Communities in Vanuatu are learning to grow climate resilient crops, 18 months after Cyclone Lola devastated the country.
The category 5 storm struck in October 2023, generating wind speeds of up to 215 kmph, which destroyed homes, schools, plantations, and left at least four people dead.
Save the Children Vanuatu country director Polly Banks said they have been working alongside Vanuatu’s Ministry of Agriculture and local partners, supporting families through the Tropical Cyclone Lola Recovery Programme.
“It really affected backyard gardening and the communities across the areas affected – their ability to pursue an income and also their own nutritional needs,” she said.
She said the programme looked at the impact of the cyclone on backyard gardening and on people’s economic reliance on what they grow in their gardens, and developed a recovery plan to respond.
“We trained community members and also provided them with the equipment to establish cyclone resilient nurseries.
Ready for harsh weather
“So for example, nurseries that can be put up and then pulled down when a harsh weather event – including cyclones but even heavy rainfall — is arriving.
“There was a focus on these climate resilient nurseries, but also through that partnership with the Department of Agriculture, there was also a much stronger focus than we’ve had before on teaching community members climate smart agricultural techniques.”
Banks said these techniques included open pollinating seed and learning skills such as grassing; and another part of the project was introducing more variety into people’s diets.
She said out of the project has also come the first seed bank on Epi Island.
“That seed bank now has a ready supply of seeds, and the community are adding to that regularly, and they’re taking those seeds from really climate-resilient crops, so that they have a cyclone secure storage facility,” she said.
“The next time a cyclone happens — and we know that they’re going to become more ferocious and more frequent — the community are ready to replant the moment that the cyclone passes.
Setting up seed bank
“But in setting the seed bank up as well, the community have been taught how to select the most productive seeds, the seeds that show the most promise; how to dry them out; how to preserve them.”
Banks said they were also working with the Department of Agriculture in the delivery of a community-based climate resilience project, which is funded by the Green Climate Fund.
Rolled out across 282 communities across the country, a key focus of it is the creation of more climate-resilient backyard gardening, food preservation and climate resilient nurseries.
“We’re also setting up early warning systems through the provision of internet to really remote communities so that they have better access to more knowledge about when a big storm or a cyclone is approaching and what steps to take.
“But that particular project is still just a drop in the ocean in terms of the adaptation needs that communities have.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
There was faint hope that efforts to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza would succeed. That hope is now all but gone, offering 2.1 million tormented and starved Palestinians dismal prospects for the days and weeks ahead.
Last Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister once again affirmed he had no intention to end the war. Benjamin Netanyahu wants what he calls “absolute victory” to achieve US President Donald Trump’s so-called vision for Gaza of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
To that end, Israel is weaponising food at a scale not seen before, including immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas. It has not allowed any wheat, medicine boxes, or other vital aid into the Gaza Strip since 2 March.
This engineered starvation has pushed experts to warn that 1.1 million Palestinians face imminent famine.
Many believe this was Israel’s “maximum pressure” plan all along: massive force, starvation, and land grabs. It’s what the Israeli Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, referred to in March when he gave Palestinians in Gaza an ultimatum — surrender or die.
A month after breaking the ceasefire, Israel has converted nearly 70 percent of the tiny territory into no-go or forced displacement zones, including all of Rafah. It has also created a new so-called security corridor, where the illegal settlement of Morag once stood.
Israel is bombing the Palestinians it is starving while actively pushing them into a tiny strip of dunes along the coast.
Israel only interested in temporary ceasefire
This mentality informed the now failed ceasefire talks. Israel was only interested in a temporary ceasefire deal that would keep its troops in Gaza and see the release of half of the living Israeli captives.
In exchange, Israel reportedly offered to allow critically needed food and aid back into Gaza, which it is obliged to do as an occupying power, irrespective of a ceasefire agreement.
Israel also refused to commit to ending the war, just as it did in the Lebanon ceasefire agreement, while also demanding that Hamas disarm and agree to the exile of its prominent members from Gaza.
Disarming is a near-impossible demand in such a context, but this is not motivated by a preserved arsenal that Hamas wants to hold on to. Materially speaking, the armaments Israel wants Hamas to give up are inconsequential, except in how they relate to the group’s continued control over Gaza and its future role in Palestinian politics.
Symbolically, accepting the demand to lay down arms is a sign of surrender few Palestinians would support in a context devoid of a political horizon, or even the prospect of one.
While Israel has declared Hamas as an enemy that must be “annihilated”, the current right-wing government in Israel doesn’t want to deal with any Palestinian party or entity.
The famous “no Hamas-stan and no Fatah-stan” is not just a slogan in Israeli political thinking — it is the policy.
Golden opportunity for mass ethnic cleansing
This government senses a golden opportunity for the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank — and it aims to seize it.
Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya recently said that the movement was done with partial deals. Hamas, he said, was willing to release all Israeli captives in exchange for ending the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the release of an agreed-on number of Palestinian prisoners.
But the truth is, Hamas is running out of options.
Netanyahu does not consider releasing the remaining Israeli captives as a central goal. Hamas has no leverage and barely any allies left standing.
Hezbollah is out of the equation, facing geographic and political isolation, demands for disarmament, and the lethal Israeli targeting of its members.
Armed Iraqi groups have signalled their willingness to hand over weapons to the government in Baghdad in order not to be in the crosshairs of Washington or Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have sustained heavy losses from hundreds of massive US airstrikes. Despite their defiant tone, they cannot change the current dynamics.
Tehran distanced from Houthis
Finally, Iran is engaged in what it describes as positive dialogue with the Trump administration to avert a confrontation. To that end, Tehran has distanced itself from the Houthis and is welcoming the idea of US investment.
The so-called Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction also excludes any role for Hamas. While the mediators are pushing for a political formula that would not decisively erase Hamas from Palestinian politics, some Arab states would prefer such a scenario.
As these agendas and new realities play out, Gaza has been laid to waste. There is no food, no space, no hope. Only despair and growing anger.
This chapter of the genocide shows no sign of letting up, with Israel under no international pressure to cease the bombing and forced starvation of Gaza. Hamas remains defiant but has no significant leverage to wield.
In the absence of any viable Palestinian initiative that can rally international support around a different dialogue altogether about ending the war, intervention can only come from Washington, where the favoured solution is ethnic cleansing.
This is a dead-end road that pushes Palestinians into the abyss of annihilation, whether by death and starvation or political and material erasure through mass displacement.
Nour Odeh is a political analyst, public diplomacy consultant, and an award-winning journalist. She also reports for Al Jazeera. This article was first published by The New Arab and is republished under Creative Commons.
There are calls for greater transparency about what the HMNZS Manawanui was doing before it sank in Samoa last October — including whether the New Zealand warship was performing specific security for King Charles and Queen Camilla.
The Manawanui grounded on the reef off the south coast of Upolu in bad weather on 5 October 2024 before catching fire and sinking. Its 75 crew and passengers were safely rescued.
The Court of Inquiry’s final report released on 4 April 2025 found human error and a long list of “deficiencies” grounded the $100 million vessel on the Tafitoala Reef, south of Upolu, where it caught fire and sank.
Equipment including weapons and ammunition continue to be removed from the vessel as its future hangs in the balance.
The Court of Inquiry’s report explains the Royal New Zealand Navy was asked by “CHOGM Command” to conduct “a hydrographic survey of the area in the vicinity of Sinalei whilst en route to Samoa”.
When it grounded on the Tafitoala Reef, the ship was following orders received from Headquarters Joint Forces New Zealand. The report incorrectly calls it the “Sinalei Reef”.
Sinalei is the name of the resort which hosted King Charles and Queen Camilla for CHOGM — the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting — which began in Samoa 19 days after the Manawanui sank from 25-26 October 2024. The Royals arrived two days before CHOGM began.
Support of CHOGM
Speaking at the release of the court’s final report, Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Garin Golding described the Manawanui’s activity on the south coast of Upolu.
“So the operation was done in support of CHOGM — a very high-profile security activity on behalf of a nation, so it wasn’t just a peacetime operation,” he said.
“It was done in what we call rapid environmental assessment so we were going in and undertaking something that we had to do a quick turnaround of that information so it wasn’t a deliberate high grade survey. It was a rapid environmental assessment so it does come with additional complexity and it did have an operational outcome. It’s just, um you know, we we are operating in complex environments.
“It doesn’t say that we did everything right and that’s what the report indicates and we just need to get after fixing those mistakes and improving.”
Sinalei Resort . . . where the royal couple were hosted. Image: Dominic Godfrey/RNZ Pacific
The report explained the Manawanui was tasked with “conducting the Sinalei survey task” “to survey a defined area of uncharted waters.” But Pacific security fellow at Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University Iati Iati questions what is meant by “in support of the upcoming CHOGM”.
“All we’ve been told in the report is that it was to support CHOGM. What that means is unclear. I think that needs to be explained. I think it also needs to be explained to the Samoan people, who initiated this.
“Whether it was just a New Zealand initiative. Whether it was done for CHOGM by the CHOGM committee or whether it was something that involved the Samoa government,” Iati said.
What-for questions
“So a lot of the, you know, who was behind this and the what-for questions haven’t been answered.”
Iati said CHOGM’s organising committee included representatives from Samoa as well as New Zealand.
“But who exactly initiated that additional task which I think is on paragraph 37 of the report after the ship had sailed, the extra task was then confirmed. Who initiated that I’m not sure and I think that needs to be explained. Why it was confirmed after the sailing that also needs to be explained.
“In terms of security, I guess the closest we can come to is the fact that you know King Charles was staying on that side and Sinalei Reef. It may have something to do with that but this is just really unclear at the moment and I think all those questions need to be addressed.”
The wreck of the Manawanui lies 2.1 nautical miles — 3.89km — from the white sandy beach of the presidential suite at Sinalei Resort where King Charles and Queen Camilla stayed during CHOGM.
Just over the fence from the Royals’ island residence, Royal New Zealand Navy divers were coming and going from the sunken vessel in the early days of their recovery operation, and now salvors and the navy continue to work from there.
AUT Law School professor Paul Myburgh said the nature of the work the Manawanui was carrying out when it ran aground on the reef has implications for determining compensation for people impacted by its sinking.
Sovereign immunity
“Historically, if it was a naval vessel that was the end of the story. You could never be sued in normal courts about anything that happened on board a naval vessel. But nowadays, of course, governmental vessels are often involved in commercial activity as well,” he said.
“So we now have what we call the restrictive theory of sovereign immunity which states that if you are involved in commercial or ordinary activity that is non-governmental you are subject to the jurisdiction of the courts, so this is why I’ve been wanting to get to the bottom of exactly what they were doing.
“Who instructed whom and that sort of thing. And it seems to me that in line with the findings of the report all of this seems to have been done on a very adhoc basis.”
RNZ first asked the New Zealand Defence Force detailed questions on Friday, April 11, but it declined to respond.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.
The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings.
Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been.
For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.
Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.
“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program.
And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier.
“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.
An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.
No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.
Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers.
“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.
Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.
While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.”
It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine.
Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.
Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information.
But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”
Brazen crimes against humanity have become the norm. World powers do nothing in response. At best, they put out weak statements of concern. Now, the US does not even bother with that.
Israel and the US are planning the violent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, knowing full well that no one will stop them.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) are sitting on their hands, despite what appeared to be significant rulings last year on Israeli war crimes by the ICC and on the “plausible risk” of genocide by the ICJ.
Israeli anti-Zionist commentator Alon Mizrahi posted on X this week:
“As Israel and the US announce and begin to enact plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, let’s remember that the International Court of Justice has not even convened to discuss the genocide since 24 May 2024, when it was using very blurry language about the planned Rafah action.
“Tens of thousands have been exterminated since then, and hundreds of thousands have been injured. Babies starved and froze to death, and thousands of children lost limbs.
“Not a word from the ICJ. Zionism and American imperialism have rendered international law null and void. Everyone is allowed to do as they please to anyone. The post-World War II masquerade is truly over.”
As Israel and the US announce and begin to enact plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, let’s remember that the International Court of Justice has not even convened to discuss the genocide since 24 May 2024, when it was using very blurry language about the planned…
Under the US Joe Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the smirking US spokesperson Matt Miller would make performative statements about “concern” over the killing of Palestinians with weapons they had supplied. (They would never use a word as clear as “killing”, always preferring the perpetrator-free “deaths”).
Today, under the Donald Trump regime, even the mask of respect for the rituals of international diplomacy has been thrown aside.
This is the law of the jungle, and the winner is the government that uses superior force to seize what it believes is theirs, and to silence and destroy those who stand in their way.
Brutally targeted Last week, a group of Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), civil defence and UN staff rushed to the site of Israeli air strikes to rescue wounded Palestinians in southern Gaza.
PRCS is the local branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which, like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), provides essential health services to Palestinians in a devastated, besieged war zone.
Alongside other international aid groups, they have been repeatedly and brutally targeted by Israel.
That pattern continued on March 23, when Israeli forces committed a heinous, deliberate massacre that left eight PRCS members, six members of Gaza’s civil defence, and one UN agency employee dead.
The bodies of 14 first responders were found in Rafah, southern Gaza, a week after they were killed. The vehicles were mangled, and the bodies dumped in a mass grave. Some were mutilated, one decapitated.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said some of the bodies were found with their hands tied and with wounds to their heads and chests.
“This grave was located just metres from their vehicles, indicating the [Israeli] occupation forces removed the victims from the vehicles, executed them, and then discarded their bodies in the pit,” civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said, describing it as “one of the most brutal massacres Gaza has witnessed in modern history”.
Under fire: Israel’s war on medics. Video: Middle East Eye
‘Killed on way to save lives’
The head of the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office in Gaza, Jonathan Whittall, said: “Today, on the first day of Eid, we returned and recovered the buried bodies of eight PRCS, six civil defence and one UN staff.
“They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives. This should never have happened.”
Nothing happened following previous lethal attacks, such as the killing of seven World Central Kitchen staff on 1 April 2024, exactly one year ago, when the victims were British, Polish, Australian, Palestinian, and a dual US-Canadian citizen.
Despite a certain uproar that was absent when dozens or hundreds of Palestinians were massacred, Israel was not sanctioned by Western powers or the UN. And so, it continued killing aid workers.
Israel declared Unrwa a “terror” group last October and has killed more than 280 of its staff — accounting for the majority of the 408 aid workers killed in Gaza since October 2023.
The international response to this latest massacre? Zilch.
#GAZA – New images emerge from the execution and burial site of 15 Red Crescent and Civil Defense members in Tal al-Sultan, Rafah, southern Gaza Strip
On March 24, the #IDF surrounded the five ambulances and their crew members, handcuffed them, executed them, buried them in a… pic.twitter.com/KM5DLWpfyH
Official silence On Sunday, Save the Children, Medical Aid for Palestinians and Christian Aid took out ads in the UK Observer calling for the UK government to stop supplying arms to Israel in the wake of renewed Israeli attacks in Gaza: “David Lammy, Keir Starmer, your failure to act is costing lives.”
The British prime minister is too busy touting his mass deportation of “illegal” migrants from the UK to comment on the atrocities of his close ally, Israel. He has said nothing in public.
Lammy, UK Foreign Secretary, has found time to put out statements on the Myanmar earthquake, Nato, Russian attacks on Ukraine, and the need for de-escalation of renewed tensions in South Sudan.
His last public comment on Israel and Gaza was on March 22, several days after Israel’s horrific massacre of more than 400 Palestinians at dawn on 18 March: “The resumption of Israeli strikes in Gaza marks a dramatic step backward. Alongside France and Germany, the UK urgently calls for a return to the ceasefire.”
No condemnation of the slaughter of nearly 200 children.
In response to a request for comment from Middle East Eye, a Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “We are outraged by these deaths and we expect the incident to be investigated transparently and for those responsible held to account. Humanitarian workers must be protected, and medical and aid workers must be able to do their jobs safely.
“We continue to call for a lift on the aid blockade in Gaza, and for all parties to re-engage in ceasefire negotiations to get the hostages out and to secure a permanent end to the conflict, leading to a two-state solution and a lasting peace.”
As this article was being written, Lammy put out a statement on X that, as usual, avoided any direct mention of who was committing war crimes. “Gaza remains the deadliest place for humanitarians — with over 400 killed. Recent aid worker deaths are a stark reminder. Those responsible must be held accountable.”
Age of lawlessness The new world order of 2025 is a lawless one.
The big powers and their allies are committed to the violent reordering of the map: Palestine is to be forcibly absorbed into Israel, with US backing. Ukraine will lose its eastern regions to Vladimir Putin’s Russia with US support.
Smaller nations can be attacked with impunity, from Yemen to Lebanon to Greenland (no US invasion plan as yet, but the mood music is growing louder with every statement from Trump and Vice-President JD Vance).
This has always been the way to some extent. Still, previously in the post-war world, adherence to international law was the official position of great powers, including the US and the Soviet Union.
Israel, however, never had time for international law. It was the pioneer of the force-is-right doctrine. That doctrine is now the dominant one.
International law and international aid are out.
In the UK last Thursday, a group of youth activists were meeting at the Quaker Friends House in central London to discuss peaceful resistance to the genocide in Gaza.
Such a police action would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but new laws introduced under the last government have made such raids against peaceful gatherings increasingly common.
This is the age of lawlessness. And anyone standing up for human rights and peace is now the enemy of the state, whether in Palestine, London, or at Columbia University.
Joe Gill has worked as a journalist in London, Oman, Venezuela and the US, for newspapers including Financial Times, Morning Star and Middle East Eye. His Masters was in Politics of the World Economy at the London School of Economics. Republished from Middle East Eye under Creative Commons.
Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options, writes Chris Hedges
ANALYSIS:By Chris Hedges
This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity.
Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.
The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas.
The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties.
The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.”
The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.
Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is massstarvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets.
Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.
Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.
Since last Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed.
This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly 16 months of incessant attacks were awful.
But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the 20th century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.
October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair.
Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.
“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:
“The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.”
The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18).
Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.
The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the 16th day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the 13 km border between Gaza and Egypt.
It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.
Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.
Israel refused to honour the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza
Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.
The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalised or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.
Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.
That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved.
It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilisation. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.
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.
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick called on New Zealand government MPs today to support her Member’s Bill to sanction Israel over its “crazy slaughter” of Palestinians in Gaza.
Speaking at a large pro-Palestinian solidarity rally in the heart of New Zealand’s largest city Auckland, she said Aotearoa New Zealand could no longer “remain a bystander to the slaughter of innocent people in Gaza”.
In the fifth day since Israel broke the two-month-old ceasefire and refused to begin negotiations on phase two of the truce — which was supposed to lead to a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the besieged enclave and an exchange of hostages — health officials reported that the death toll had risen above 630, mostly children and women.
Five children were killed in a major overnight air attack on Gaza City and at least eight members of the family remained trapped under the rubble as Israeli attacks continued in the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
Confirmed casualty figures in Gaza since October 7, 2023, now stand at 49,747 with 113,213 wounded, the Gaza Health Ministry said.
For more than two weeks, Israel has sealed off border crossings and barred food, water and electricity and today it blew up the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the only medical institution in Gaza able to provide cancer treatment.
“The research has said it from libraries, libraries and libraries. And what is it doing in Gaza?” said Swarbrick.
‘Ethnic cleansing . . . on livestream’
“It is ethnic cleansing. It is apartheid. It is genocide. And we have that delivered to us by livestream to each one of us every single day on our cellphones,” she said.
“That is crazy. It is crazy to wake up every single day to that.”
Swarbrick said Aotearoa New Zealand must act now to sanction Israel for its crimes — “just like we did with Russia for its illegal action in Ukraine.”
She said that with the Green Party, Te Pāti Māori and Labour’s committed support, they now needed just six of the 68 government MPs to “pass my Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill into law”.
“There’s no more time for talk. If we stand for human rights and peace and justice, our Parliament must act,” she said.
“Action for Gaza Now” banner heads a march protesting against Israel’s resumed attacks on the besieged Strip in Auckland today. Image: APR
In September, Aotearoa had joined 123 UN member states to support a resolution calling for sanctions against those responsible for Israel’s “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in relation to settler violence”.
“Our government has since done nothing to fulfil that commitment. Our Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill starts that very basic process.
“No party leader or whip can stop a Member of Parliament exercising their democratic right to vote how they know they need to on this Bill,” she said to resounding cheers.
‘No hiding behind party lines’
“There is no more hiding behind party lines. All 123 Members of Parliament are each individually, personally responsible.”
Several Palestinian women spoke of the terror with the new wave of Israeli bombings and of their families’ personal connections with the suffering in Gaza, saying it was vitally important to “hear our stories”. Some spoke of the New Zealand government’s “cowardice” for not speaking out in opposition like many other countries.
About 1000 people took part in the protest in a part of Britomart’s Te Komititanga Square in a section now popularly known as “Palestine Corner”.
Amid a sea of banners and Palestinian flags there were placards declaring “Stop the genocide”, “Jews for tangata whenua from Aotearoa to Palestine”, “Hands off West Bank End the occupation” , “The people united will never be defeated”, “Decolonise your mind, stand with Palestine,” “Genocide — made in USA”, and “Toitū Te Tiriti Free Palestine”.
“Genocide – Made in USA” poster at today’s Palestinian solidarity rally. Image: APR
The ceasefire-breaking Israeli attacks on Gaza have shocked the world and led to three UN General Assembly debates this week on the Middle East.
France, Germany and Britain are among the latest countries to condemn Israel for breaching the ceasefire — describing it as a “dramatic step backwards”, and France has told the UN that it is opposed to any form of annexation by Israel of any Palestinian territory.
Meanwhile, Sultan Barakat, a professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera in an interview that the more atrocities Israel committed in Gaza, the more young Palestinian men and women would join Hamas.
“So it’s not going to disappear any time soon,” he said.
With Israel killing more than 630 people in five days and cutting off all aid to the Strip for weeks, there was no trust on the part of Hamas to restart the ceasefire, Professor Barakat said.
“Jews for tangata whenua from Aotearoa to Palestine” . . . a decolonisation placard at today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland. Image: APR
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
A joint operation between the Fiji Police Force, Republic of Fiji Military Force (RFMF), Territorial Force Brigade, Fiji Navy and National Fire Authority was staged this week to “modernise” responses to emergencies.
Called “Exercise Genesis”, the joint operation is believed to be the first of its kind in Fiji to “test combat readiness” and preparedness for facing civil unrest, counterinsurgency and humanitarian assistance scenarios.
It took place over three days and was modelled on challenges faced by a “fictitious island grappling with rising unemployment, poverty and crime”.
The exercise was described as based on three models, operated on successive days.
The block 1 scenario tackled internal security, addressing civil unrest, law enforcement challenges and crowd control operations.
Block 2 involved humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and coordinating emergency response efforts with government agencies.
Block 3 on the last day dealt with a “mid-level counterinsurgency”, engaging in stabilising the crisis, and “neutralising” a threat.
Flash flood scenario
On the second day, a “composite” company with the assistance of the Fiji Navy successfully evacuated victims from a scenario-based flash flood at Doroko village (Waila) to Nausori Town.
“The flood victims were given first aid at the village before being evacuated to an evacuation centre in Syria Park,” said the Territorial Brigade’s Facebook page.
“The flood victims were further examined by the medical team at Syria Park.”
Fiji police confront protesters during the Operation Genesis exercise in Fiji this week. Image: RFMF screenshot APR
On the final day, Thursday, Exercise Genesis culminated in a pre-dawn attack by the troops on a “rebel hideout”.
According to the Facebook page, the “hideout” had been discovered following the deployment of a joint tracker team and the K9 unit from the Fiji Corrections Service.
“Through rigorous training and realistic scenarios, the [RFMF Territorial Brigade] continues to refine its combat proficiency, adaptability, and mission effectiveness,” said a brigade statement.
Mock protesters in the Operation Genesis security services exercise in Fiji this week. Image: RFMF screenshot APR
It said that the exercise was “ensuring that [the brigade] remains a versatile and responsive force, capable of safeguarding national security and contributing to regional stability.”
However, a critic said: “Anyone who is serious about reducing crime would offer a real alternative to austerity, poverty and alienation. Invest in young people and communities.”
Israel says President Donald Trump green lit a scorched-earth bombing of Gaza that wiped out entire families and killed dozens of infants and other children.
The US-backed Israeli government resumed its intense genocidal attacks on Gaza early yesterday morning, unleashing a massive wave of indiscriminate military strikes across the Strip and killing more than 410 people, including scores of children and women, according to local health officials.
The massacre resulted in one of the largest single-day death tolls of the past 17 months, and also killed several members of Gaza’s government and a member of Hamas’s political bureau.
The Trump administration said it was briefed ahead of the strikes, which began at approximately 2 am local time, and that the US fully supported Israel’s attacks.
“The sky was filled with drones, quadcopters, helicopters, F-16 and F-35 warplanes. The firing from the tanks and vehicles didn’t stop,” said Abubaker Abed, a contributing journalist for Drop Site News who reports from Deir al-Balah, Gaza.
“I didn’t sleep last night. I had a pang in my heart that something awful would happen. At 2 am, I tried to close my eyes. Once it happened, four explosions shook my home. The sky turned red and became heavily shrouded with plumes of smoke.”
Abubaker said Israel’s attacks began with four strikes in Deir al-Balah.
“Mothers’ wails and children’s screams echoed painfully in my ears. They struck a house near us. I didn’t know who to call. I couldn’t feel my knees. I was shivering with fear, and my family were harshly awakened,” he said.
‘My mother couldn’t breathe’
“My mother couldn’t take a breath. My father searched around for me. We gathered in the middle of our home, knowing our end may be near. That’s the same feeling we have had for the 16 months of intense bombings and attacks.
“The nightmare has chased us again.”
The Israeli attacks pummeled cities across Gaza — from Rafah and Khan Younis in the south to Deir al-Balah in the center, and Gaza City in the north, where Israel carried out some of the heaviest bombing in areas already reduced to an apocalyptic landscape.
Since the “ceasefire” took effect in January, more than half a million Palestinians returned to the north and many of them have been living in makeshift shelters or on the rubble of their former homes.
Hospitals that already suffer from catastrophic damage from 16 months of relentless Israeli attacks and a dire lack of medical supplies struggled to handle the influx of wounded people, and local authorities issued an emergency call for blood donations.
Late Tuesday morning, Dr Abdul-Qader Weshah, a senior emergency doctor at Al-Awda Hospital in Al-Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, described the situation.
“We’ve just received another influx of injuries following a nearby strike. We’ve dealt with them. We are just preparing ourselves for more casualties as more bombings are expected to happen,” he told Drop Site News.
‘Horrified . . . awoke to screams’
“Since the morning, we were horrified and awoke to the screams and pain of people. We’ve been treating many people, children and women in particular.”
Weshah said they have had to transfer some of the wounded to other hospitals because of a lack of medical supplies.
“We don’t have the means. Gaza’s hospitals are devoid of everything. Here at the hospital, we lack everything, including basic necessities like disinfectants and gauze. We don’t have enough beds for the casualties.
We don’t have the capacity to treat the wounded. X-ray devices, magnetic resonance imaging, and simple things like stitches are not available. The hospital is in an unprecedented state of chaos.
“The number of medical crews is not enough. Overwhelmed with injuries, we’re horrified and we don’t know why we are speaking to the world.
“We’re working with less than the bare minimum in our hands. We need doctors, devices and supplies, and circumstances to do our job.”
Al-Shifa hospital director Muhammad Abu Salmiya told Al Jazeera Arabic: “Every minute, a wounded person dies due to a lack of resources.”
The Indonesia Hospital morgue in Beit Lahia, Gaza on March 18, 2025. Image: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu
Rising death toll
Dr Zaher Al-Wahidi, the Director of the Information Unit at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, told Drop Site Tuesday afternoon that 174 children and 89 women were killed in the Israeli attacks. [Editors: Latest figures are 404 killed, including many children, and the toll is expected to rise as many are still buried beneath rubble.]
Local health officials and witnesses said that the death toll was expected to rise dramatically because dozens of people are believed to be buried under the rubble of the structures where they were sleeping when the bombing began.
“We can hear the voices of the victims under the rubble, but we can’t save them,” said a medical official at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Video posted on social media by Palestinians inside Gaza portrayed unspeakable scenes of the lifeless bodies of infants and small children killed in the bombings.
Zinh Dahdooh, a dental student from Gaza City, posted an audio recording she said was of her neighbours screaming as their shelter was bombed, trapping them in the destruction.
“Tonight, they bombed our neighbors,” she wrote on the social media site X. “They kept screaming until they died, and no ambulance came for them. How long are we supposed to live in this fear? How long!”
According to local health officials, many strikes hit buildings or homes housing multiple generations of families.
‘Wiped out six families’
“Israel in its strikes has wiped out at least six families. One in my hometown. The others are from Khan Younis, Rafah, and Gaza City. Some families have lost five or 10 members. Others have lost around 20,” Abubaker reported.
“We talk about families killed from the children to the old. The Gharghoon family was bombed today in Rafah. The strikes have killed the father and his two daughters. Their mom and grandparents along with their uncles and aunts were also murdered, erasing the entire family from the civil registry.
“We are talking about the erasure of entire families. Among Israel’s attacks in Deir al-Balah, Israel bombed the homes of the Mesmeh, Daher, and Sloot families.
“More than 10 people, including seven women, from the Sloot family were killed, wiping them out entirely. The same has happened to the Abu-Teer, Barhoom, and other families.
“This is extermination by design. This is genocide.”
On Tuesday, Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirmed that “Abu Hamza,” the spokesman of its military wing, Al Quds Brigades, had been killed along with his wife and other family members.
A hellish scene Israeli officials said they had been given a “green light” by President Donald Trump to resume heavy bombing of Gaza because of Hamas’s refusal to obey Trump’s directive to release all Israeli captives immediately.
“All those who seek to terrorise not just Israel but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News.
“All hell will break loose.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement asserting that “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength”.
Israeli media reported that the decision to resume heavy strikes against Gaza was made a week ago and was not in response to any imminent threat posed by Hamas.
Israel, which has repeatedly violated the ceasefire that went into effect January 19, has sought to create new terms in a transparent effort to justify blowing up the deal entirely.
“This is unconscionable,” said Muhannad Hadi, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“A cease-fire must be reinstated immediately. People in Gaza have endured unimaginable suffering.”
Compounding the crisis in Gaza’s hospitals, Israel recently began blocking the entry of international medical workers to the Strip at unprecedented rates as part of a sweeping new policy that severely limits the number of aid organisations Israel will permit to operate in Gaza.
Plumes of smoke from central Gaza just as Israel began its heavy bombing on Monday night. Image: Abubaker Abed/Drop Site News
Editor’s note: Due to the ongoing Israeli attacks, Abubaker Abed relayed his reporting and eyewitness account to Jeremy Scahill by phone and text messages. This article is republished from Drop Site News under Creative Commons.
They say only bad news from Balochistan makes the headlines–Pakistan’s largest and most impoverished province marred in a decades long insurgency. The local newspapers are flooded with the news of people being killed in bomb blasts, target killings and the loss of lives in incidents of terrorism. However, amid this backdrop of turmoil, a problem that is just as terrible is subtly developing: climate change. Its perennial consequences are changing the lives of women and children, particularly in the remote and underprivileged parts of Balochistan.
Noora Ali, 14, was oblivious to the temperature shifts because she had grown up in Turbat, a city around 180 kilometres Southwest of Gwadar, the center of CPEC( China-Pakistan Economic Corridor)–a bilateral project to would facilitate trade between China and Pakistan valued at $46 billion. There was frequent flooding during the monsoon season and blazing heatwaves during the summer, with temperatures rising above 51 centigrade. Compared to other cities in Balochistan, Turbat experiences horrible summers and typical winters. As a result, the majority of wealthy families in the city travel to Gwadar, Quetta, or Karachi during the sweltering summers and return to Turbat during the winters. The Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) moved Noora’s father, who works there, to the neighboring Coastal city of Gwadar in 2022.
In February of 2022, the sea seemed calmed while boats of the fishermen busily dotted the waters of the Padi Zir (Gwadar’s West bay). It was a typical Thursday morning when rain started pouring down. The rain was so intense that the sea became wild. The roads were washed away, bridges collapsed, streets were inundated with flood water, and the port city became completely disconnected from the rest of the country. Back in Turbat, her ancestral hometown was also submerged under flood water.
Noora had also heard from her schoolmates that Gwadar and Turbat had never experienced such heavy and intense rainfall before. She knew and felt that the temperature of her native city was rising and that Gwadar beneath flood water didn’t seem normal. “This is due to climate change,” her elder brother tells her. At the age of 14, most youth in Pakistan’s Balochistan have no idea what climate change and global warming are, but they are already feeling it impacts.
Like Noora, thousands of children in South Asia, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Afghanistan are at the risk of climate related disasters, as per the UNICEF 2021 Children’s Climate Risk Index. The report further reiterates that children in these countries have vigorously been exposed to devastating air pollution and aggressive heatwaves, with 6 million children confronting implacable floods that lashed across these countries in the July of 2024.
On November 11 and 22, 2024, over 20 youths urged the world leaders to come up with plans to mitigate the impacts of climate change on children at the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 29) held in Baku, Azerbaijan. Among those 20 resolute children was 14-years-old Zunaira Qayyum Baloch, representing the 241.5 million children and women of Pakistan.
Dressed in her traditional Balochi attire, with a radiant smile and resolute in her commitment, Zunaira Qayyum Baloch has startled everyone. Hailing from the far-flung district of Hub in the Southwest of the Pakistan’s Balochistan, Mrs. Baloch went to represent the children of a country whose carbon footprint is next to zero, yet suffering some of the worst climate-related disasters. Her message to world leaders was clear: step up and combat climate-induced inequalities, particularly those affecting women and children.
She had always remained conscious about the changing climate in her city, observing the floods of 2022 that had wrecked havoc in Hub Chowki, initiating awareness programmes and youth advocacy guide training in her home city to advocate for girls right to education and climate change.
“After my father passed away, my mother became the sole breadwinner. She helped us get an education and met all our requirements,” Zunaira explains. “During the catastrophic rains of 2022, an incident changed my perspective on climate change. Rain water had accumulated in the roof of our home and streets were flooded with water. The destruction was so overwhelming, and I realised that such events were no longer rare but increasing constantly.”
Zunaira Baloch basically hails from the Zehri town of the Khuzdar district. With her journey starting from the Zehri town of Balochistan, she became completely determined to make a difference–initiating awareness drives in her community and educating the people particularly children about climate resilience.
During the COP29, she expressed her concerns with the experts about how Pakistan, particularly Balochistan has been detrimentally affected by climate disasters like frequent floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, and droughts. Lamenting that climate change was a child-rights crisis, she told the world how changes in the climate had jeopardised the lives of millions of women and children throughout the world.
Asking the world leaders to join determined children like her to combat climate change, she addressed them in the COP29: “Climate change matters to me, and it should matter to you too.”
Both Noora and Zunaira are children’s of a backward region of the world, grappling with the harrowing reality of climate change. Given that Noora represents those children unaware of the technicalities of climate change, Zunaira is a resolute hope for Balochistan, leading children like Noora to recognize and combat the stark reality of climate crisis.
Stark Reality of the Past
Bibi Dureen, 80, is a witness of how climate is continuously transforming. With wrinkles on her face and a pointed nose, she hails from the outskirts of the Kech district in a town called Nasirabad.
“The seasons are changing,” she says, her voice laced with sorrow. “The heatwaves have become more aggressive and floods are common. It all started in 1998 in Turbat. Then in 2007, a devastating flood destroyed our homes, date palm trees, livestock–and worst of all, it took lives.” She pauses, her wrinkled hands trembling.
As she talks to me in front of her thatched cottage, through which sunlight streams in, tears well up in her eyes as she recalls a haunting childhood memory. “I was a small child at that time. It was a pitch-black night and the rain was pouring down mercilessly when a man came shouting that the flood water had reached the fields.” She exclaims, “My mother, desperate to save what little we had, sent her only son, Habib, 16–our family’s only breadwinner–to find the only cow we had in the fields. Neither the cow nor Habib came back. Later some men found his dead body in the jungle.”
In June 2007, when the Cyclone Yemyin hit the coast of Balochistan, it wrought unprecedented damage to the province, particularly Turbat, Pasni and Ormara. It rendered 50,000 homeless within 24 hours, including children. According to reports 800,000 were affected and 24 went missing.
The 2022 floods had a devastating impact across Pakistan, Balochistan being one of the hardest-hit. The Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) reported that 528 children had died nationwide, 336 from Balochistan.
Tragedy struck again in 2024 when torrential rains engulfed 32 districts of Balochistan, particularly the port city of Gwadar and Kech district. The PDMA put the death toll at 170, 55 of which were children.
These statistics highlight how urgently appropriate plans and proper strategies for disaster preparedness and loss mitigation in Balochistan must be developed. While extreme weather events such as floods become more common, the need to fight climate change has never been greater.
The Double Crisis Facing Girls: Heatwaves, period poverty
Regions in Balochistan have seen severe heatwaves in the past few decades. In May 2017, the mercury rose to a record breaking 53.5 centigrade in Turbat, making the district the second hottest locale in 2017 after Mitribah, Kuwait. During heatwaves, cases of fainting and health-related illness among residents, particularly among children are common. According to a 2023 report by the Pakistan Meteorological Department, Balochistan has seen a 1.8°C rise in average temperature over the past three decades, leading to longer and harsher heatwaves.
Dr Sammi Parvaz, a gynaecologist at the teaching hospital in Turbat, relates that rising temperatures in the district not only contribute to higher dropout rates among school-age girls, but their menstrual cycle is also affected.
“According to the recent research of the National Institute of Health (NIH), menstruation … is severely affected in countries which are vulnerable to climate change and Pakistan is one them,” she explains. “The menstruation in girl children living in extreme heat, such as in Turbat and Karachi, becomes very intense, painful and with cramps.”
Dr Sammi further elaborates that this phenomenon is linked to the increased release of cortisol and estrogen, the hormones which regulate the female reproductive cycle. “Girl children exposed to harsher environments such as severe heat or cold, experience hormonal imbalances leading to irregular periods and severe menstrual cramps. The hospitals in Turbat are frequented by patients suffering from intense cramps or irregular periods.”
Hygiene becomes another pressing issue during floods, especially for young girls. Research published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health states that floodwater contains lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other chemicals which are cited as causes of irregular periods.
Overcoming the stigma around periods is a daunting task, particularly in small towns in Balochistan where cultural norms and practices have a strong hold on communities. During floods, thousands of girls struggle with menstruation amid the disasters and lack of menstruation products. For instance, after the 2022 floods, 650,000 pregnant women and girls in Pakistan were without essential maternal care, with a significant proportion from Balochistan.
Amid all this chaos, climate activists like Zunaira Qayyum Baloch helped raise awareness while women like Maryam Jamali work directly on the ground to ensure that every women has rations in her household and had access to feminine hygiene products during catastrophes.
Madat Balochistan–a non-profit organisation–has supported 31,000+ people across 34 districts in Sindh and Balochistan. With its major work concentrated in and around Quetta, Dera Bugti, Jaffarabad, Jhal Magsi, Sohbatpur, and Khuzdar, the proudly women-led NGO prioritizes women and girls in its work because even on the frontlines, they are bearing most of the cost of climate change, according to its co-founder, Maryam Jamali.
“Our conversations on climate change vulnerability often treat everyone as ‘equal’ in terms of impact, when that is far from the truth. Vulnerability is a multi-dimensional concept and in a country like Pakistan where most of the women and girls are pushed to the margins of society in every way possible–we cannot just overlook their struggles,” says Jamali.
Take the 2022 floods, for example–the most recent catastrophes etched in our memories. Women and girls were responsible for most of the labour when it came to evacuating to safer places. As soon as they did, their needs when it came to menstruation or pregnancy care were completely ignored by aid agencies as they sent out packages or set up medical camps. Most of our work at Madat was compensating for things like this. We worked with midwives to ensure that women who could not stand in lines for ration received it regardless or women who did not want to interact with male doctors didn’t have to. In our housing projects, we prioritize women especially those who don’t have a patriarch in the household because that severely limits their access to resources for rehabilitation.
Floods, heatwaves, and other natural calamities are gender-neutral. However, girls are more likely to be negatively affected. According to the UN Assistant Secretary-General Asako Okai, when disaster strikes, women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men. In Pakistan, 80% of people displaced by climate disasters are women and children, and the province of Balochistan is a stark reflection of this statistic.
In patriarchal societies, women and girls are the primary caregivers of the family, and they are the only ones growing crops, doing household chores, and fetching firewood and water. With little or no potable water nearby, girls have to travel far to help their parents, making them vulnerable.
These household responsibilities create an educational gap, and girls are taken out of schools in Balochistan during floods. With Pakistan’s lowest girl literacy rate at just 27 per cent , the International Rescue Committee (IRC) reported that the province of Sindh and Balochistan have seen greater educational disruptions due to heatwaves and floods, with the 2022 flood causing more educational institutions closure than the combined two year COVID-19 pandemic.
With 47 percent of it’s child population out of school, extreme heatwaves and recurrent flooding in Balochistan have further compounded this absenteeism. For instance, the 2022 flood damaged or destroyed 7,439 schools in the province, affecting the education of over 386,600 students, 17,660 teachers, and staff members. Reports also mention that most of the government schools were used as flood shelters in the province. In the 2024 floods, 464 schools were again damaged.
The destruction of educational infrastructure has forced many children out of school, contributing to the province’s high out-of-school rate.
Monsoon Brides during floods
Though floodwater is no longer accumulating in the Mulla Band Ward of Gwadar district in Balochistan, the damage it has wrought will stay with the people for a long time for many years. For 16-year-old Gul Naz–a pseudonym–the loss has been devastating.
She was only 16 years when flood water entered their home in 2022. Her father, being a fisherman, struggled to make ends meet, as the sea was completely closed for fishing, cutting off the family’s only source of income.
“I was in the Jannat Market and when I returned home, I was told by my mother that my marriage has been fixed to a man twice my age in exchange for money.” She discloses that her parents were given Rs.50,000 ($178.50) which is a whooping sum for a poor family who survive on around one dollar a day.
“I have two kids now, and I am a child raising a child.”
The sadness in Gul Naz’s voice is palpable, and she isn’t alone in her predicament. During floods and emergency situations, families in Balochistan resort to desperate means for survival. The first and most obvious way is to give their daughters away in marriage for financial relief–a practice that usually surges during monsoon season, earning the name monsoon brides.
In Pakistan’s Sindh province this trend is more prevalent, with a spike in the number of monsoon brides during the last flash floods of 2022. In the Khan Mohammad Mallah Village, Dadu district, approximately 45 were married off in that year, according to an NGO Sujag Sansar which works to reduce child marriages in the region.
Pakistan stands sixth in the world in marriages below age 18. While there has been a reduction in child marriages in Pakistan in recent years, UNICEF warns that extreme weather patterns put the girl children at risk.
Madat Balochistan has also been in the forefront in reducing child marriages in Balochistan. “It’s not intuitive to think of girls’ education or loan relief or housing provision as measures to build climate change resilience, but in our contexts these are the very things that drive vulnerability to climate change,” says Maryam Jamali. “We have been working on supporting farmers with loan relief so that young girls aren’t married off to compensate for the financial burden of loans after a lost harvest. We are also working on initiatives for sustainable livelihoods for women as well as ensuring that young girls in all the communities we work in have access to education despite geographic or financial limitations.”
Maryam Jamali thinks that gender inequality is one of the biggest aspects here which makes it absolutely necessary for a region like Balochistan, where physical vulnerability and socio-economic vulnerability is high, to have young girls at the decision-making table.
“Activists like Zunaira can ensure that when we come up with solutions for climate change, we contextualize them through a gender lens and make sure that this does not become another instance of taking away women’s agency, but becomes an opportunity to involve them in climate change policy decision-making,” Maryam discloses. “ It is rewarding to see the girls we support do great things. One of our girls from Musakhel is studying at Cadet College Quetta, the first in her family to be able to pursue education beyond 8th grade.”
The Way forward
“Extreme weather can fuel conflict and be a threat multiplier,” says Advocate Siraj Gul, a lawyer at the Balochistan High Court, Quetta, citing the recent research published in the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.
Hailing from the Makran division , he stresses that the decades long running insurgency in Balochistan stems from human rights violations, inequality and government negligence. “Climate related catastrophes further destabilise the region’s development. For instance, there was a surge in the number of protests during the 2022 floods in Gwadar, Lasbela and Turbat, reflecting the deep frustration and despair of the people.”
According to Mr. Gul, if children like Zunaira are given a platform to speak and work for Balochistan, they are not merely advocating for the environment; they are working for a more peaceful and tranquil region.
In the impoverished regions of the world where climate change fuels droughts, flood and heatwaves, children are the ones to bear. Some are taken out of school, pushed into labor or given away in marriage but if empowered, can become advocates for change like Zunaira Qayyum Baloch. The world needs to provide climate resilient infrastructure and child-oriented disaster relief programs while the global leaders at COP30 had better ensure that climate-torn regions like Balochistan receive the technical and financial support they desperately need.
Vanuatu has celebrated the reconstruction of the national council of chiefs meeting house, called the Malvatumauri nakamal, destroyed by fire two years ago.
Dozens of chiefs from across the country — and also Kanaky New Caledonia — joined the ceremony in the capital Port Vila on Wednesday, March 5, during the Chiefs Day national public holiday alongside the president, prime minister and general public.
Traditional dances, kastom ceremonies, and speeches highlighted the building’s cultural significance, reinforcing its role as a place for conflict resolution, discussions on governance, and the preservation of oral traditions.
After independence in 1980, the chiefs decided a symbol representing unity for all of Vanuatu’s peoples and customs be built in Port Vila. The nakamal was officially opened in 1990.
Ahead of the ceremony, Prime Minister Jotham Napat emphasised all are welcome at the meeting house, in the heart of the capital.
“Nakamal does not separate the people, nakamal has a place for everyone,” Napat said.
President of the Malvatumauri Council of Chiefs Paul Robert Ravun used the occasion to call for greater parliamentary consultation with customary leaders.
‘Right time to speak’
“For 44 years we have been silent, but now, in this moment, I believe it is the right time to speak,” Ravun said.
“Any bill that is to be passed through Parliament must first pass through the father’s house, the father must agree and have the final say before it can proceed,” he said, referring to the council of chiefs.
The nakamal took two years to rebuild using locally sourced materials, including natangura palm for the thatched roof and hardwood for the framework, after it was destroyed by fire in early 2023.
Volunteers including chiefs, community members, and apprentices eager to learn ancestral building techniques all contributed to its construction and it survived December’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake intact.
Vanuatu’s government and international donors France, Australia, New Zealand, and China provided financial and logistical support for its reconstruction, costing about 20 million vatu (US$160,000).
Republished with permission from BenarNews.
Images by the VBTC
The Malvatumauri nakamal
1 of 10
Nak 1: President of the Malvatumauri Council of Chief Paul Robert Ravun Merhimba DangDang at the reopening of the rebuilt nakamal. Image: VBTC
Nak 2: The rebuilt national council of chief’s meeting house. Image: VBTC
Nak 3: Everyone is welcome inside at new chiefs’ nakamal. Image: VBTC
Nak 4: Inside the Malvatumauri nakamal ahead of its reopening. Image: VBTC
Nak 5: Ready for the nakamal opening. Image: VCTC
Nak 6: Head of State Nikenike Vurobaravu (left) and the president of the Malvatumauri Council of Chief, Ravun Merhimba DangDang, open the doors to the Nakamal. Image: VBTC
Nak 7: A traditional dance from Tanna Island during the nakamal’s opening ceremony. Image: VBTC
Nak 8: Chief Gureshaba La Roche Mare Nengone Sinewami Wakewi, president of the National Council of Chiefs in Kanaky New Caledonia (Inaat Ne Kanaky), attended the traditional ceremony in Port Vila. Image: VBTC
Nak 9: Chief Gureshaba La Roche Mare Nengone Sinewami Wakewi, president of the National Council of Chiefs in New Caledonia (Inaat Ne Kanaky ), prepares to receive a traditional preparation of kava at the opening. Image: VBTC
Nak 10: President of the Malvatumauri council of chiefs Ravun Merhimba DangDang (left), Minister of Finance Johnny Koanapo and President, Nikenike Vurobaravu (right) tour the new nakamal. Image: VBTC
As Benjamin Netanyahu threatens to resume war, Hamas outlines widespread Israeli ceasefire violations in document sent to the mediators.
By Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Dropsite News
Hamas officials submitted a two-page report to mediators yesterday listing a wide range of Israeli violations of the Gaza ceasefire since the agreement went into effect on January 19 — including the killing of civilians, repeated ground and air incursions, the beating and humiliation of Palestinian captives during their release and the deportation of some without their consent, and the denial of humanitarian aid.
Drop Site News obtained a copy of the report delivered to mediators from Qatar and Egypt.
“Hamas is committed to the ceasefire agreement if the occupation is committed to the agreement,” Hamas said in a statement.
“We confirm that the occupation is the party that did not abide by its commitments, and it bears responsibility for any complications or delays.”
The move comes in response to accusations by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas had violated the agreement, threatening a full resumption of the war — yet it was Israel’s nearly daily breaches of the deal that prompted Hamas to announce it would postpone the next release of Israeli captives.
On Monday, Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, announced the next planned release of three Israeli captives, scheduled for Saturday, would be “postponed indefinitely”.
Abu Obeida cited “delays in allowing displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, targeting them with airstrikes and gunfire across various areas of the Strip, and failing to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid as agreed”.
Israel violating ceasefire agreement
Hamas issued a statement soon afterwards reiterating that Israel was violating the agreement by blocking aid, attacking civilians, and restricting movement in Gaza, and warning that the next release of captives would be postponed until it complied.
“By issuing this statement five full days ahead of the scheduled prisoner handover, Hamas aims to grant mediators sufficient time to pressure the occupation to fulfill its obligations,” the statement said.
Three Israeli officials and two mediators speaking anonymously to The New York Times confirmed that Israel had not fulfilled its obligations to send humanitarian aid into Gaza. This fact was mentioned in the 9th paragraph of the Times story.
In response, President Trump, on Monday told reporters that the ceasefire should be cancelled if Hamas did not release all the remaining captives it was holding in Gaza by midday Saturday, warning “all hell is going to break out”.
Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on Trump’s comments.
“If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon,” Netanyahu said in a video statement, “the ceasefire will end, and the IDF will return to intense fighting until Hamas is finally defeated.”
Netanyahu reportedly ordered the military to add more troops in and around Gaza to prepare for “every scenario” if the captives were not released.
It was not immediately clear if he was referring to the three Israelis originally scheduled for release Saturday, all remaining captives, or all living Israelis slated for release in Phase 1.
Document submitted to mediators
The two-page document submitted by Hamas to mediators yesterday divided the violations into five separate categories: Field Violations, Prisoners, Humanitarian Aid, Denial of Essential Supplies, and Political Violations.
Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire deal since it came into effect, targeting Palestinians in Gaza on an almost daily basis. The document outlines 269 “field violations” by the Israeli military, including the killing of 26 Palestinians and the wounding of 59 others.
Page 1 of the Hamas report of ceasefire violations by Israel. Image: Hamas screenshot APR/DDN
The number of people killed appears to be a dramatic undercount compared to the official toll documented by the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
The report also lists repeated ground incursions into Gaza beyond the designated buffer zone, particularly in the Philadelphi corridor — the 14km strip of land that runs along the border of Egypt.
These incursions “were accompanied by gunfire and resulted in the deaths of citizens and the demolition of homes,” the report said.
It also accused Israeli authorities of subjecting Palestinian captives to beatings and humiliation during their release, forcibly deporting released captives to Gaza without their coordination or consent, preventing families of deported prisoners from leaving the West Bank to join them, and delaying prisoner releases by several hours.
The report also says that fewer than 25 fuel trucks per day have been allowed into Gaza, which is half of the allotted 50 fuel trucks per day, as outlined in the deal. The entry of commercial fuel was blocked entirely, the report says, again in violation of the agreement.
Only 53,000 tents allowed
Just over 53,000 tents were allowed into Gaza, the reports says, out of the 200,000 allotted and no mobile housing units out of the 60,000 agreed on.
Heavy machinery for the removal of massive amounts of debris and retrieval of bodies was similarly blocked, with only four machines allowed in.
Israel also blocked the entry of supplies to repair and operate the power plant and electrical grid, the report said.
No medical supplies, ambulances have been allowed in and no equipment for civil defense teams. Meanwhile banks were not allowed to receive cash to replenish a severe currency shortage.
The report ends on “Political Violations” criticising statements by the “Israeli Prime Minister and ministers openly calling for the expulsion of Gaza’s population, sending a clear message that the occupation does not wish to honour the agreement and aims to implement Trump’s plan to displace Gaza’s residents”.
It also criticises the “deliberate delay” in starting the negotiations on Phase 2 of the ceasefire and “the introduction of impossible conditions.”
A summary of the Israeli ceasefire violations. Image: QudsNews
What will happen to Australia — and New Zealand — once the superpower that has been followed into endless battles, the United States, finally unravels?
With President Donald Trump now into his second week in the White House, horrific fires have continued to rage across Los Angeles and the details of Elon Musk’s allegedly dodgy Twitter takeover began to emerge, the world sits anxiously by.
The consequences of a second Trump term will reverberate globally, not only among Western nations. But given the deeply entrenched Americanisation of much of the Western world, this is about how it will navigate the after-shocks once the United States finally unravels — for unravel it surely will.
Leading with chaos Now that the world’s biggest superpower and war machine has a deranged criminal at the helm — for a second time — none of us know the lengths to which Trump (and his puppet masters) will go as his fingers brush dangerously close to the nuclear codes. Will he be more emboldened?
The signs are certainly there.
President Donald Trump 2.0 . . . will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division? Image: ABC News screenshot IA
So far, Trump — who had already led the insurrection of a democratically elected government — has threatened to exit the nuclear arms pact with Russia, talked up a trade war with China and declared “all hell will break out” in the Middle East if Hamas hadn’t returned the Israeli hostages.
Will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division?
This, too, appears to be already happening.
Trump’s rants leading up to his inauguration last week had been a steady stream of crazed declarations, each one more unhinged than the last.
Denial of catastrophic climate consequences
And will Trump be in even further denial over the catastrophic consequences of climate change than during his last term? Even as Los Angeles grapples with a still climbing death toll of 25 lives lost, 12,000 homes, businesses and other structures destroyed and 16,425 hectares (about the size of Washington DC) wiped out so far in the latest climactic disaster?
The fires are, of course, symptomatic of the many years of criminal negligence on global warming. But since Trump instead accused California officials of “prioritising environmental policies over public safety” while his buddy and head of government “efficiency”, Musk blamed black firefighters for the fires, it would appear so.
Will the madman, for surely he is one, also gift even greater protections to oligarchs like Musk?
“…pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal agencies”.
So, this too is already happening.
All of these actions will combine to create a scenario of destruction that will see the implosion of the US as we know it, though the details are yet to emerge.
The flawed AUKUS pact sinking quickly . . . Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with outgoing President Joe Biden, will Australia have the mettle to be bigger than Trump. Image: Independent Australia
What happens Down Under?
US allies — like Australia — have already been thoroughly indoctrinated by American pop culture in order to complement the many army bases they house and the defence agreements they have signed.
Though Trump hasn’t shown any interest in making it a 52nd state, Australia has been tucked up in bed with the United States since the Cold War. Our foreign policy has hinged on this alliance, which also significantly affects Australia’s trade and economy, not to mention our entire cultural identity, mired as it is in US-style fast food dependence and reality TV. Would you like Vegemite McShaker Fries with that?
So what will happen to Australia once the superpower we have followed into endless battles finally breaks down?
‘Trump has promised chaos and chaos is what he’ll deliver.’
His rise to power will embolden the rabid Far-Right in the US but will this be mirrored here? And will Australia follow the US example and this year elect our very own (admittedly scaled down) version of Trump, personified by none other than the Trump-loving Peter Dutton?
If any of his wild announcements are to be believed, between building walls and evicting even US nationals he doesn’t like, while simultaneously making Canadians US citizens, Trump will be extremely busy.
There will be little time even to consider Australia, let alone come to our rescue should we ever need the might of the US war machine — no matter whether it is an Albanese or sycophantic Dutton leadership.
It is a given, however, that we would be required to honour all defence agreements should our ally demand it.
It would be great if, as psychologists urge us to do when children act up, our leaders could simply ignore and refuse to engage with him, but it remains to be seen whether Australia will have the mettle to be bigger than Trump.
Republished from the Independent Australia with permission.
For Doddy Morris, a journalist with the Vanuatu Daily Post, the 7.3 magnitude earthquake that struck Vanuatu last month on December 17, 2024, was more than just a story — it was a personal tragedy.
Amid the chaos, Morris learned his brother, an Anglican priest, had died.
“My mom called me crying and asked, ‘Did your brother die?’. I wasn’t sure and told her I was heading to Vila Central Hospital right away,” he recalled.
Morris arrived at the hospital to confirm the worst. “My heart sank when I confirmed that my brother had indeed passed away. At that moment, I forgot about my job.”
Doddy’s brother’s coffin . . . Doddy bids him farewell before the casket is flown to their home island. Image: Doddy Morris The New Atoll
Despite his grief, Morris joined his remaining brothers at the hospital mortuary that night, staying by their deceased sibling’s side and mourning together. “We were the only ones there. We spent the whole night drinking kava outside while he lay in the cool room,” he said.
The quake — which claimed 14 lives, injured more than 265 people, and displaced more than 1000 — left an indelible mark on Port Vila and its residents. Infrastructure damage was extensive, with schools, homes, and water reserves destroyed, and the Central Business District (CBD) heavily impacted.
In the days following the earthquake, Morris returned to his role as a reporter, capturing the unfolding crisis despite the emotional toll. “When the earthquake struck, I thought I was going to die myself,” he said. Yet, minutes after the tremor subsided, he grabbed his camera and rushed to the CBD.
At the heart of the destruction, he witnessed harrowing scenes. “I was shocked to see the collapsed Billabong building. A body lay covered with a blue tarpaulin, and Pro Rescue teams were trying to save others who were trapped inside,” Morris recounted.
The lack of a network connection frustrated his efforts to report live, but he pressed on, documenting the damage.
A month after the disaster, Morris continues to cover the aftermath as Vanuatu transitions from emergency response to recovery. “A month has passed since the earthquake, but the memories remain fresh. We don’t know when Port Vila will return to normal,” he said.
His photojournalism has been demonstrating the true impact of the earthquake as he continues to capture the mourning of a nation after such a tragic event.
Doddy Morris’ photojournalism . . . demonstrating the true impact of the earthquake as he continues to capture the mourning of a nation after such a tragic event. Image: Vanuatu Daily Post/The New Atoll
The earthquake left deep scars, not only on the nation’s infrastructure but also on its people. “Unlike cyclones, which we can predict, prepare for, and survive, earthquakes strike without warning and show no mercy,” Morris said.
Through grief and uncertainty, Morris remains committed to his work, documenting the resilience of his community and the challenges they face as they rebuild. His reporting serves as a testament to the strength of both the people of Vanuatu and a journalist who continues to bear witness, even in the face of personal loss.
Journalist Doddy Morris . . . reporting on the traumatic events of the earthquake meant confronting his own grief while documenting the grief of others. Image: The New Atoll
Reporting on his own community while grappling with personal loss is a reality for many Pacific Island journalists who cover disasters. For Doddy Morris, reporting on the traumatic events of the earthquake meant confronting his own grief while documenting the grief of others.
Dr Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a Pacific journalism trainer with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She expresses her support for Morris and his colleagues in showing extraordinary courage and resilience. This article was first published by The New Atoll and is republished with permission.
RNZ International (RNZI) began broadcasting to the Pacific region 35 years ago — on 24 January 1990, the same day the Auckland Commonwealth Games opened.
Its news bulletins and programmes were carried by a brand new 100kW transmitter.
The service was rebranded as RNZ Pacific in 2017. However its mission remains unchanged, to provide news of the highest quality and be a trusted service to local broadcasters in the Pacific region.
Although RNZ had been broadcasting to the Pacific since 1948, in the late 1980s the New Zealand government saw the benefit of upgrading the service. Thus RNZI was born, with a small dedicated team.
The first RNZI manager was Ian Johnstone. He believed that the service should have a strong cultural connection to the people of the Pacific. To that end, it was important that some of the staff reflected parts of the region where RNZ Pacific broadcasted.
He hired the first Pacific woman sports reporter at RNZ, the late Elma Ma’ua.
Linden Clark (from left) and Ian Johnstone, former managers of RNZ International now known as RNZ Pacific, and Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor, current manager of RNZ Pacific . . . strong cultural connection to the people of the Pacific. Image: RNZ
The Pacific region is one of the most vital areas of the earth, but it is not always the safest, particularly from natural disasters.
Disaster coverage
RNZ Pacific covered events such as the 2009 Samoan tsunami, and during the devastating 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption, it was the only news service that could be heard in the kingdom.
Cyclones have become more frequent in the region, and RNZ Pacific provides vital weather updates, as the late Linden Clark, RNZI’s second manager, explained: “Many times, we have been broadcasting warnings on analogue shortwave to listeners when their local station has had to go off air or has been forced off air.”
RNZ Pacific’s cyclone watch service continues to operate during the cyclone season in the South Pacific.
As well as natural disasters, the Pacific can also be politically volatile. Since its inception RNZ Pacific has reported on elections and political events in the region.
Some of the more recent events include the 2000 and 2006 coups in Fiji, the Samoan Constitutional Crisis of 2021, the 2006 pro-democracy riots in Nuku’alofa, the revolving door leadership changes in Vanuatu, and the 2022 security agreement that Solomon Islands signed with China.
Human interest, culture
Human interest and cultural stories are also a key part of RNZ Pacific’s programming.
The service regularly covers cultural events and festivals within New Zealand, such as Polyfest. This was part of Linden Clark’s vision, in her role as RNZI manager, that the service would be a link for the Pacific diaspora in New Zealand to their homelands.
Today, RNZ Pacific continues that work. Currently its programmes are carried on two transmitters — one installed in 2008 and a much more modern facility, installed in 2024 following a funding boost.
Around 20 Pacific region radio stations relay RNZP’s material daily. Individual short-wave listeners and internet users around the world tune in directly to RNZ Pacific content which can be received as far away as Japan, North America, the Middle East and Europe.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
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.
Star Wharf, the international port, is still out of action and parts of the city and some of the villages surrounding it still have not had their water supply reconnected.
“They are still afraid. Even last night when we had that one that happened, we all ran outside,” she said.
“It’s hard for us to remain in the house.”
Ongoing trauma
The only mental health specialist at Vila Central Hospital, Dr Jimmy Obed, said the ongoing seismic activity is re-traumatising many.
Obed said as things slowly returned to something resembling normalcy, more people were reaching out for mental health support.
“What we try and tell them is that it’s a normal thing for you to be having this anxiety,” he said.
“And then we give them some skills. How to calm themselves down . . . when they are panicking, or are under stress, or have difficulty sleeping.
“Simple skills that they can use — even how children can calm and regulate their emotions.”
Post-earthquake scenes from Port Vila in Vanuatu. Image: Michael Thompson/FB/RNZ Pacific
Meanwhile, following yesterday’s snap election, preliminary counting and the transportation of ballot boxes back to the capital for the official tally continues.
Trenold Tari, an aviation worker who spoke to RNZ Pacific after he had cast his vote, said he hopes they are able to elect leaders with good ideas for Vanuatu’s future.
“And not just the vision to run the government and the nation but also who has leadership qualities and is transparent. People who can work with communities and who don’t just think about themselves,” he said.
Wanting quick rebuild
Many voters in the capital said they wanted leaders who would act quickly to rebuild the quake-stricken city.
Others said they were sick of political instability.
This week’s snap election was triggered by a premature dissolution of parliament last year; the second consecutive time President Nike Vurobaravu has acted on a council of ministers’ request to dissolve the house in the face of a leadership challenge.
Counting this week’s election, Vanuatu will have had five prime ministers in the last four years.
The chairperson of the Seaside Tongoa community, Paul Fred Tariliu, said they have discussed this as a group and made their feelings clear to their election candidate.
“We told our candidate to tell the presidents of all the political parties they are affiliated with — that if they end up in government and they find at some point they don’t have the number and a motion is brought against you, please be honest and set a good example — tell one group to step down and let another government come in,” Tariliu said.
The head of the Vanuatu Red Cross Society is looking to start distributing financial relief assistance to families affected by last month’s earthquake.
The embassy building for NZ, the US, the UK and France in Vanuatu was severely damaged in the earthquake. Image: Dan McGarry
The society’s secretary-general, Dickinson Tevi, said some villages were still without water and a lot of people were out of work.
“We have realised that there are still a few requests coming from the communities. People who haven’t been assessed during the emergency,” Tevi said.
“So, we have made plans to do a more detailed assessment after this to make sure we don’t leave anyone out.”
Tevi said with schools due to restart soon, parents and families who had lost their main source of income were under a lot of stress.
In a release, Save the Children Vanuatu country director Polly Bank, said disasters often had the power to suddenly turn children’s lives upside down, especially if they had lost loved ones, had their education interrupted, or had been forced to flee their homes.
Critical for children’s recovery
“In the aftermath of any disaster, it is critical for children recovering that they are able to return to their normal routines as soon as possible,” she said.
“And for most kids, this would include returning to school, where they can reconnect with friends and share their experiences.”
She said at least 12,500 children in the country may be forced to start the new school year in temporary learning centres with at least 100 classrooms across the country damaged or destroyed.
It is back to business for Vanuatu today after the public holiday that was declared yesterday to allow people to go and vote.
Unofficial election results continue to trickle in with local media reporting an even distribution of seats across the country for the Leaders Party, Vanua’aku Party, Reunification Movement for Change and the Iauko Group.
But it is still early days, with official results a while away.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
CBS Evening News (1/13/25) cited Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example of how climate disruption is making wildfires more destructive.
The devastation of the ongoing Los Angeles fires is an alarm going off, but also the result of society having hit the snooze button long ago (Democracy Now!, 1/9/25; CBS, 1/13/25). Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California (NPR, 11/8/23), in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.
“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear,” the Nature Conservancy (7/9/24) said. “Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons.”
The scientific journal Fire Ecology (7/24/23) reported that “climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States.”
Now we are watching one of America’s largest cities burn. It’s a severe reminder that the kind of disruption we experienced in the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020 is the new normal under climate change.
The right-wing media, however, have found a culprit—it’s not climate change, but Democratic Party–led wokeness. The coverage demonstrates once again that the W-word can be used to blame literally anything in the Murdoch fantasyland.
‘Preoccupation With DEI’
Alyssia Finley (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/25): “A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans.” Another cynic might wonder if the Journal publishes smears without evidence as part of its business model.
“Megyn Kelly sounded off on Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Karen Bass,” the New York Post (1/8/25) reported. Former Fox News host Kelly said “that the officials’ preoccupation with diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs distracted them from the city’s fire-combating duties.”
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (1/12/25) echoed the charge: “Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response, but they illustrate the government’s wrongheaded priorities.” In other words, the paper didn’t have evidence to blame the fires on firefighter salaries or department diversity, but decided to insinuate as much anyway.
Other conservative journalists were more direct, like CNN pundit Scott Jennings, who went on CNN NewsNight (1/8/25) to assert:
As a matter of public policy in California, the main interest in the fire department lately has been in DEI programming and budget cuts, and now we have this massive fire, and people are upset.
As the Daily Beast (1/9/25) noted, “His response was part of a Republican kneejerk reaction that included President-elect Donald Trump blaming ‘liberals’ and state Gov. Gavin Newsom.”
The Washington Post (1/10/25) reported that Trump-supporting X owner Elon Musk
has been inundating his 212 million followers with posts casting blame for the blazes on Democrats and diversity policies, amplifying narratives that have taken hold among far-right activists and Republican leaders.
Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, blamed the LA devastation on the “woke religion” (New York Post, 1/9/25).
“There are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs—and more women firefighters isn’t one of them,” moaned National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry (New York Post, 1/15/25). “Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters.”
Blaming gay singers
Mentioned by Fox News (1/10/25): $13,000 allocated to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs. Not mentioned by Fox News: a $126 million boost to the LAPD budget.
Fox & Friends (1/9/25, 1/9/25) blamed the city’s Democratic leaders and the fire chief for the destruction. Fox NewsDigital (1/10/25) said:
While Los Angeles officials were stripping millions in funding from their fire department ahead of one of the most destructive wildfires in state history, hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to fund programs such as a “Gay Men’s Chorus” and housing for the transgender homeless.
You may notice the shift from “millions” to “hundreds of thousands”—the latter, obviously, can’t explain what happened to the former. What can far better explain it is that the city focused much more on funding cops than firefighters (Intercept, 1/8/25). The mayor’s budget plan offered “an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LA Fire Department” (KTTV, 4/22/24). KABC (1/9/25) reported more recent numbers, saying the “fire department’s budget was cut by $17.6 million,” while the “city’s police department budget increased by $126 million,” according to the city’s controller.
And in 2023, the LA City Council approved salary increases for cops over objections that these pay boosts “would pull money away from mental health clinicians, homeless outreach workers and many other city needs” (LA Times, 8/23/23). The cop-pay deal was reportedly worth $1 billion (KNBC, 8/23/23).
LAFD cuts under Mayor Bass were, in fact, big news (KTTV, 1/15/25). Fox overlooked the comparison with the police, one regularly made by city beat reporters who cover public safety and city budgets, and went straight to blaming gay singers.
Crusade against ‘woke’
Contrary to the Daily Mail‘s headline (1/14/25), former California first lady Maria Shriver Maria Shriver did not “tear into LA’s woke leaders”; rather, she complained about LA’s insufficient funding of public needs.
Or take the Daily Mail (1/14/25), a right-wing British tabloid with a huge US footprint, whose headline said former California first lady “Maria Shriver Is Latest Celebrity to Tear Into LA’s Woke Leaders.” But the story went on to say that Shriver had decried the cuts to the LAFD, citing no evidence that she was fighting some culture war against women firefighters.
Shriver, the ex-wife of actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was pointing the finger at austerity and calling for more public spending. In other words, Shriver was siding with LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who had complained that city budget cuts had failed her department (CNN, 1/12/25). The Mail’s insistence on calling this a crusade against “woke” is just another example of how tediously the conservative media apply this word to almost anything.
While these accusations highlight diversification in the LA firefighting force, the right never offers real evidence that these hiring practices lead to any kind of hindering of fire response, as University of Southern California education professor Shaun Harper (Time, 1/13/25) noted. If anything, the right admits that miserly budgeting, usually considered a virtue in the conservative philosophy, is the problem.
Equal opportunity disasters
These talking points among right-wing politicians and their sycophants in the media serve several purposes. They bury the idea that climate change, driven by fossil fuels and out-of-control growth, has anything to do with the rise in extreme weather. They pin the blame on Democrats: LA is a blue city in a blue state. And they continue the racist and sexist drumbeat that all of society’s ills can be pinned on the advancement of women and minorities.
There is, of course, an opportunity to look at political mismanagement, including the cutbacks in the fire department. But natural disasters—intensified by climate change and exacerbated by poor political leadership—have ravaged unwoke, Republican-dominated states, as well, meaning Democrats don’t have a monopoly on blame.
Hurricane Ian practically destroyed Sanibel Island in Florida, a state that has been living with Trumpism for some time under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Hurricane Helene also ravaged that state, as well as western North Carolina, a state that went to Trump in the last three elections. Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas’ largest city, Houston, and the rest of Texas has suffered power outages and shortages, due to both extreme cold and summer spikes in energy demand.
Climate change, and the catastrophes it brings to the earth, does not discriminate against localities based on their populations’ political leanings. But conservative media do.
Metastasizing mythology
Ari Paul (In These Times, 8/31/15): “The more progress made in racial and gender diversity, the more white male firefighters will denounce the changes and say that increased diversity is only the result of lowering standards.”
Meanwhile, real firefighters know what the real problem is. The Western Fire Chiefs Association (3/5/24) said:
Global warming pertains to the increased rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, largely caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. These practices emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures over time. Recent data on fire and trends suggests that global extreme fire incidents could rise by up to 14% by the year 2030, 30% by 2050, and 50% by the end of the century. The impact of global warming is seen particularly in the western United States, where record-setting wildfires have occurred in recent years. Fourteen of the 20 largest wildfires on record have been in California over the past 15 years.
Conservative media can ignore all this, because the notion that cultural liberalism has tainted firefighting isn’t new. I covered efforts to diversify the New York City Fire Department as a reporter for the city’s labor-focused weekly Chief-Leader, and I saw firsthand that the resistance to the efforts were based on the idea that minority men weren’t smart enough and women (white and otherwise) weren’t strong enough (PBS, 3/28/06; New York Times, 3/18/14; In These Times, 8/31/15).
What I found interesting in that case was that other major fire departments had achieved higher levels of integration, and no one was accusing those departments of falling behind in their duties. At the same time, while the FDNY resisted diversification, the New York Police Department, almost worshipped by right-wing media, embraced it (New York Post, 9/8/14, 6/10/16).
This racist and sexist mythology has metastasized in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus for years. With Trump coming back into power, these media outlets will feel more empowered to regurgitate this line of thinking, both during this disaster in LA and in the disasters ahead of us.
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.
Earlier on Wednesday, January 8th, I saw a prominent Zionist commentator and Twitter/X User post, “Has Greta Thunberg taken her keffiyeh off to address the fires in LA yet or are there too many Jews living here for her to be concerned?” The weird implications about a mythical antisemitic malice that climate activist Greta Thunberg has to supposedly fuel her anti-genocide and ecocide beliefs aside, the post is equally embarrassing in its lack of understanding about the exacerbators of Los Angeles’ most destructive fires in the metropolitan area’s history.
Out of the rubble of last year’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake that hit Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila on December 17 and the snap election due next week on January 16, a new leadership is required to reset the country’s developmental trajectory.
Persistent political turmoil has hampered the Pacific nation’s ability to deal with a compounding set of social and economic shocks over recent years, caused by climate-related and other natural disasters.
The earthquake is estimated to have conservatively caused US$244 million (VUV29 billion) in damage, and the Vanuatu government’s ability to pay for disaster response, the election, and resume public service delivery will require strong, committed and stable leadership.
Prior to the devastating quake and dramatic dissolution of Parliament on November 18, economist Peter Judge from Vanuatu-based Pacific Consulting warned of an evolving economic emergency.
Vanuatu’s US$1 billion economy faced a concerning decline in government revenue from value-added tax, down 25 percent on the previous year.
This was a ripple effect from the decline in economic activity after the collapse of national airline Air Vanuatu last May, as well as the falling revenues from the troubled Citizenship by Investment Programme.
Both were plagued by lack of oversight by parliamentarians.
Struggling economy
In 2024, Vanuatu is expected to record about 1 percent economic growth, as it struggles to climb out of the red and back to pre-pandemic levels.
Conversely, Vanuatu has a much more positive, although somewhat contradictory democratic profile.
According to the Global State of Democracy Initiative, Vanuatu is one of the more democratic states in the Pacific islands region, and currently ranks as 45th in the world.
But this performance comes with a significant price. Leadership turnover is frequent, with 28 prime ministerial terms in just 44 years of statehood, 20 of those in the last 25 years — the highest frequency of change in the Melanesian region.
The impacts of disrupted leadership and political instability are highly visible. Government decision-making and service delivery is grindingly slow.
In Vanuatu’s Parliament, the legislative process is frequently deferred due to regular motions of no confidence, with several critical bills still awaiting MPs’ attention.
Last October, for example, the Vanuatu government proposed a 2025 budget 10 percent smaller than 2024’s, due to reduced economic activity and declining government revenue.
Sudden dissolution
Parliament was unable to approve this year’s budget due to its sudden dissolution on November 18, only two-and-a-half years into a four-year political term.
This is the second consecutive presidential dissolution of Parliament, the previous one in 2022 also occurring barely two-and-a-half years into its term.
The Bill for the appropriation of the 2025 budget now awaits the formation of the next legislature for approval. In the meantime, earthquake recovery and election management costs accumulate under a caretaker government.
With deepening economic hardship and industries facing slow economic growth across multiple sectors, voters are looking for leadership that can stabilise the compounding cost of living pressures.
The new government will need to urgently tackle overdue, unresolved issues pertaining to reliable inter-island transport and air connectivity, outstanding teacher salaries and greater opportunities for the nation’s restive youth.
Democracy with political stability is the holy grail for Vanuatu. But attaining this legendary and supposedly miraculous prize comes with costs attached.
Rules come into force
In response to civic and youth activism in late 2023 calling for political stability and transparency, the last Parliament approved a national referendum to make political affiliation more accountable and end party hopping.The rules come into force in the next parliamentary term for the first time.
The referendum passed successfully on May 29, 2024, but cost US$2.9 million. The 2022 snap election required US$1.4 million and the 2025 poll is expected to require another US$1.6 million.
While revenue from candidature fees of US$250,000 does cover part of these costs, each legislature transition also weighs on the public purse.
The current crop of outgoing 52 parliamentarians were paid out US$1.62 million in gratuities and benefits — around US$31,000 per MP — even though most did not see out their full terms.
Whatever the outcome of the 2025 snap election, the incoming government will need to refocus attention on stabilising the trajectory of Vanuatu’s economy and development.
The next legislature — the 14th — will need to commit to stability in the interests of Vanuatu’s people and the nation’s development.
Budget, earthquake recovery priorities
The most immediate priorities for a new government should be the passage of the 2025 national budget and the implementation of an earthquake recovery and reconstruction plan.
In the 45 years since throwing off the British and French colonial yoke, citizens have enthusiastically done their duty at elections in the expectation of a national leadership that will take Vanuatu forward.
Now their faith appears to be waning, after the 2022 poll saw voter turnout — a key indicator of the health of a democracy — dropped below 50 percent for the first time since independence.
This election therefore needs to see a return on the considerable investment made in Vanuatu’s democratic processes, both in terms of financial cost to successive governments and donors, and more to the point, a political dividend for voters.
Anna Naupa is a ni-Vanuatu scholar and currently a PhD student at the Australian National University. Republished from BenarNews with permission.
People living near low lying areas or rivers have also been told to move, should water levels rise.
The heavy rain may also cause flash flooding.
USAR team leader Ken Cooper said last Tuesday’s 7.3 earthquake caused significant landslides.
“With the weather system that’s coming in, there is a high likelihood that the landslides continue and we need to ensure that there’s no life risks if those landslides should move further,” Cooper said.
Death toll now 12
Aftershocks have continued, and early this morning, the US Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 6.1 quake, at a depth of 40km west of Port Vila.
New Zealand and Vanuatu engineers were assessing prioritised areas in the capital, and a decision would then be made as to whether a community needed to be evacuated, Cooper said.
Since the team had been in Vanuatu, it had taken damage assessments of buildings and infrastructure, with the Vanuatu government, allowing them to prioritise the biggest risks and to assist the community in recovering more quickly, he said.
The official death toll from Vanuatu’s 7.3 magnitude quake is now 12 according to the Vanuatu Disaster Management office.
This has been confirmed by the Vila Central Hospital.
The deployment lead for New Zealand in Vanuatu praised the resilience of the ni-Vanuatu people following the 7.3 earthquake. Image: MFAT/RNZ Pacific
The team had completed almost 1000 assessments, alongside the Australia USAR team, which was a significant task, Cooper said.
Both teams shared common tools and practices, which had allowed them to work simultaneously and helped the teams to quickly carry out the assessments, he said.
“When we undertake the assessments that really gives us a clear picture of what should be prioritised and we work with the [Vanuatu] government and their infrastructure cluster, and some of the priorities we have looked at are bridges, [the] airport, the port, and also landslides,” he said.
Resilience shown by locals The deployment lead for New Zealand in Vanuatu praised the resilience of the Ni-Vanuatu people following the 7.3 earthquake.
Thousands of people had been affected by the disaster but the response effort was being hampered by damage to core infrastructure including the country’s telecommunications network.
Emma Dunlop-Bennett said the New Zealand teams on the ground were working in partnership with the Vanuatu government.
She said she was in awe of the strength of locals after the disaster.
“As we go out into communities, working . . . with the government, people are out there, getting up and doing what they can to get themselves into business as usual, life as usual. I am really in awe and humbled.
The purpose of the New Zealand team being in Vanuatu was three-fold: To provide urgent and critical humanitarian assistance, a response for consular need to New Zealanders, and to support a smooth transition from relief, response to recovery, Dunlop-Bennett said.
Then to business as usual, working along side the priority need identified by the Vanuatu government, she added.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Twenty New Caledonian children who suffered the shock of Port Vila’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake have been repatriated from Vanuatu on board a French military CASA aircraft.
The special operation was conducted on Thursday, as part of relief operations conducted by the Nouméa-based French Armed Forces in New Caledonia in response to the destructive quake that shook the Vanuatu capital, where several buildings have collapsed.
The group of children, from northern New Caledonia (Népoui, Koné, Pouembout, and Poia), are aged between 8 and 14.
They were visiting Vanuatu as part of a holiday camp organised by their sports association.
They were supervised by four adults.
One of them, Melissa Rangassamy, told local Radio Rythme Bleu upon arrival in Nouméa that the group was having a picnic on a Port Vila beach when the ground started to shake violently.
“Children were falling to the ground, everyone was falling all around, it was panic. We told the children not to move. At the time, they were in shock.
“We gathered them all, put them on the buses, and went straight up to a higher place,” she said.
“It’s so good to come back home.”
More evacuation flights
The French High Commission in New Caledonia said a special psychological assistance unit was available to anyone who should need help.
More flights to evacuate French nationals would be carried out of Port Vila to New Caledonia, French Ambassador to Vanuatu Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer said.
Vanuatu hosts a significant French community, estimated at more than 3300 French citizens, including from New Caledonia.
New Caledonia is also home to a strong ni-Vanuatu community of about 5000.
French forces deliver hygiene kits at the Port Vila airport after last week’s massive earthquake in Vanuatu. Image: French Embassy in Vanuatu/RNZ Pacific
One French national confirmed among fatalities A Vanuatu-born French citizen has been confirmed dead.
He was found under the rubble of one of the hardest-hit buildings in central Port Vila.
He has been identified as Vincent Goiset, who belongs to a long-established, affluent Vanuatu family of Vietnamese origin.
The total death toll from the December 17 earthquake stood at 15 on Friday, but was still likely to rise.
France, Australia and New Zealand: 100 percent ‘FRANZ’ Both Australia and New Zealand, through their armed forces, have deployed relief — including urban search and rescue teams — in a bid to find survivors under the collapsed buildings.
The two countries are part of a tripartite set-up called “FRANZ” (France, Australia, New Zealand).
Signed in 1992, the agreement enforces a policy of systematic coordination between the three armed forces when they operate to bring assistance to Pacific island countries affected by a natural disaster.
As part of the FRANZ set-up, the French contribution included an initial reconnaissance flight from its Nouméa-based Falcon-200 jet (known as the Gardian) at daybreak on Wednesday, mostly to assess the Bauerfield airport.
Port Vila is only 500km away from Nouméa.
Later that day, a French PUMA helicopter transported emergency relief and personnel (including experts in buildings structural assessment, telecom and essential supplies such as water and electricity) to Port Vila to further assess the situation.
The small military CASA aircraft also operated a number of rotations between Nouméa and Port Vila, bringing more relief supplies (including food rations, water, and IT equipment) and returning with evacuees.
The French High Commission also said if needed, a Nouméa-based surveillance frigate Vendémiaire and the overseas assistance vessel d’Entrecasteaux were placed on stand-by mode “ready to set sail from Nouméa to Vanuatu within 72 and 96 hours, respectively”.
Embassies ‘flattened’ Following the Tuesday quake, four embassies in Port Vila (New Zealand, United Kingdom, the United States and France), all under the same roof, had been temporarily relocated to their respective chiefs of mission.
Their offices, once located in a three-storey building, collapsed and were “flattened”, the French ambassador said.
Vanuatu’s caretaker Prime Minister Charlot Salwaï has announced a state of emergency at least until Christmas and the Vanuatu snap election has been postponed from January 14 to 16.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Searchers were racing against time to find survivors in the rubble, Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver reported for 1News Breakfast from Port Vila.
She also said that aftershocks continued to shake the country, making search efforts more difficult.
“Our team has integrated with the Australians, that is to make the most of this very small window that they have now to find survivors,” she said.
“Time is not on their side, so they’ve really got to make the most of it.
“It’s a very volatile situation still, we’ve been speaking to some very distressed people trying to get home.”
The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) said late last night that a flight carrying 93 passengers, almost all Kiwis and their families, had left Port Vila at about 7.45pm New Zealand time.
“A small number of foreign nationals are also being assisted on this flight,” the NZDF said.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters confirmed the flight’s arrival overnight.
He wrote on X at about 5.30am today: “We are pleased to have evacuated 93 people from Port Vila on a @NZDefenceForce flight overnight.
People about to depart Vanuatu on a RNZAF Boeing 757. Image: NZDF
“The passengers were mostly New Zealanders and their families, but also included around 12 foreign nationals from Samoa, the United Kingdom, Singapore, France and Finland.
“Our consular team continues to assist New Zealanders affected by the earthquake in Vanuatu.”
Any Kiwis still in Vanuatu were urged to call MFAT on +64 99 20 20 20.
“New Zealand’s efforts to aid Vanuatu with its earthquake response, through the provision of personnel and relief supplies, continues,” Peters said.
NZ disaster response teams on the ground in quake-hit Vanuatu. Image: 1NewsRescue and recovery efforts continue after Vanuatu earthquake. Image: 1NewsThe moment the quake hit a car garage in Port Vila. Image: 1 News
Australian couple describe earthquake ‘mayhem’
Australian couple Susie Nailon and her partner Tony Ferreira were in the Billabong shop when the quake hit. Image 1News
Australian couple Susie Nailon and her partner Tony Ferreira told 1News about the “mayhem” of being inside the Billabong shop when the quake hit.
“It sort of started to rumble a little bit and I looked up in the ceiling and saw the ceiling start to come down on the fluorescent light. But it wasn’t just a shake, it no longer shook left or right, the whole ground started to wave,” said Ferreira.
“The whole roof had caved down . . . It just felt like a deck of cards. [It came] straight down, flattened everything.
“And the force of it just pushed all the windows, plastered glass straight out in the road from all that weight,” he said.
He said there were about six or seven others in the shop with them at the time, and said the couple only made it out by “literally seconds”.
“If my rack had been a couple more metres in, then there’s no chance. It was that quick. There was no warning,” he said.
Nailon said the aftershocks had been really triggering, and as soon as she felt something she was “straight out the door”.
“No one has a chance if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said.
Kiwi helping out in Vanuatu
Kiwi Jason Horan who lives in Port Vila. Image: 1News
New Zealander Jason Horan, who lives in Port Vila, told 1News it was “just chaos” in the aftermath of the quake.
“There [were] people lying on the ground everywhere, buildings falling down, so it was pretty scary,” he said.
He said he watched the road move “like a wave”.
Since the quake, Horan said he had been helping others simply because he wanted to.
“I’ve been running everybody around, just trying to supply everybody with food and water. So I go around to every hotel and resort making sure they know who to talk to and stuff like that.”
He said he wanted to do his part in “making sure people are okay”.
“All the locals are pulling together though . . . they’re resilient, so it’s really good.”
“Our team has integrated with the Australians, that is to make the most of this very small window that they have now to find survivors.
“Time is not on their side, so they’ve really got to make the most of it,” she said.
“It’s a very volatile situation still, we’ve been speaking to some very distressed people trying to get home.”
NZ High Commissioner on quake and what comes next
New Zealand High Commissioner to Vanuatu Nicci Simmonds. Image: 1News
New Zealand High Commissioner to Vanuatu Nicci Simmonds said the commission was in the top storey of a three-storey concrete building.
“I was at my desk at the time [of the quake], so that’s about as far away from the entry/exit as you can get,” she said.
“So you follow your schoolgirl training and you just get under the table, holding on while it jumped around a lot. A lot of noise.”
She said there was dust everywhere when the shaking stopped. She tried to check on a colleague.
“Very close to her desk, the building had completely separated. There was a three-storey drop.”
Everyone managed to get out of the building, Simmonds said. Initially, communications were the biggest challenge, she added.
“Now, it’s making sure that reliable safe drinking water, power, and basic infrastructure is up and running.”
Simmonds said the impact was “highly localised”, based on aerial surveillance.
“It’s a significant, major event in Port Vila, but it doesn’t appear that there have been villages buried by landslides elsewhere, so that’s been an enormous relief.”
She said the response was “the kind of job that surges, and peaks, and changes”.
There are conflicting reports of the official death toll from this week’s massive earthquake in Vanuatu as rescue teams continue to scour the rubble for survivors.
On Tuesday, the Vanuatu National Disaster Management Office reported 14 deaths.
It said four people had been confirmed dead by the hospital, six others were killed in a landslide and four others died in a collapsed building.
But yesterday, the disaster management office reported only nine people had been confirmed dead by the hospital and made no mention of the deaths it had earlier attributed to the landslides and collapsed buildings.
One consistent figure is the more than 200 people injured, with the hospital saying many patients were being treated for broken bones.
A landslide near the main wharf of Port Vila. Image: Development Mode/Facebook via ABC News
Damage and destruction According to the Vanuatu government’s disaster assessment team, most of the damage from the earthquake had been to the Port Vila CBD on the main island of Efate.
This area has been closed to the public and search and rescue operations were ongoing.
Any buildings still standing had sustained significant structural damage.
The Port Vila main wharf remained closed due to a major landslide.
The two main water reservoirs supplying Port Vila had been totally destroyed and would require reconstruction — an assessment of the rest of the water network was ongoing.
A boil water notice is in place for all of Vila.
Power and telecommunications The utility company Unelco is working to restore power and water supply.
Vodafone Vanuatu informed its customers that instant messaging on Messenger, Viber and WhatsApp had been restored on its mobile network.
Audio and video calling via these platforms, however, was still unavailable by today.
Vodafone said its team was working hard to resolve these issues and fully restore its internet services.
State of emergency A one-week state of emergency was declared on Tuesday by the President, Nikenike Vurobaravu, for the worst affected areas.
Police had been urging people to adhere to the nightly curfew of 6pm to 6am local time.
They had also warned of a greater chance of opportunistic crimes being committed after the disaster and urged everyone to look out for each other.
Commercial flights There were no commercial flights operating into or out of Vanuatu.
Local authorities said on Tuesday they were closing the Bauerfield International Airport to commercial flights for 72 hours to repair damage and prioritise disaster relief flights.
Passengers booked to fly Fiji Airways to Vila on Thursday had their flights moved to December 21.
Solomon Airlines had also indicated it would resume flying to Vanuatu from Saturday.
Virgin Airlines has cancelled flights until Sunday and a spokesperson for the Qantas Group told the ABC they were monitoring the situation closely.
International aid International defence and medical personnel, search and rescue teams and disaster response experts from New Zealand, Australia and France were now on the ground in Port Vila.
They were helping local emergency response teams, which had been working around the clock since Tuesday’s 7.3 magnitude quake alongside locally based staff at UN agencies and non-government organisations in Vila.
Time is of the essence for the teams scouring the rubble for any sign of survivors.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Vanuatu is taking stock of damage from a powerful 7.3 magnitude earthquake that has killed at least 14 people and collapsed buildings in the capital Port Vila, as the first trickle of international assistance began arriving in the disaster-prone Pacific nation.
The quake rattled the island nation, located about 1900km northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane, not long after midday on Tuesday, sending people in restaurants and shops running into the streets of Port Vila.
The National Disaster Management office said in a report that 14 people had been confirmed dead and 200 treated for injuries, with the numbers expected to increase.
Of those killed, six died in a landslide, four at the Vila Central Hospital and four in the Billabong building, which collapsed in downtown Port Vila.
Two Chinese nationals were among the dead, Chinese Ambassador to Vanuatu Li Minggang told state media yesterday.
On Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Charlot Salwai declared a week-long state of emergency and set a curfew of 6 pm to 6 am.
Rescue efforts are focused on downtown Port Vila on the main island Efate, where the NDMO said at least 10 buildings, including one housing multiple diplomatic missions, suffered major structural damage.
Survivors trapped
Emergency teams worked through the night in a bid to find survivors trapped in the rubble, using heavy machinery such as excavators and cranes, along with shovels and hand grinders, videos posted to social media showed.
Two major commercial buildings, the Wong store and the Billabong shop, collapsed in the quake, according to Basil Leodoro, a surgeon and director of Helpr-1 Operations at Respond Global in Vanuatu.
Teams from the Vanuatu Mobile Force and ProRescue stand outside a damaged building in downtown Port Vila on Tuesday. Image: Vanuatu Police/BenarNews
“Vanuatu Mobile Force, ProRescue and ambulance teams are helping to remove casualties from the wreckage. So far they’ve been able to pull two,” said Leodoro in a social post yesterday morning, citing official reports.
“There are several others reported to be missing, still under the wreckage, coming to a total of about seven.”
People wounded in the disaster are being treated at two health facilities, the Vila Central Hospital and a second health clinic opened at the Vanuatu Mobile Force (VMF) base at Cooks Barracks, he said.
“From the initial reports at Vila Central Hospital, we know the hospital is overrun with casualties being brought in,” Leodoro said.
“The emergency team at the hospital have been working overnight to try to handle the number of casualties and walking wounded that are coming in, with triage being performed outside.”
“There are 14 confirmed deaths, and that number is likely to rise.”
The building in Port Vila’s CBD that hosts the US, British, French and New Zealand missions partially collapsed and was split in half by the earthquake. Image: Michael Thompson/BenarNews
‘Ring of Fire’
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in an update that there was damage to the hospital and the “operating theatre is non-functional, and overall healthcare capacity is overwhelmed.”
Vanuatu, an archipelago that straddles the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire,” is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world and is frequently hit by cyclones, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
The UN agency estimated 116,000 people could be affected by this earthquake.
The government reported damage to power lines and water supplies in urban areas, while telecommunications were down, with Starlink providing the main form of connectivity to the outside world.
“Two major water reserves in the Ohlen area which supplies water to Port Vila are totally destroyed and will need reconstruction,” the NDMO said on Tuesday.
The Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Corporation (VBTC) said in a statement that its facilities were damaged in the quake and it was operating only a limited radio service.
Australia, New Zealand and France said they had dispatched aid and emergency response teams to Vanuatu and were helping to assess the extent of damage.
Airport closed
Airports Vanuatu CEO Jason Rakau said the airport was closed for commercial airplanes for 72 hours to allow humanitarian flights to land, VBTC reported.
A post on X from France’s ambassador to Vanuatu, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, showed that three military engineers with satellite communications equipment had arrived by helicopter from the French territory of New Caledonia.
Aid supplies are already stationed in locations across Vanuatu as part of their disaster preparations, Katie Greenwood, head of the Pacific delegation at the Red Cross, said in another post to X.
Glen Craig, the chairman of the Vanuatu Business Resilience Council, said most damage was centered within 5km of Port Vila’s central business district.
“In terms of residential housing, it is far, far less significant than a cyclone,” he told BenarNews.
Most damage to businesses would be insurable, but of more concern would be a loss of income from tourism, he said.
“If tourists keep coming, we’re going to be okay,” he said. “If tourists just suddenly decide it’s all too hard, we’re in a bit of trouble.”
Vanuatu is home to about 300,000 on its 13 main islands and many smaller ones.
Its government declared a six-month national emergency early last year after it was hit by back-to-back tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin and a 6.5 magnitude earthquake within several days.
Republished from BenarNews with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
World Vision’s Vanuatu country director says electricity and water are still affected in the capital Port Vila and strategic bridges connecting the city are damaged, nearly 24 hours after a 7.3 earthquake just before 1pm on Tuesday afternoon.
The city has had multiple aftershocks since, with the strongest this morning reaching a magnitude 5.5.
At least 14 people are confirmed to have been killed and more than 200 people are injured.
World Vision’s Clement Chipokolo said the aftershocks are making everyone more vulnerable.
“We’re still out of electricity; we’re out of water as well and most of the stores are closed,” Chipokolo said.
“We have queues that are forming in the stores that are open for people to get essentials, especially water.”
He said the main priority is to recover those buried under rubble and recover bodies, while service providers were frantically trying to restore water and power.
‘Compromised strategic bridges’
“There are a number of compromised strategic bridges that are very essential for connecting the town those are the ones that I’m worried about for now,” Chipokolo said.
Telephone lines were now up and running but there was no internet connectivity.
He said the public was starting to come to grips with what had happened.
“I think we did not really gauge the scale of the impact yesterday, but now the public are sucking it in — how much we went through yesterday and by extension today.”
Vanuatu is one of the most natural disaster-prone countries in the world. It was hit by three severe tropical cyclones last year.
“We are a country that’s quite resilient to disasters but this was not a disaster that we anticipated or probably prepared for,” Chipokolo said.
However, he said the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO). which is the government arm that manages disasters, were on standby to support because of the cyclone season.
RNZ News also reports that help is slowly arriving, with incoming support from New Zealand, Australia and France. The airport in Port Vila is not operational other than for humanitarian assistance.
There are concerns about a lack of safe drinking water and Unicef Vanuatu Field Office Eric Durpaire told RNZ Midday Report there had been an increase in cases of diarrhoea.
Two Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff previously unaccounted for have been found safe.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
My friend Jamie just shared this video of the moment the earthquake struck his home. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/FaR24r2DeJ
Vanuatu is now in a state of emergency with at least 14 confirmed deaths following a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that struck the capital Port Vila yesterday, followed by
a 6.1 quake and other after shocks today.
According to the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) in Vanuatu, more than 200 people were injured, with the numbers expected to rise.
The NDMO also reported that 10 buildings were damaged, included a building that housed the embassies of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the New Zealand High Commission.
A street scene in the capital of Port Vila after yesterday’s earthquake. Image: Wansolwara
The Joint Police Operation Centre is assisting with search and rescue operations, including the planned deployment of medical teams equipped with heavy machinery. Efforts to restore power and water supplies are also ongoing, the NDMO added.
Meanwhile, Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said in a statement that his country stood ready to help in any way it could.
The 7.3 magnitude earthquake – which struck at a depth of 57 km – caused at least 14 deaths in the capital Port Vila. Image: Wansolwara
“I extend my sincere condolences to the families who have lost their loved ones, and I wish those injured a quick recovery,” said Rabuka.
Although Port Vila airport remained closed to commercial flights, aerial assessments were underway.
The Head of Delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) Pacific, Katie Greenwood, shared in a post on X that their Emergency Operations Centre was now active, with staff and volunteers working tirelessly to assist those affected by the earthquake.
The University of the South Pacific (USP) has also expressed its sympathies to Vanuatu.
Rescue efforts have continued overnight, witnesses report seeing people alive being pulled from the rubble. Image: Wansolwara
In an advisory, USP stated that its Emalus Campus would remain closed, following advice from the Campus DISMAC Committee. The closure would enable essential teams to assess and repair damage while national authorities address public infrastructure concerns.
Rescue operation continue in Port Vila, Vanuatu (it is 3:45am)
3 people have been pulled out of rubble alive, with one of them in serious condition.
All the staff from American Embassy is safe. #earthquake#sismo#Vanuatu#terremotopic.twitter.com/oDVUjvJYci
Personnel from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Pacific are on the ground in Vanuatu and are collaborating with the government, civil society organisations, and development partners to support immediate response efforts.
UNICEF, in a social media update, said it has already dispatched first aid kits and Interagency Emergency Health Kits (IEHK) to health facilities. It added that prepositioned supplies, including WASH, child protection, health, ECD, nutrition, and education kits, along with tents and first aid kits, are ready for distribution to reach at least 3000 people.
The UNICEF Vanuatu field office, comprising 19 staff and consultants, was working with local authorities and partners to assess the extent of the damage and determine response needs.
Published in partnership with the University of the South Pacific Journalism Programme’s Wansolwara News.
Overnight rescue attempts in the capital of Port Vila. Image: 1News screenshot APR
The death toll from Vanuatu’s 7.3 earthquake is expected to rise because concrete buildings have collapsed with people inside in the capital Port Vila.
International Federation of Red Cross Pacific head of delegation Katie Greenwood posted on X that the Vanuatu government was reporting 14 confirmed fatalities and 200 people were treated for injuries at the main hospital in Port Vila.
Rescue efforts to retrieve people trapped by fallen buildings and rubble have continued overnight.
Vanuatu Government is reporting 14 confirmed fatalities and 200 treated for injuries at main hospital in Port Vila. Local humanitarian network activated and @vanuaturedcross leads the Shelter response with Government and support from @ifrc
In a press conference, caretaker Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said a State of Emergency and curfew were in place in the worst affected areas.
“Urgently request international assistance,” he said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated 116,000 people had been affected by the quake and earlier said there were six unconfirmed deaths.
Rescue operation continue in Port Vila, Vanuatu (it is 3:45am)
3 people have been pulled out of rubble alive, with one of them in serious condition.
All the staff from American Embassy is safe. #earthquake#sismo#Vanuatu#terremotopic.twitter.com/oDVUjvJYci
A strong 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Vanuatu today, US geologists said, severely damaging a number of buildings in the capital, crushing cars and briefly triggering a tsunami warning.
Witnesses described a “violent shake” and widespread damage to Port Vila, located about 1900km northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane.
The Pacific island nation is ranked as one of the world’s most at-risk countries from natural disasters and extreme weather events, including cyclones and volcanic eruptions.
Michael Thompson, an adventure tour operator based in the capital, said the quake was “bigger than anything” he had felt in his 20 years living in Vanuatu.
“I was caught in the office with my colleague,” he told BenarNews. “When we came outside, it was just chaos everywhere. There have been a couple of buildings that have pancaked.
“You can hear noises and kind of muffled screams inside.”
The building housing the US, British, French and New Zealand diplomatic missions in the capital Port Vila partially collapsed during the earthquaketoday. Image: Michael Thompson/Vanuatu Zipline Adventures/BenarNews
Video footage taken by Thompson outside the US embassy showed the bottom floor of the building in downtown Port Vila had partially collapsed. Its windows are buckled and the foundations have been turned to rubble.
“It looks dangerous’
“We stood there yelling out to see if there was anyone inside the building,” Thompson said. “It looks really dangerous.”
The building also hosts the British, French and New Zealand missions.
Just down the main road from the embassy building, search and rescue teams were trying to force their way into a commercial building through the tin roof, Thompson said, but at the pace they were going it would be a “24 hour operation”.
Bottom line: It’s bad. People died, and many more were hurt. Some have lost their home, and many will find it hard to get back to work. Repairs will likely stretch for years, as they always do in the wake of disaster.
“We need help. We need medical evacuation and we need qualified rescue personnel. That’s the message,” he said.
A number of buildings in Port Vila’s CBD have sustained serious damage in the earthquake today. Image: Michael Thompson/Vanuatu Zipline Adventures/BenarNews
The quake was recorded at a depth of 43km and centered 30km west of the capital Port-Vila, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).
The US Tsunami Warning System cancelled an initial tsunami warning for coastal communities in Vanuatu within 300km of the epicenter.
The quake hit the island nation not long after midday, coming into peak tourist season, when the streets of Port Vila were packed with people shopping and eating in restaurants, Thompson said.
One dead body
He had seen at least one dead body among the rubble.
“The police are out trying to keep people back,” he said. “But it’s a pretty big situation here.”
In other videos posted online people can be seen running through the streets of the capital past shop fronts that had fallen onto cars. Elsewhere, a cliff behind the container port in Port Vila appears to have collapsed.
Dan McGarry, a Port Vila-based journalist, described the earthquake on social platform X as a “violent, high frequency vertical shake” that lasted about 30 seconds, adding the power was out around the city.
Vanuatu, home to about 300,000 on its 13 main islands and many smaller ones, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because it straddles the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire.”
Vanuatu’s government declared a six-month national emergency early last year after it was hit by back-to-back tropical cyclones Judy and Kevin and a 6.5 magnitude earthquake within several days.
