you that from here, that we are very hopeful. There is a state of optimism in the anticipation for a ceasefire, because people, including me, want to heal, want to lick our wounds or stitch our wounds — heal up.
And we want to really have one moment, only one moment, of not hearing the buzzing sounds of the drones and the hovering of warplanes, particularly during the night hours, because the tones are every single day, we are very much traumatised.
We really need rehabilitation, to really get to our lives, to get to who we were before this war started.
So, it’s a very much-needed thing, because people are really crying for it. People are really hopeful about it.
And I hope that this will not dash their hopes, the continuous attacks on Gaza. And I hope that they will have their dreams coming true very, very soon, in the coming days.
AMY GOODMAN: Abubaker Abed, we want to thank you so much for being with us, a 22-year-old journalist, speaking to us from Deir al-Balah, Gaza. He used to be a soccer commentator, now as he calls himself, an “accidental” war correspondent.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s coalition government has introduced a bill to criminalise “improper conduct for or on behalf of a foreign power” or foreign interference that echoes earlier Cold War times, and could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”.
It is a threat to our democracy and here is why.
Two new offences are:
Offence 78AAA — a person thus charged must include all three of the following key elements — they:
know, or ought to know, they are acting for a foreign state, and
act in a covert, deceptive, coercive, or corruptive manner, and
intend to, or are aware that they are likely to, harm New Zealand interests specified in the offence through their actions OR are reckless as to whether their conduct harms New Zealand’s interests.
Offence 78AAB – a person thus charged must commit:
any imprisonable offence intending to OR being reckless as to whether doing so is likely to provide a relevant benefit to a foreign power.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
The bill also extends laws on publication of classified information, changes “official” information to “relevant” information, increases powers of unwarranted searches by authorities, and allows charging of people outside of New Zealand who “owe allegiance to the Sovereign in right of New Zealand” and aid and abet a non-New Zealander to carry out a “relevant act” of espionage, treason and inciting to mutiny even if the act is not in fact carried out.
Why this legislation is dangerous 1. Much of the language is vague and the terms subjective. How should we establish what an individual ‘ought to have known’ or whether he or she is being “reckless”? It is entirely possible to be a loyal New Zealand and hold a different view to that of the government of the day about “New Zealand’s interests” and “security”.
This proposed legislation is potentially highly undemocratic and a threat to free speech and freedom of association. Ironically the legislation is a close copy of similar legislation passed in Australia in 2018 and it reflects the messaging about “foreign interference” promoted by our Five Eyes partners.
How should we distinguish “foreign interference” from the multitude of ways in which other states seek to influence our trade, aid, foreign affairs and defence policies? It is not plausible that the motivation behind this legislation is to limit Western pressure on New Zealand to water down its nuclear free policy.
Or to ensure that its defence forces are interoperable with those of its allies and to be part of military exercises in the South China Sea. Or to host spyware tools on behalf of the United States. Or to sign trade agreements that favour US based corporates.
The government openly supports these activities, so it seems that the legislation is aimed at foreign interference from current geostrategic “enemies”. Which ones? China, Russia, Iran?
The introduction of a bill to criminalise foreign interference has echoes of earlier Cold War times as it has the potential to criminalise members of friendship organisations that seek to improve understanding and cooperation with people in countries such as China, Russia or North Korea.
It is entirely possible that their efforts could be seen as engaging in conduct “for or on behalf of” a foreign power.
There is also real concern is that this legislation could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”. There is a global movement of resistance to economic sanctions on Cuba and other countries including Venezuela, and North Korea.
Supporters are likely to liaise with representatives of those countries, and perhaps circulate their material. Could that be considered harming New Zealand’s interests? The inclusion of such vague wording (Clause 78AAB) as “enhancing the influence” of a foreign power is chilling in its potential to silence open debate, and especially dissent or protest.
The legislation is unnecessary Existing law already criminalises espionage which intentionally prejudices the security or defence of New Zealand. There are also laws to cover pressurising others by blackmail, corruption, and threats of violence or threats of harm to people and property.
It is true that diaspora critics of authoritarian regimes come under pressure from their home governments. Such governments seek to silence their critics who are outside their jurisdiction by threatening harm to their families still living in the home country.
But it is not clear how New Zealand law could prevent this as it cannot protect people who are not within its jurisdiction. This is something which diaspora citizens and overseas students studying here must be acutely conscious of. This issue is one for diplomacy and negotiation rather than law.
A threat to democracy The terms sedition and subversion have gone into disuse and are no longer part of our law.
They were used in the past to criminalise some and ensure that others were subject to intrusive surveillance.
In essence both terms justified State actions against dissidents or those who held an alternative vision of how society should be ordered. In Cold War times the State was particularly exercised with those who championed communist ideas, took an interest in the Soviet Union or China or associated with Communists.
Those who associated with Soviet diplomats or attended functions at the Soviet Embassy would often be subject to SIS surveillance.
While mediator Qatar says a Gaza ceasefire deal is at the closest point it has been in the past few months — adding that many of the obstacles in the negotiations have been ironed out — a special report for Drop Site News reveals the escalation in attacks on Palestinians in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Mariam Barghouti in Jenin for Drop Site News
On December 28, 21-year-old Palestinian journalist Shatha Sabbagh was standing on the stairs of her home on the outskirts of the Jenin refugee camp when she was shot and killed.
The bullets weren’t fired by Israeli troops but, according to eyewitnesses and forensic evidence, by Palestinian Authority security forces.
The Palestinian Authority has been conducting a large-scale military operation in Jenin since early December, dubbing it “Operation Homeland Protection”.
A stronghold of Palestinian armed resistance in the occupied West Bank, the city of Jenin and the refugee camp within it have been repeatedly raided, bombed, and besieged by the Israeli military in an attempt to crush the Jenin Brigade — a politically diverse militant group of mostly third-generation refugees who believe armed resistance is key to liberating Palestinian lands from Israeli occupation and annexation.
Over the past 15 months, the Israeli military has killed at least 225 Palestinians in Jenin, making it the deadliest area in the West Bank.
The real aim, residents say, is to crush Palestinian armed resistance at the behest of Israel. Dubbed the “Wasps’ Nest” by Israeli officials, Jenin refugee camp has posed a constant threat to Israel’s settler colonial project.
But the current operation, which is being billed as a campaign to “restore law and order,” is the longest and most lethal assault by Palestinian security forces in recent memory. While the PA claims to be rooting out armed factions and individuals accused of being “Iranian-backed outlaws,” according to multiple residents and eyewitnesses, the operation is a suffocating siege, with indiscriminate violence, mass arrests, and collective punishment.
Sixteen Palestinians have been killed so far, with security forces setting up checkpoints around the city and refugee camp, cutting electricity to the area, and engaging in fierce gun battles. Among those killed are six members of the security forces and one resistance fighter, Yazeed Ja’aysa.
Yet the overwhelming majority of those killed have been civilians, including Sabbagh, and at least three children — Majd Zeidan, 16, Qasm Hajj, 14, and Mohammad Al-Amer, 13.
“It’s reached levels I have never seen before. Even journalists aren’t allowed to cover it,” M., 24, a local journalist and resident of Jenin, told Drop Site News on condition of anonymity for fear of being arrested or targeted by PA security forces.
Dozens of residents, including journalists, have been arrested from Jenin and across the West Bank by the PA in the past six weeks under the pretext of supporting the so-called Iranian-backed “outlaws.”
PA security forces spokesperson Brigadier-General Anwar Rajab has justified the assault as “in response to the supreme national interest of the Palestinian people, and within the framework of ongoing continued efforts to maintain security and civil peace, establish the rule of law, and eradicate sedition and chaos”.
‘Wasps’ Nest’ threat to Israel’s settler colonial project
But the real aim, residents say, is to crush Palestinian armed resistance at the behest of Israel. Dubbed the “Wasps’ Nest” by Israeli officials, Jenin refugee camp has posed a constant threat to Israel’s settler colonial project.
Just one week into the operation, on December 12, PA security forces shot and killed the first civilian, 19-year-old Ribhi Shalabi, and injured his 15-year-old brother in the head. Although the PA initially denied killing Shalabi and claimed he was targeting its security forces with IEDs, video captured by CCTV shows Ribhi being shot execution-style while riding his Vespa.
The PA later admitted to killing Shalabi, saying “the Palestinian National Authority bears full responsibility for his martyrdom, and announces that it is committed to dealing with the repercussions of the incident in a manner consistent with and in accordance with the law, ensuring justice and respect for rights”.
Just two days later, the PA began escalating their attack on Jenin. At approximately 5:00 am on December 14, the Palestinian Authority officially declared the large-scale operation, dubbing it “Himayat Watan” or “Homeland Protection.”
By 8:00 am, Jenin refugee camp was under siege and two more Palestinians had been killed, including prominent Palestinian resistance fighter Yazeed Ja’aisa, and 13-year-old Mohammad Al-Amer. At least two other children were injured with live ammunition.
The roads leading to Jenin are now riddled with Israeli checkpoints while the entrance to the city is surrounded by PA armoured vehicles and security forces brandishing assault rifles, their faces hidden behind black balaclavas.
Eerily reminiscent of past Israeli incursions, snipers fire continuously from within the PA security headquarters toward the refugee camp just to the west, sending the sound of live ammunition echoing through the city. The PA also imposed a curfew on the city of Jenin, warning residents that anyone moving in the streets would be shot.
PA counterterrorism units have also been stationed at the entrance to Jenin’s public hospital, while the National Guard blocked roads with armoured vehicles and personnel carriers, denying entry to journalists.
When I attempted to reach the hospital on December 14 with another journalist to gather information for Drop Site on the injuries sustained during the earlier firefight and follow up on the killing of Al-Amer, the 13-year-old, armed and masked PA security forces claimed the area was a closed security zone. When we attempted to carry out field interviews outside the camp instead, two armed men in civilian clothing who identified themselves as members of the mukhabarat — Palestinian General Intelligence — requested that we leave the area.
“If you stay here, you might get shot by the outlaws,” he warned. Yet, from where we stood between the hospital, the PA security headquarters, and Jenin refugee camp, the only bullets being fired were coming from the direction of the PA headquarters towards the camp.
PA security forces also appear to have been using one of the hospital wards as a makeshift detention center where detainees are being mistreated. While Brigadier-General Rajab, the PA’s spokesperson, denied this; several young men detained by the PA told Drop Site they were taken to the third floor of Jenin public hospital where they were interrogated and beaten.
“They kept asking me about the fighters,” said A., a 31-year-old medical service provider from Jenin refugee camp, who says he was held for hours, blindfolded, and denied legal representation.
“They kept beating me, cursing at me, asking me questions that I don’t have answers for.”
Fear of being arrested, abused again
Since his arbitrary detention, A. has not returned to work out of fear of being arrested and abused again.
According to residents, the PA also stationed snipers in the hospital, firing at the camp from inside the facility. During the past six weeks, according to interviews with several medics in Jenin, PA security forces shot at medics, burned two medical vehicles, beat paramedics, and detained medical workers throughout the siege.
“What exactly are they protecting?” Abu Yasir, 50, asks as he stands outside the hospital, waiting for any news of the security operation to end.
A father of three, Abu Yasir grew up in the Jenin refugee camp. “There are people being killed in the camp just for being there. They didn’t do anything,” he told Drop Site as he burst into tears.
By December 14, with Operation Homeland Protection entering its 10th day, families in the refugee camp had run out of food, the chronically ill needed life-saving medication, and with electricity and water punitively cut from the camp, families found themselves under siege and increasingly desperate.
Women and their children tried to protest in an attempt to break the PA-imposed blockade. They also wanted to challenge the PA’s claim of targeting outlaws. As the women gathered in the dark towards the edge of the camp, several men worked to fix an electricity box to restore power to the camp.
When the lights came on, cheers echoed in the camp — but barely 15 minutes later, PA forces shot at the box, plunging the area into darkness again.
Denying electricity for families
According to residents of the camp, over the course of 10 days, the PA shot at the electric power boxes more than a dozen times, denying families electricity just as temperatures began to plummet.
Elderly women confronted soldiers of the Special Administrative Tasks squad (SAT), a specialised branch of the PA security forces, SAT is trained by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) and is responsible for coordinating operations with the United States and Israel, including joint-operations and intelligence sharing.
“I yelled at them,” said Umm Salamah, 62. “They burst through the door, and at first, I thought they were Israelis’” she told Drop Site, pointing to the destroyed door. “I told them I have children in the house. But they forced their way in.
“I told them we already have the Israeli army constantly raiding us, and now you?”
Not only were homes raided, according to Umm Salameh, but PA security forces also fired at water tanks, effectively cutting water supplies to the camp. Jenin refugee camp had already been severely damaged in the last Israeli invasion, during which Israeli military and border-police bulldozed the city’s civilian infrastructure, turning streets into hills of rubble.
Operation Homeland Protection comes just three months following “Operation Summer Camps,” Israel’s large-scale military operation between August and October.
Under the pretext of targeting “Iran-backed terrorists,” Israeli forces destroyed large swathes of civilian infrastructure in the northern districts of the West Bank, namely Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus and Tubas, and killed more than 150 Palestinians over three months, a fifth of whom were children.
Protest over ‘outlaws’ framing
Outside in the mud-filled streets, the group of women began to chant “Kateebeh!” (Brigade) in support of the Jenin Brigade, and in protest of the PA’s attempt to frame them as “outlaws” and a “threat to national security.”
Within minutes, the SAT unit responded with teargas and stun grenades fired directly at the crowd, which included journalists clearly marked with fluorescent PRESS insignia. While elderly women tripped and fell to the ground, children ran back towards the camp as PA security forces kept lobbing stun grenades at the fleeing crowd.
In an interview with Drop Site that evening, Brigadier-General Rajab affirmed that “this operation comes to achieve its goals which are the reclaiming of safety and security of Palestinians and reclaiming Jenin refugee camp from the outlaws that kidnapped it and spread corruption in it while threatening the lives of civilians.”
Days later, the PA had expanded its operations to Tulkarem, where clashes between resistance fighters and PA security forces erupted on December 19. This came just one day following an Israeli airstrike which killed three Palestinian fighters in Tulkarem refugee camp: Dusam Al-Oufi, Mohammad Al-Oufi, and Mohammad Rahayma.
On December 22, Saher Irheil, a Palestinian officer in the PA’s presidential guard was killed in Jenin, and two others injured.
According to official state media and statements by the PA, Lieutenant Irheil was killed by the “outlaws” of Jenin refugee camp. Brigadier-General Rajab claimed “this heinous crime will only increase [the PA’s] determination to pursue those outside the law and impose the rule of law, in order to preserve the security and safety of our people.”
By military order, speakers from mosques across the West Bank echoed in a public tribute to the fallen officer. The same was not done for those killed by the PA, including Shalabi, the 19-year-old whom the PA dubbed “a martyr of the nation” after being forced to admit they killed him.
That week, PA security forces escalated their attack on the Jenin refugee camp, using rocket-propelled grenades and firing indiscriminately at families sheltering in their own homes. PA security officers even posted photos and videos of themselves online, similar to those taken by Israeli soldiers while invading the camp in August and September.
On December 23, security forces shot and killed 16-year-old Majd Zeidan while he was returning to his home from a nearby corner store. The PA claimed Zeidan was an Iranian-backed saboteur.
Killed teenager had bag of chips
“They killed him, then said he was a 26-year-old Iranian-backed outlaw,” Zeidan’s mother, Yusra, told Drop Site. “Look,” she said while pulling her son’s ID card from her pocket. “My son was 16 years old, killed while returning from the store with a bag of chips.”
According to Yusra, not only was her son killed, but her brother who lives in Nablus, was arrested by the PA a few days later for holding a wake for his slain nephew.
“The Preventative Security are detaining my brother because he was mourning a mukhareb,” she said. The term “mukhareb” which roughly translates to “saboteur” is a term derived from the Israeli term “mekhablim” which is commonly used when arresting Palestinians.
The funeral of journalist Shatha Sabbagh who was shot and killed on December 28 in Jenin. The journalist carrying her body the next day on the left (Jarrah Khallaf) was later arrested by the PA. Image: The photographer chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal by the PA/Drop Site News
A few days later, on December 28, Shatha Sabbagh, a young journalist, was shot and killed as she stood on the stairs of her home at the edges of the camp. Official PA statements claim that Sabbagh was killed by resistance fighters, not its security forces.
However, accounts by eyewitnesses and the victim’s family belie those claims.
According to testimonies from her family and residents, Sabbagh was killed while holding her 18-month-old nephew; her sister lives nearby, on Mahyoub Street in the refugee camp — the same area PA snipers were targeting. Initial autopsy findings shared with Drop Site show that the bullet that struck her came from the area in which PA snipers were positioned in the camp.
Known for her reliable reporting during both Israeli and PA raids on Jenin, local residents claim that PA loyalists had been inciting against Sabbagh for some time. Further inflaming tensions, Sabbagh’s killing underscored the risks faced by Palestinian journalists in documenting what the PA would rather conceal.
Soon afterward, Brigadier-General Rajab spoke about the killing of Sabbagh in a live interview with Al Jazeera. He turned off his camera and left the interview, however, as soon as Sabbagh’s mother was brought on air. Sabbagh’s mother, Umm Al-Mutasem, was next to her daughter when she was killed.
On January 5, the Magistrate Court of Ramallah announced a suspension of Al Jazeera’s broadcasting operations in the West Bank, citing a “failure to meet regulations.” This move followed Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera offices during Operation Summer Camps in September of last year.
100 Palestinians arrested in operation
The Preventative Security, an internal intelligence organisation led by the Minister of Interior, and part of the Palestinian Security Services, arrested more than a hundred Palestinians as part of Operation Homeland Protection, including five journalists in Nablus and Jenin. Palestinians were summoned and interrogated, at times tortured, and detained without legal representation.
The PA not only targeted residents of the camp, but also expanded its repressive campaign to target anyone that would sympathise with the camp or is suspected of having any solidarity with the armed resistance.
Amro Shami, 22, who was arrested by the PA from his home in Jenin on December 25 had markings of torture on his body during his court hearing in the Nablus Court the following day. Shami was reported to have bruising on his body and was unable to lift his arms in court.
Despite appeals by his lawyer, the court denied Amro release on bail. Amro’s lawyer was only able to visit 15 days later when he reported additional torture against Amro, including breaking his leg.
An armed resistance fighter of the Jenin Brigade in Jenin refugee camp last month. Image: The photographer chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal by the PA/Drop Site News
At the very end of December, as the operation stretched into its fifth week, journalists were able to enter the camp at their own risk. With water and electricity cut off, families huddled outside, burning wood and paper in old metal barrels to try and keep warm.
The camp reeked with uncollected trash piled in the alleyways due to the PA cutting all social services from the camp.
Inside the camp, armed resistance fighters patrolled the streets. After confirming our IDs as journalists they helped us move safely in the dark.
“In the beginning there were clashes between the Brigade and the PA, but we told them we are willing to collaborate with anything that does not harm the community,” H., a 26-year-old fighter with the brigade, told Drop Site. The young fighter was referring to the PA’s claims that they are targeting “outlaws”, in which the Jenin Brigade agreed to hand over anyone that is indeed breaking the law.
However, the PA seemed more interested in the resistance fighters.
Spokesmen of the Jenin Brigade have made several public statements informing the PA that as long as the operation was not targeting resistance efforts, they would fully comply and coordinate to ensure law and order.
‘We are with the law . . . but which law?’
“We are with the law, we are not outside the law. We are with the enforcement of law, but which law? When an Israeli jeep comes into Jenin to kill me, where are you as law enforcement?”
Abu Issam, a spokesman for the Jenin Brigade told Drop Site: “As I speak right now, the PA armoured vehicles and jeeps are parked over our planted IEDs, and we are not detonating them,” he said.
A former member of the PA presidential guard, Abu Issam is no stranger to the PA’s repressive tactics to quell resistance.
“Our compass is clear, it’s against the occupation,” he said. “Come protect us from the Israeli settlers, and by all means here is my gun as a gift. Get them out of our lands, and execute me.
“We were surprised with the demands of the PA. They offered us three choices: to turn ourselves in along with our weapons, offering us jobs for amnesty; to leave the camp and allow the PA to take over; or to confront them.
“We have no choice but to confront,” he says, holding his M16 to his chest. “We want a dignified life, a free life, not a life of security coordination with our oppressors,” H. said.
By the second week of January, not only did the PA expand its security operations to Tulkarem and Tubas, but intensified its violence against Palestinians in Jenin refugee camp as well.
On January 3, PA snipers shot and killed 43-year-old Mahmoud Al-Jaqlamousi and his 14-year-son, Qasm, as they were gathering water. Two days later, PA security forces began burning homes of residents near the Ghubz quarter of the camp.
“Why burn it? I didn’t build this home in an hour, it was years of work, why burn it?” Issam Abu Ameira asks while standing in front of the charred walls of his home.
The operation, ostensibly intended to restore security and order, has instead brought devastation, raising troubling questions about governance and resistance in the West Bank.
“This is not solely the PA. This is also the United States and Israel’s attempt to crush resistance in the West Bank,” H. said. Like him, other fighters find the timing of the operation to be questionable.
“This is an organisation that negotiated with the occupation for more than 30 years, but can’t sit and talk with the Jenin refugee camp for 30 hours?” Abu Al-Nathmi, a spokesperson for the Jenin Brigade, said as he huddled inside the camp while fighters patrolled around us and live ammunition fired continuously in the area.
‘PA acting like group of gangs’
“The PA is acting like a group of gangs, each trying to prove their power and dominance at the expense of Jenin refugee camp,” Abu Al-Nathmi tells Drop Site. “Right now the PA is trying to prove itself to the United States to take over Gaza, but there was no position taken to defend Gaza.”
While the PA continued its attack on Jenin refugee camp, the Israeli military waged military operations on the neighboring villages of Jenin, as well as Tubas and Tulkarem where 11 Palestinians were killed in the first week of January, three of whom were children.
In the 39 days since the PA launched Operation Homeland Protection, more than 40 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in the West Bank, including six children. Over that same time period, Israeli courts have issued confiscation orders for thousands of hectares of land belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank.
The PA is failing to provide protection to the Palestinian people against continuous settler expansion and amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza, residents of the Jenin refugee camp say.
“The PA is claiming they don’t want what happened to Gaza to happen here, but here we are dying a hundred times,” Abu Amjad, 50, told Drop Site. Huddled near a fire outside the rubble of his home, he cries “we are being humiliated, attacked, beaten, and told there’s nothing we can do about it. In this way, it’s better to die.”
Mariam Barghouti is a writer and a journalist based in the West Bank. She is a member of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network. This article was first published by Drop News.
Indonesia officially joined the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa — consortium last week marking a significant milestone in its foreign relations.
In a statement released a day later on January 7, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that this membership reflected Indonesia’s dedication to strengthening multilateral cooperation and its growing influence in global politics.
The ministry highlighted that joining BRICS aligned with Indonesia’s independent and proactive foreign policy, which seeks to maintain balanced relations with major powers while prioritising national interests.
This pivotal move showcases Jakarta’s efforts to enhance its international presence as an emerging power within a select group of global influencers.
Traditionally, Indonesia has embraced a non-aligned stance while bolstering its military and economic strength through collaborations with both Western and Eastern nations, including the United States, China, and Russia.
By joining BRICS, Indonesia clearly signals a shift from its non-aligned status, aligning itself with a coalition of emerging powers poised to challenge and redefine the existing global geopolitical landscape dominated by a Western neoliberal order led by the United States.
Indonesia joining boosts BRICS membership to 10 countres — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — but there are also partnerships.
Supporters of a multipolar world, championed by China, Russia, and their allies, may view Indonesia’s entry into BRICS as a significant victory.
In contrast, advocates of the US-led unipolar world, often referred to as the “rules-based international order” are likely to see Indonesia’s decision as a regrettable shift that could trigger retaliatory actions from the United States.
The future will determine how Indonesia balances its relations with these two superpowers. However, there is considerable concern about the potential fallout for Indonesia from its long-standing US allies.
The future will determine how Indonesia balances its relations with these two superpowers, China and the US. However, there is considerable concern about the potential fallout for Indonesia from its long-standing US allies. Image: NHK TV News screenshot APR
The smaller Pacific Island nations, which Indonesia has been endeavouring to win over in a bid to thwart support for West Papuan independence, may also become entangled in the crosshairs of geostrategic rivalries, and their response to Indonesia’s membership in the BRICS alliance will prove critical for the fate of West Papua.
Critical questions The crucial questions facing the Pacific Islanders are perhaps related to their loyalties: are they aligning themselves with Beijing or Washington, and in what ways could their decisions influence the delicate balance of power in the ongoing competition between great powers, ultimately altering the Melanesian destiny of the Papuan people?
For the Papuans, Indonesia’s membership in BRICS or any other global or regional forums is irrelevant as long as the illegal occupation of their land continues driving them toward “extinction”.
For the Papuans, Indonesia’s membership in BRICS or any other global or regional forums is irrelevant as long as the illegal occupation of their land continues driving them toward “extinction”. Image: NHK News screenshot APR
The pressing question for Papuans is which force will ultimately dismantle Indonesia’s unlawful hold on their sovereignty.
Will Indonesia’s BRICS alliance open new paths for Papuan liberation fighters to re-engage with the West in ways not seen since the Cold War? Or does this membership indicate a deeper entrenchment of Papuans’ fate within China’s influence — making it almost impossible for any dream of Papuans’ independence?
While forecasting future with certainty is difficult on these questions, these critical critical questions need to be considered in this new complex geopolitical landscape, as the ultimate fate of West Papua is what is truly at stake here.
Strengthening Indonesia’s claims over West Papuan sovereignty Indonesia’s membership in BRICS may signify a great victory for those advocating for a multipolar world, challenging the hegemony of Western powers led by the United States.
This membership could augment Indonesia’s capacity to frame the West Papuan issue as an internal matter among BRICS members within the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs.
Such backing could provide Jakarta with a cushion of diplomatic protection against international censure, particularly from Western nations regarding its policies in West Papua.
The growing BRICS world . . . can Papuans and their global solidarity networks reinvent themselves while nurturing the fragile hope of restoring West Papua’s sovereignty? Map: Russia Pivots to Asia
However, it is also crucial to note that for more than six decades, despite the Western world priding itself on being a champion of freedom and human rights, no nation has been permitted to voice concern or hold Indonesia accountable for the atrocities committed against Indigenous Papuans.
The pressing question to consider is what or who silences the 193 member states of the UN from intervening to save the Papuans from potential eradication at the hands of Indonesia.
Is it the United States and its allies, or is it China, Russia, and their allies — or the United Nations itself?
Indonesia’s double standard and hypocrisy Indonesia’s support for Palestine bolsters its image as a defender of international law and human rights in global platforms like the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
This commitment was notably highlighted at the BRICS Summit in October 2024, where Indonesia reaffirmed its dedication to Palestinian self-determination and called for global action to address the ongoing conflict in line with international law and UN resolutions, reflecting its constitutional duty to oppose colonialism.
Nonetheless, Indonesia’s self-image as a “saviour for the Palestinians” presents a rather ignoble facade being promoted in the international diplomatic arena, as the Indonesian government engages in precisely the same behaviours it condemns Israel over in Palestine.
Military engagement and regional diplomacy Moreover, Indonesia’s interaction with Pacific nations serves to perpetuate a façade of double standards — on one hand, it endeavours to portray itself as a burgeoning power and a champion of moral causes concerning security issues, human rights, climate change, and development; while on the other, it distracts the communities and nations of Oceania — particularly Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, which have long supported the West Papua independence movement — from holding Indonesia accountable for its transgressions against their fellow Pacific Islanders in West Papua.
On October 10, 2024, Brigadier-General Mohamad Nafis of the Indonesian Defence Ministry unveiled a strategic initiative intended to assert sovereignty claims over West Papua. This plan aims to foster stability across the Pacific through enhanced defence cooperation and safeguarding of territorial integrity.
The efforts to expand influence are characterised by joint military exercises, defence partnerships, and assistance programmes, all crafted to address common challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and natural disasters.
However, most critically, Indonesia’s engagement with Pacific Island nations aims to undermine the regional solidarity surrounding West Papua’s right to self-determination.
This involvement encapsulates infrastructure initiatives, defence training, and financial diplomacy, nurturing goodwill while aligning the interests of Pacific nations with Indonesia’s geopolitical aspirations.
Indonesia has formally joined the BRICS group, a bloc of emerging economies featuring Russia, China and others that is viewed as a counterweight to the West https://t.co/WArU5O2PfTpic.twitter.com/IQKmPOJqlS
Military occupation in West Papua As Indonesia strives to galvanise international support for its territorial integrity, the military presence in West Papua has intensified significantly, instilling widespread fear among local Papuan communities due to heightened deployments, surveillance, and restrictions.
Indonesian forces have been mobilised to secure economically strategic regions, including the Grasberg mine, which holds some of the world’s largest gold and copper reserves.
These operations have resulted in the displacement of Indigenous communities and substantial environmental degradation.
As of December 2024, approximately 83,295 individuals had been internally displaced in West Papua due to armed conflicts between Indonesian security forces and the West Papua Liberation Army (TPNPB).
Recent reports detail new instances of displacement in the Tambrauw and Pegunungan Bintang regencies following clashes between the TPNPB and security forces. Villagers have evacuated their homes in fear of further military incursions and confrontations, leaving many in psychological distress.
The significant increase in Indonesia’s military presence in West Papua has coincided with demographic shifts that jeopardise the survival of Indigenous Papuans.
Government transmigration policies and large-scale agricultural initiatives, such as the food estate project in Merauke, have marginalised Indigenous communities.
These programmes, aimed at ensuring national food security, result in land expropriation and cultural erosion, threatening traditional Papuan lifestyles and identities.
For more than 63 years, Indonesia has occupied West Papua, subjecting Indigenous communities to systemic marginalisation and brink of extinction. Traditional languages, oral histories, and cultural values face obliteration under Indonesia’s colonial occupation.
A glimmer of hope for West Papua Despite these formidable challenges, solidarity movements within the Pacific and global communities persist in their advocacy for West Papua’s self-determination.
These groups, united by a shared sense of humanity and justice, work tirelessly to maintain hope for West Papua’s liberation. Even so, Indonesia’s diplomatic engagement with Pacific nations, characterised by eloquent rhetoric and military alliances, represents a calculated endeavour to extinguish this fragile hope for Papuan liberation.
Indonesia’s membership in BRICS will either amplify this tiny hope of salvation within the grand vision of a new world re-engineered by Beijing’s BRICS and its allies or will it conceal West Papua’s independence dream on a path that is even harder and more impossible to achieve than the one they have been on for 60 years under the US-led unipolar world system.
Most significantly, it might present a new opportunity for Papuan liberation fighters to reengage with the new re-ordering global superpowers– a chance that has eluded them for more than 60 years.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, the tumult of the First and Second World Wars, coupled with the ensuing cries for decolonisation from nations subjugated by Western powers and Cold War tensions, forged the very existence of the nation known as “Indonesia.”
It seems that this turbulent world of uncertainty is upon us, reshaping a new global landscape replete with new alliances and adversaries, harbouring conflicting visions of a new world. Indonesia’s decision to join BRICS in 2025 is a clear testament to this.
The pressing question remains whether this membership will ultimately precipitate Indonesia’s disintegration as the US-led unipolar world intervenes in its domestic affairs or catalyse its growth and strength.
Regardless of the consequences, the fundamental existential question for the Papuans is whether they, along with their global solidarity networks, can reinvent themselves while nurturing the fragile hope of restoring West Papua’s sovereignty in a world rife with change and uncertainty?
Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He lives in Australia and contributes articles to Asia Pacific Report.
For 30 years, Filipino journalist Manny “Bok” Mogato covered the police and defence rounds, and everything from politics to foreign relations, sports, and entertainment, eventually bagging one of journalism’s top prizes — the Pulitzer in 2018, for his reporting on Duterte’s drug war along with two other Reuters correspondents, Andrew Marshall and Clare Baldwin.
For Mogato it was time for him to “write it all down,” and so he did, launching the autobiography It’s Me, Bok! Journeys in Journalism in October 2024.
Mogato told Rappler, he wanted to “write it all down before I forget and impart my knowledge to the youth, young journalists, so they won’t make the same mistakes that I did”.
His career has spanned many organisations, including the Journal group, The Manila Chronicle, The Manila Times, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Rappler. Outside of journalism, he also serves as a consultant for Cignal TV.
Recently, we sat down with Mogato to talk about his career — a preview of what you might be able to read in his book — and pick out a few lessons for today’s journalists, as well as his views on the country today.
You’ve covered so many beats. Which beat did you enjoy covering most?
Manny Mogato: The military. Technically, I was assigned to the military defence beat for only a few years, from 1987 to 1992. In early 1990, FVR (Fidel V. Ramos) was running for president, and I was made to cover his campaign.
When he won, I was assigned to cover the military, and I went back to the defence beat because I had so many friends there.
‘We faced several coups’
I really enjoyed it and still enjoy it because you go to places, to military camps. And then I also covered the defence beat at the most crucial and turbulent period in our history — when we faced several coups.
Rappler: You have mellowed through the years as a reporter. You chronicled in your book that when you were younger, you were learning the first two years about the police beat and then transferred to another publication.
How did your reporting style mellow, or did it grow? Did you become more curious or did you become less curious? Over the years as a reporter, did you become more or less interested in what was happening around you?
MM: Curiosity is the word I would use. So, from the start until now, I am still curious about things happening around me. Exciting things, interesting things.
But if you read the book, you’ll see I’ve mellowed a lot because I was very reckless during my younger days.
I would go on assignments without asking permission from my office. For instance, there was this hostage-taking incident in Zamboanga, where a policeman held hostages of several officers, including a general and a colonel.
So when I learned that, I volunteered to go without asking permission from my office. I only had 100 pesos (NZ$3) in my pocket. And so what I did, I saw the soldiers loading bullets into the boxes and I picked up one box and carried it.
Hostage crisis with one tee
So when the aircraft was already airborne, they found out I was there, and so I just sat somewhere, and I covered the hostage crisis for three to four days with only one T-shirt.
Reporters in Zamboanga were kind enough to lend me T-shirts. They also bought me underpants. I slept in the headquarters crisis. And then later, restaurants. Alavar is a very popular seafood restaurant in Zamboanga. I slept there. So when the crisis was over, I came back. At that time, the Chronicle and ABS-CBN were sister companies.
When I returned to Manila, my editor gave me a commendation — but looking back . . . I just had to get a story.
Rappler: So that is what drives you?
MM: Yes, I have to get the story. I will do this on my own. I have to be ahead of the others. In 1987, when a PAL flight to Baguio City crashed, killing all 50 people on board, including the crew and the passengers, I was sent by my office to Baguio to cover the incident.
But the crash site was in Benguet, in the mountains. So I went there to the mountains. And then the Igorots were in that area, living in that area.
I was with other reporters and mountaineering clubs. We decided to go back because we were surrounded by the Igorots [who made it difficult for us to do our jobs]. Luckily, the Lopezes had a helicopter and [we] were the first to take photos.
‘I saw the bad side of police’
Rappler: Why are military and defense your favourite beats to cover?
MM: I started my career in 1983/1984, as a police reporter. So I know my way around the police. And I have many good friends in the police. I saw the bad side of the police, the dark side, corruption, and everything.
I also saw the military in the most turbulent period of our history when I was assigned to the military. So I saw good guys, I saw terrible guys. I saw everything in the military, and I made friends with them. It’s exciting to cover the military, the insurgency, the NPAs (New People’s Army rebels), and the secessionist movement.
You have to gain the trust of the soldiers of your sources. And if you don’t have trust, writing a story is impossible; it becomes a motherhood statement. But if you go deeper, dig deeper, you make friends, they trust you, you get more stories, you get the inside story, you get the background story, you get the top secret stories.
Because I made good friends with senior officers during my time, they can show me confidential memorandums and confidential reports, and I write about them.
I have made friends with so many of these police and military men. It started when they were lieutenants, then majors, and then generals. We’d go out together, have dinner or some drinks somewhere, and discuss everything, and they will tell you some secrets.
Before, you’d get paid 50 pesos (NZ$1.50) as a journalist every week by the police. Eventually, I had to say no and avoid groups of people engaging in this corruption. Reuters wouldn’t have hired me if I’d continued.
Rappler: With everything that you have seen in your career, what do you think is the actual state of humanity? Because you’ve seen hideous things, I’m sure. And very corrupt things. What do you think of people?
‘The Filipinos are selfish’
MM: Well, I can speak of the Filipino people. The Filipinos are selfish. They are only after their own welfare. There is no humanity in the Filipino mentality. They’re pulling each other down all the time.
I went on a trip with my family to Japan in 2018. My son left his sling bag on the Shinkansen. So we returned to the train station and said my son had left his bag there. The people at the train station told us that we could get the bag in Tokyo.
So we went to Tokyo and recovered the bag. Everything was intact, including my money, the password, everything.
So, there are crises, disasters, and ayuda (aid) in other places. And the people only get what they need, no? In the Philippines, that isn’t the case. So that’s humanity [here]. It isn’t very pleasant for us Filipinos.
Rappler: Is there anything good?
MM: Everyone was sharing during the EDSA Revolution, sharing stories, and sharing everything. They forgot themselves. And they acted as a community known against Marcos in 1986. That is very telling and redeeming. But after that… [I can’t think of anything else that is good.]
Rappler: What is the one story you are particularly fond of that you did or something you like or are proud of?
War on drugs, and typhoon Yolanda
MM: On drugs, my contribution to the Reuters series, and my police stories. Also, typhoon Yolanda in 2013. We left Manila on November 9, a day after the typhoon. We brought much equipment — generator sets, big cameras, food supply, everything.
But the thing is, you have to travel light. There are relief goods for the victims and other needs. When we arrived at the airport, we were shocked. Everything was destroyed. So we had to stay in the airport for the night and sleep.
We slept under the rain the entire time for the next three days. Upon arrival at the airport, we interviewed the police regional commander. Our report, I think, moved the international community to respond to the extended damage and casualties. My report that 10,000 people had died was nominated for the Society Publishers in Asia in Hong Kong.
Every day, we had to walk from the airport eight to 10 kilometers away, and along the way, we saw the people who were living outside their homes. And there was looting all over.
Rappler: There is a part in your book where you mentioned the corruption of journalists, right? And reporters. What do you mean by corruption?
MM: Simple tokens are okay to accept. When I was with Reuters, its gift policy was that you could only accept gifts as much as $50. Anything more than $50 is already a bribe. There are things that you can buy on your own, things you can afford. Other publications, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press [nes agency], have a $0 gift policy. We have this gift-giving culture in our culture. It’s Oriental.
If you can pay your own way, you should do it.
Rappler: Tell us more about winning the Pulitzer Prize.
Most winners are American, American issues
MM: I did not expect to win this American-centric award. Most of the winners are Americans and American stories, American issues. But it so happened this was international reporting. There were so many other stories that were worth the win.
The story is about the Philippines and the drug war. And we didn’t expect a lot of interest in that kind of story. So perhaps we were just lucky that we were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In the Society of Publishers in Asia, in Hong Kong, the same stories were also nominated for investigative journalism. So we were not expecting that Pulitzer would pay attention.
The idea of the drug war was not the work of only three people: Andrew Marshal, Clare Baldwin and me. No, it was a team effort.
Rappler: What was your specific contribution?
MM: Andrew and Clare were immersed in different communities in Manila, Tondo, and Navotas City, interviewing victims and families and everybody, everyone else. On the other hand, my role was on the police.
I got the police comments and official police comments and also talked to police sources who would give us the inside story — the inside story of the drug war. So I have a good friend, a retired police general who was from the intelligence service, and he knew all about this drug war — mechanics, plan, reward system, and everything that they were doing. So, he reported about the drug war.
The actual drug war was what the late General Rodolfo Mendoza said was a ruse because Duterte was protecting his own drug cartel.
Bishops wanted to find out
He had a report made for Catholic bishops. There was a plenary in January 2017, and the bishops wanted to find out. So he made the report. His report was based on 17 active police officers who are still in active service. So when he gave me this report, I showed it to my editors.
My editor said: “Oh, this is good. This is a good guide for our story.” He got this information from the police sources — subordinates, those who were formerly working for him, gave him the information.
So it was hearsay, you know. So my editor said: “Why can’t you convince him to introduce us to the real people involved in the drug war?”
So, the general and I had several interviews. Usually, our interviews lasted until early morning. Father [Romeo] Intengan facilitated the interview. He was there to help us. At the same time, he was the one serving us coffee and biscuits all throughout the night.
So finally, after, I think, two or three meetings, he agreed that he would introduce us to police officers. So we interviewed the police captain who was really involved in the killings, and in the operation, and in the drug war.
So we got a lot of information from him. The info went not only to one story but several other stories.
He was saying it was also the police who were doing it.
Rappler: Wrapping up — what do you think of the Philippines?
‘Duterte was the worst’
MM: The Philippines under former President Duterte was the worst I’ve seen. Worse than under former President Ferdinand Marcos. People were saying Marcos was the worst president because of martial law. He closed down the media, abolished Congress, and ruled by decree.
I think more than 3000 people died, and 10,000 were tortured and jailed.
But in three to six years under Duterte, more than 30,000 people died. No, he didn’t impose martial law, but there was a de facto martial law. The anti-terrorism law was very harsh, and he closed down ABS-CBN television.
It had a chilling effect on all media organisations. So, the effect was the same as what Marcos did in 1972.
We thought that Marcos Jr would become another Duterte because they were allies. And we felt that he would follow the policies of President Duterte, but it turned out he’s much better.
Well, everything after Duterte is good. Because he set the bar so low.
Everything is rosy — even if Marcos is not doing enough because the economy is terrible. Inflation is high, unemployment is high, foreign direct investments are down, and the peso is almost 60 to a dollar.
Praised over West Philippine Sea
However, the people still praise Marcos for his actions in the West Philippine Sea. I think the people love him for that. And the number of killings in the drug war has gone down.
There are still killings, but the number has really gone so low, I would say about 300 in the first two years.
Rappler: Why did you write your book, It’s Me, Bok! Journeys in Journalism?
MM: I have been writing snippets of my experiences on Facebook. Many friends were saying, ‘Why don’t you write a book?’ including Secretary [of National Defense] Gilberto Teodoro, who was fond of reading my snippets.
In my early days, I was reckless as a reporter. I don’t want the younger reporters to do that. And no story is worth writing if you are risking your life.
I want to leave behind a legacy, and I know that my memory will fail me sooner rather than later. It took me only three months to write the book.
It’s very raw. There will be a second printing. I want to polish the book and expand some of the events.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! As we continue our discussion of President Jimmy Carter’s legacy, we look at his policies in the Middle East and North Africa, in particular, Israel and Palestine.
On Thursday during the state funeral in Washington, President Carter’s former adviser Stuart Eizenstat praised Carter’s work on facilitating the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
STUART EIZENSTAT: Jimmy Carter’s most lasting achievement, and the one I think he was most proud of, was to bring the first peace to the Middle East through the greatest act of personal diplomacy in American history, the Camp David Accords.
For 13 days and nights, he negotiated with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, personally drafting more than 20 peace proposals and shuttling them between the Israeli and Egyptian delegations.
And he saved the agreement at the 11th hour — and it was the 11th hour — by appealing to Begin’s love of his grandchildren.
For the past 45 years, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty has never been violated and laid the foundation for the Abraham Accords.
AMY GOODMAN: The Abraham Accords are the bilateral normalisation agreements between Israel and, as well, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel and Bahrain, signed in 2020.
In 2006, years after he left office, Jimmy Carter wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s former racist regime.
It was striking for a former US president to use the words “Palestine,” let alone “apartheid,” in referring to the Occupied Territories. I went down to The Carter Center to speak with President Jimmy Carter about the controversy around his book and what he wanted the world to understand.
JIMMY CARTER: The word “apartheid” is exactly accurate. You know, this is an area that’s occupied by two powers. They are now completely separated.
The Palestinians can’t even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory.
The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers.
So, within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of “apartheid” is, one side dominates the other.
And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.
AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t Americans know what you have seen?
JIMMY CARTER: Americans don’t want to know and many Israelis don’t want to know what is going on inside Palestine.
It’s a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there are powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land.
I think it’s accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries, or to publicise the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good-faith peace talks.
There hasn’t been a day of peace talks now in more than seven years. So this is a taboo subject. And I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out as I’ve just described, they would probably not be back in the Congress the next term.
AMY GOODMAN: President Jimmy Carter. To see that whole interview we did at The Carter Center, you can go to democracynow.org.
For more on his legacy in the Middle East during his presidency and beyond, we’re joined in London by historian Seth Anziska, professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at University College London, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo.
What should we understand about the legacy of President Carter, Professor Anziska?
Late former US President Jimmy Carter’s opposition to Israeli apartheid. Video: Democracy Now!
SETH ANZISKA: Well, thank you, Amy.
I think, primarily, the biggest lesson is that when he came into office, he was the first US president to talk about the idea of a Palestinian homeland, alongside his commitment to Israeli security. And that was an enormous change from what had come before and what’s come since.
And I think that the way we understand Carter’s legacy should very much be oriented around the very deep commitment he had to justice and a resolution of the Palestinian question, alongside his commitment to Israel, which derived very much from his Southern Baptist faith.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the whole trajectory. Talk about the Camp David Accords, for which he was hailed throughout the various funeral services this week and has been hailed in many places around the world.
SETH ANZISKA: Well, I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about the legacy of Camp David is that this is not at all what Carter had intended or had hoped for when he came into office. He actually had a much more comprehensive vision of peace in the Middle East, that included a resolution of the Palestinian component, but also peace with Syria, with Jordan.
And he came up with some of these ideas, developed them with Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzeziński, his national security adviser. And in developing those ideas, which came out in 1977 in a very closely held memo that was not widely shared inside the administration, he actually talked about return of refugees, he talked about the status of Jerusalem, and he desired very much to think about the different components of the regional settlement as part of an overall vision.
This was in contrast to Henry Kissinger’s attitude of piecemeal diplomacy that had preceded him in the aftermath of the 1973 war. So we can understand Carter in this way very much as a departure and somebody who understood the value and the necessity of contending with these much broader regional dynamics.
Now, the reasons why this ended up with a far more limited, but very significant, bilateral peace treaty between Egypt and Israel had a lot to do both with the election of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977, as well as the position of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and also the role of the Palestinians and the PLO.
But what people don’t quite recall or understand is that Camp David and the agreement towards the peace treaty was in many ways a compromise or, in Brzeziński’s view, was a real departure from what had been the intention.
And that gap between what people had hoped for within the administration and what ended up emerging in 1979 with the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty also was tethered very much to the perpetuation of Palestinian statelessness. So, if we want to understand why and how Palestinians have been deprived of sovereignty or remain stateless to this day, we have to go back to think about the impact of Camp David itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Interesting that Sadat would be assassinated years later in Egypt when Carter was on the plane with Nixon and Ford. That’s when they say that cemented his relationship with Ford, while they hardly talked to Nixon at all.
But if you could also comment on President Carter and post-President Carter? I mean, the fact that he wrote this book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, using the word “Palestine,” using the word “apartheid,” to refer to the Occupied Territories — I remember chasing him down the hall at the Democratic convention when he was supposed to speak. This was the Obama Democratic convention. And it ended up he didn’t speak. And I chased him and Rosalynn, because . . .
SETH ANZISKA: Remember that in 1977, there was a very famous speech that he gave in Clinton, Massachusetts, talking about a Palestinian homeland. And that raised huge hackles, both in the American Jewish community among American Jewish leaders who were very uncomfortable and were already distrustful of a Southern Democrat and his views on Israel, but also Cold War conservatives, who were quite hawkish and felt that he was far too close to engaging with the Soviet Union.
And so, both of those constituencies were very, very opposed to his attitude and his approach on the Palestinian issue. And I think we can see echoes of that in how he then was treated after his presidency, when much of his activism and much of his engagement on the question of Palestine, to my view, derived from a sense of frustration and regret about what he was not able to achieve in the Camp David Accords.
And his commitment stemmed from the same values that he had been shaped by early on, a sense of viewing the Palestinian issue through the same lens as civil rights, in the same lens as what he experienced in the South, which is often, what his biographers have explained, where his views and approach towards the Palestinians came from, but also a particularly close relationship to biblical views around Israel and Zionism, that he was very much committed to Israeli security as a result.
And that was never something that he let go of, even if you look closely at his work in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Some of his views on Israel are actually quite closely aligned with positions that many in the Jewish community would feel comfortable with.
The fact that people criticised and attacked him for that, I think, speaks to the taboo of talking about what’s happening or what has happened, in the context of Israel and Palestine, in the same kind of language as disenfranchisement around race in apartheid South Africa.
And, of course, as Carter said in the interview you just ran that you had done with him when the book came out, the situation is far worse in actuality with what is happening vis-à-vis Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN:Seth Anziska, I want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at University College London, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, speaking to us from London.
To be Jewish does not mean an automatic identification with the rogue state of Israel. Nor does it mean that Jews are automatically threatened by criticism of Israel, yet our media and Labor and Liberal politicians would have you believe this is the case.
We are seeing a debate in Australia about the so-called rise of antisemitism which includes rally chants for Gaza at a time when we are witnessing the most horrific Israeli genocide of Palestinians in which our government is complicit.
Jewish peak bodies here and internationally have continually linked their identity to that of Israel.
Why? Can generations of Jews in this country still believe that Israel represents anything like the myths that were perpetrated at its inception?
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Jewish Board of Deputies and others, all staunchly defend this apartheid state that is accused of plausible genocide by the UN International Court of Justice and confirmed by dozens of human rights and legal NGOs, UN Rapporteurs, medical organisations and holocaust scholars.
Israel’s Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have been charged as war criminals by the International Criminal Court and must be arrested and tried in the Hague, yet Australia maintains a cosy relationship with Israel and our media dutifully repeats its outright lies verbatim.
Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has been the main focus of the Israeli state and its defenders for decades. With the emergence of the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005, Israel’s narrative was countered, leading to a persistent Israeli directed campaign to link BDS with antisemitism.
Colonial, occupying power
BDS focuses on the actions of Israel as a colonial, occupying power violating international law against the indigenous people of Palestine. It is anti-racist and human rights-centred.
On December 11, we heard Prime Minister Albanese at the Jewish Museum in Sydney combining his support for Jewish people with his ongoing condemnation and active campaigning against BDS.
He referred to the Marrickville Council BDS motion, (which I proposed back in 2010 along with my Greens councillor colleague, Marika Kontellis), and again repeated the bald-faced mistruths that were spread back then about BDS and the intent and focus of the Marrickville motion.
“I was part of a campaign against BDS in my own local government area. At the time I argued that if you start targeting businesses because they happen to be owned by Jewish people, you’ll end up with the Star of David above shops.
“And that ended in World War II, during the Holocaust, with six million lives lost, murdered. We need an end to antisemitism.”
In one sentence we see Albanese’s extremely offensive equation of the horror of the Holocaust and antisemitism, directly linked to BDS. Why would a prime minister and local federal member deliberately mischaracterise BDS, given the movement has always been clear that its targets are global companies and corporations that are complicit in the Israeli state’s apartheid and genocidal actions, as well as Israeli government bodies and arms companies?
What is in it for Albanese, Wong, Plibersek or Dutton and all of the politicians back in 2010/2011 who appeared to think there was political advantage in scapegoating BDS by jumping on the frenzied anti-BDS campaign?
Fawning support for Israel
It was obvious back then, as it is now, that their fawning support for the rogue Israeli state knows no bounds. Lock step in line with the United States outlier position, Australia has maintained its repugnant inaction in the face of 15 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza despite continued condemnation by the UN and a majority of states.
But Australia has, however, appointed a public supporter of Zionism and the Israeli state, as its special envoy on antisemitism.
The inaction by all states since 1948 to apply sanctions has gifted Israel the impunity that’s led to its industrial scale slaughter of innocents in Gaza and its continuing violence and killing of civilians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All governments must bear responsibility for this.
At the time of the Marrickville BDS, he used the situation to attempt to discredit the Greens who were challenging the incumbent Labor state member, Carmel Tebbutt (his former wife). He fanned the national media frenzy that was fed by pro-Israel Jewish lobbyists who were the long-time custodians of the “reputation” of Israel.
Marrickville Council and the Greens were characterised as antisemites who would be pulling Jewish books out of the local library.
This insanity was akin to what is happening today. The legitimate opposition to the worst, most egregious, brutality of the Israeli state has somehow been cleverly morphed into so-called expressions of antisemitism.
Absurd claims on protest
In the media conference of December 11, Albanese also made absurd claims that the peaceful 24-hour protest outside his electorate office in Marrickville was displaying Hamas symbols in a vile attempt to discredit the constituents he had refused to meet for more than eight months.
He and his colleagues in Canberra continue to appease the powerful Israel lobby at the expense of our rights and the rights and visibility of the whole Palestinian population here and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are now literally on death row.
Back then, we heard locally that he and the party had bullied the four Labor councillors to vote to rescind the Marrickville BDS motion that they had all previously wholeheartedly supported. Some months earlier these same councillors had also supported a motion condemning the latest Israeli strike against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The meaning of BDS was no secret to them — they appreciated that it was important for a council to check its ethical purchasing guidelines to ensure that it was not supporting companies that were in violation of international human rights law by operating in the illegal Israeli settlements or by providing technology or services that maintained Israel’s apartheid and dispossession of Palestinians.
They knew then, as we know now, that this is not antisemitic. They knew then that no Jewish businesses per se were the target of this peaceful civil rights movement. And they knew then that the Labor Party was lying for political gain.
Now, as for far too many decades, political parties in power in this country have failed Palestinians for political gain and at the behest of Israel lobby groups which dare to speak on behalf of anti-Zionist Jews like me.
Despite all the gratuitous rhetoric, these politicians have failed to uphold the basic precepts of human rights law — rights they regularly give lip service to, but rights they will never defend by taking the action required of them as signatories to numerous UN conventions.
Australia must sanction Israel
To act with humanity and to act as required by international law, Australia must sanction and end all economic and military ties with the Israeli state.
We must expel the Israeli ambassador and bring our ambassador back and we must prosecute any Australian citizen or resident who has joined the IDF to kill Palestinians. We must also support Palestinian refugees and take all action necessary to assist those in Gaza for as long as it takes.
But as we have seen so clearly this year, most governments have not acted to pressure Israel to end its barbaric colonial project. To protest as allies and to call out the hypocrisy of governments and politicians that speak of a rules-based order while enabling a state that has continually breached fundamental human rights laws, is to be called antisemitic.
The pressure applied to governments, universities and the like in recent years to adopt the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism is precisely because it equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
It’s the perfect tool for shutting down condemnation of Israel’s grave human rights violations. We’ve seen some universities and parliaments endorse it in deference to this pressure, despite the serious flaws that have been identified, including from Jewish Israeli experts.
Now more than ever BDS is imperative.
BDS campaigns will work to isolate Israel as it should be isolated until it complies with international law. Multinational companies are increasingly loath to be associated with this terror state.
Major pension funds are divesting from companies that are complicit in Israel’s human rights violations and local councils, unions and universities are taking steps to ensure they divest from any partnerships or investments that would make them part of the chain of complicity and liable for prosecution by the International Court of Justice as enabling Israel’s genocide.
The facts are indisputable. Australia’s complicity with Israel’s genocide and colonisation of Palestine can be countered by individuals, churches, unions, councils and students taking immediate and urgent BDS action.
Do not wait for Labor or Liberal politicians in this country to act, as they are doing their best to shut us down and to appease Israel. Their complicity will never be forgotten.
Cathy Peters is a former Greens councillor on the Marrickville Council from 2008-2011 and the co-founder of BDS Australia. She worked as a radio producer and executive producer for the ABC for 30 years making some documentaries on the Israeli occupation. She is Jewish and her grandparents and other relatives perished in the Holocaust. She has travelled to Gaza and throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories on a number of occasions and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights and justice. First published in the Australia social policy journal Pearls and Irritations and republished with permission.
