The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has warned of the growing danger posed by tens of thousands of tonnes of unexploded munitions left behind by the Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip, stressing that it poses a direct threat to the lives of civilians and hinders rescue and rubble removal efforts.
In a statement received by the Canary on Friday, the centre explained that preliminary estimates indicate the presence of around 20 thousand unexploded bombs, rockets and missiles dropped by the occupation army during its ongoing aggression. It noted that these remnants are scattered among approximately 70 million tonnes of rubble resulting from the destruction of homes and infrastructure in the Strip.
Unexploded munitions making Gaza a minefield
Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defence Authority, added that approximately 71 thousand tonnes of explosives remain buried in the rubble, making every recovery operation a deadly task. He pointed out that rescue workers face real dangers while performing their duties, as any wrong move could lead to a deadly explosion.
The PCHR noted that a number of fatal accidents have been recorded in recent months as a result of unexploded munitions, the latest of which was in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, where a buried shell exploded, killing three civilians, while another explosion in Nuseirat camp injured four workers clearing rubble.
The centre called for the formation of a specialised international committee under the supervision of the United Nations to conduct a comprehensive survey of unexploded munitions sites in Gaza. The committee would need to send international engineering teams equipped with the necessary equipment and expertise to remove them and secure populated areas. It also demanded that the occupation authorities disclose maps of the locations where bombs and ammunition were dropped during the war.
The statement stressed the need to immediately open the crossings to allow the entry of heavy machinery and equipment needed for debris removal and body recovery operations, emphasising that the international community’s continued silence in the face of this catastrophic situation constitutes indirect complicity in the suffering of the people of Gaza.
United States top diplomat Marco Rubio says the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) “is not going to play any role” in aid delivery in Gaza, reports Al Jazeera.
He also rejected the possibility of Hamas being involved in any future governance of the besieged enclave.
Speaking during a news conference while on a visit to Israel yesterday, the US Secretary of State claimed UNRWA had become “a subsidiary of Hamas”, echoing an Israeli government line that has been discredited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In response, UNRWA insisted that its presence “remains vital to meeting urgent humanitarian needs” across the bombarded and starved enclave, where a deadly Israeli offensive has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in two years.
In a statement posted on X, the agency also highlighted that the ICJ had recognised that “no organisation can replace the UNRWA’s role in supporting the people of Gaza”.
Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, also dismissed Rubio’s characterisation.
“You’ve already heard us talk about how UNRWA is not linked to Hamas,” he told reporters at the UN. “UNRWA is the backbone of our humanitarian operations in Gaza.”
Israel banned the agency from operating after accusing some of its staff of taking part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack without providing evidence.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the proclamation by Rubio that UNRWA was a Hamas “subsidiary” was “quite shocking” and “devastating” for UNRWA and all who were involved in Gaza.
UNRWA exonerated by ICJ
UNRWA was not only exonerated by the ICJ and two separate commissions of inquiry, but also had the largest, most extensive aid mechanism in Gaza, Odeh said.
“It has thousands of employees, it has the data to distribute aid to Palestinians with dignity and in an orderly fashion,” she said.
“Nobody has that kind of infrastructure and history in Gaza.”
PRESS RELEASE: The #ICJ delivers its Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organizations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory https://t.co/uMXJBTcJq6pic.twitter.com/YuTGwDzPwP
Despite a US-mediated ceasefire that took effect earlier this month, Israel has continued launching attacks across Gaza. At least two people were killed in shelling east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza yesterday, a source at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic.
Israel has also kept the Rafah crossing near Egypt sealed, blocking large-scale aid deliveries that were stipulated in the truce agreement.
In his remarks on Friday, Rubio voiced hope of soon putting together an international security force to police the ceasefire in Gaza and said Israel, which opposes including Turkiye, could veto participants.
In Suva, The Fiji Times reports that Israel says Fiji’s “neutral and highly skilled military” could play a valuable role in future peacekeeping efforts once negotiations on Gaza’s next phase were complete.
The indication came as Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said discussions between Israel, the United States and Arab nations would determine the structure and participants of any peacekeeping arrangement.
“I have to say that we do trust the Fijian forces,” Haskel said during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka before she left for her controversial visit to New Zealand.
Fiji opening an embassy in Jerusalem last month in defiance of United Nations resolutions on Occupied Palestine and hosting a visit by a senior Israeli minister from the paraiah state this week has revived condemnation by Pacific human rights groups and Palestinian advocates.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel visited the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Fiji — where she welcomed a possible “peacekeeping” role — in a week-long Pacific friendship mission.
Both Fiji and Papua New Guinea have opened controversial embassies in Jerusalem, recognised as the capital of Palestine when statehood is granted.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has condemned Fiji’s coalition government for “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza”, saying it was being “deliberately orchestrated” by Israel in a statement.
The statement was issued before the opening of the embassy and the declaration of a Gaza ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump and three mediating Middle East countries.
Embassy entourage
The NGOCHR statement by chair Shamima Ali, dated September 9, criticised widespread reports in Fiji media that Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka would take “an entourage of 17 government officials and spouses” to officially establish the residential Fijian embassy.
“The coalition government appears to be callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel,” she said.
“This very same Fiji government previously defended the destruction, killing, and maiming of scores of thousands of innocent civilians — 70 percent of them women and children — by Israel at the International Court of Justice [in an earlier and ongoing case on genocide].”
Shamima Ali highlighted the visit in August by two World Elders — Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand and former Head of UNDP) — to the Rafah crossing into Gaza from Egypt.
They had witnessed how Israel was preventing the flow of food, water, and medicine to the suffering people of Gaza, and declared it as an “unfolding genocide” — “this is not the chaos of war, nor the result of an environmental disaster. It is intentional.”
Ali said Prime Minster Rabuka, and ministers Lynda Tabuya and Pio Tikoduadua had made “rather unconvincing arguments” about opening of the Fijian embassy in Jerusalem on September 18 amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
“Whether they like it or not, in the eyes of the world, Fiji will be seen as a country that supports the apartheid and pariah state of Israel, and its genocide in Gaza,” the statement said.
‘Not in our name’
Ali said the NGOCHR reiterated its “Not in our name” opposition to Fiji’s defence of Israel at the ICJ in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide.
It also declared its strongest “Not in our name” opposition to the establishment of the Fiji Embassy in Jerusalem.
“Neither action reflects the wishes of all citizens of Fiji. It does not reflect well on Fiji for the present coalition government to be effectively supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine.”
Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Program, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.
Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News
Māori and Pasifika leaders are leading climate adaptation, guided by ancestral knowledge and Indigenous principles to build resilience and shape global solutions.
Last week, they played a key role in launching a new Indigenous climate adaptation network at a wānanga ahead of Adaptation Futures 2025, held on October 13-16 in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
The network aims to build a global movement grounded in Indigenous knowledge, centred on decolonising systems and financial mechanisms, and ensuring Indigenous peoples have direct access to climate finance, the funding that supports actions to address and adapt to climate change.
Kaiwhakahaere Lisa Tumahai . . . Ngāi Tahu are in the midst of “the challenge of our lifetime” — climate change. Image: Te Ao Māori News
The wānanga was led by Lisa Tumahai (Ngāi Tahu), New Zealand patron for Adaptation Futures 2025 and deputy chair of the NZ Climate Commission, and Tagaloa Cooper (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Niue), director of the Climate Change Resilience Programme at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) in Apia, Samoa.
“The Indigenous Forum came from what we learnt at the previous two adaptation conferences. The recommendations from Indigenous peoples were to step it up a bit at this conference and create an intentional day and space for Indigenous voices,” says Tumahai.
“For the first time, people are really seeing the commonalities we share with other Indigenous populations, whether they’re from Canada, Africa, or the Amazon.”
Tagaloa Cooper . . . encouraging Pacific rangatahi to take charge of their stories and lead discussions on what loss and damage mean for their communities. Image: Women in Climate Change Network
Kotahitanga across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Cooper said many of the Pasifika in attendance felt “at home” in Aotearoa and welcomed the opportunity to have a major conference hosted in the region, as international events are often inaccessible due to high costs.
“I’d like to have more of these types of conversations with our cousins in New Zealand where we can exchange knowledge, learn from each other, and also be innovative about how we do adapt,” she says.
She added that, in speaking with Pacific participants, there was a strong call for deeper engagement with iwi across Aotearoa, particularly in rural communities facing similar challenges to small island nations, to create more opportunities for sharing and exchanging traditional knowledge.
Cynthia Houniuhi from the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change presented at the United Nations Adaptation Futures Conference. Image: Te Ao Māori News
The value of Indigenous knowledge Cooper emphasised that Indigenous peoples hold a vast body of knowledge that has long been marginalised.
“Science now is telling us what we’ve always known as Indigenous people,” Cooper says.
“We must remember our ancestors navigated the vast oceans to get here and then grew nations in very difficult places. There is a lot to learn from our people because we have adapted to live in new lands and we’re still here.”
As Indigenous observer for the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds, lawyer Taumata Toki (Ngāti Rehua) says this is a growing area that deserves attention, given the value Indigenous peoples bring and how their knowledge can strengthen climate adaptation projects.
Taumata Toki at the UN headquarters for the 24th session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). Image: LinkedIn/Te Ao Māori News
He says he is continually inspired by Indigenous leaders around the world who are not only experts in Western knowledge systems but also grounded in Indigenous principles that are transforming how climate change is addressed.
Toki says the guiding aim of tikanga is balance, a core concept that aligns with many other Indigenous worldviews and shapes how they approach climate change and sustainability.
Barriers to climate finance Indigenous peoples globally have often had limited access to UN climate change negotiation spaces.
Tumahai said barriers include accreditation requirements or registered body status to access climate finance.
Cooper added that smaller nations and small administrations often lack the capacity, time, and personnel to develop complex project proposals, causing delays and frustration in the flow of funds.
The devastation from Cyclone Gabrielle has prompted iwi to focus on preparing for future weather events, as climate change is expected to increase their frequency and intensity. Image: Hawkes Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle/Te Ao Māori News
When asked whether Māori face additional barriers to accessing climate adaptation funding as Indigenous peoples within a developed nation, Toki says that, on a global scale, Māori are at the forefront of sovereignty over what development looks like.
However, he acknowledges that when this is set against the wider context of what is happening in Aotearoa, “it doesn’t look the best,” pointing to the ongoing challenges Māori face at home despite their strong global standing.
Māori-led adaptation and succession planning “When it comes to Māori-led adaptation, it needs to start in our court,” he says. “We need to have our own really thought-out discussion in terms of how we develop these projects to be both tikanga-aligned, but also wider Indigenous peoples’ principles aligned.”
When asked about an iwi adaptation conference in Aotearoa, Tumahai say it is a great idea and could be driven forward by national iwi. Image: Phil Walter/Getty Images/Te Ao Māori News
Once internal cohesion across iwi is established, state support will play an important role.
Despite the challenges, Toki says the potential ahead is immense, both economically and environmentally, and Aotearoa has the opportunity to be world-leading in this space.
Tumahai agrees that the work has to start at home, and her passion, which she has long championed, is succession planning to bring rangatahi into the work.
“And with that succession planning, it’s not to be dismissive of the pakeke or kaumatua who are really that korowai and the knowledge holders,” she says.
“We have our own systems that ensure the conversations are held and led where the knowledge is sitting.”
Te Aniwaniwa is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by Te Ao Māori News and is republished with permission.
A leading Palestine solidarity and advocacy group in New Zealand has accused an Israeli cabinet minister of “sneaking” into the country this weekend while on a Pacific tour as
Israel resumed its genocidal attacks.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskell visited the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Fiji — where she welcomed a possible “peacekeeping” role — in a week-long Pacific friendship mission.
Both Fiji and Papua New Guinea have opened controversial embassies in Jerusalem, recognised as the capital of Palestine when statehood is granted.
“It seems clear from media reports that Haskell is visiting Auckland this weekend as part of a trip to strengthen ties with New Zealand and other Pacific countries,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa co-chair Maher Nazal.
He said in a statement that he would expect New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters to “have had, or will be having, a secret meeting” with Haskell.
“Haskell wouldn’t come to New Zealand unless she was having a meeting with
Peters. Otherwise, it would be a diplomatic snub,” Nazzal said.
“Haskell wouldn’t tolerate that, and Peters is most unlikely to snub Israel.
“But if he’s turned her down, we’d love to hear about it.”
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “Why would we put out the welcome mat for a representative of such a monstrous regime?”. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Nazzal said: “The trip is a ‘thank you’ visit for New Zealand refusing to recognise Palestine [statehood]. Haskell had appointments with the governments of Fiji and Papua New Guinea earlier this week.
“They are the only two countries in the world, other than the United States, which both voted in the United Nations last year against requiring Israel to leave the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and they also have an embassy in Jerusalem.
“They are the greatest fans of Israel outside the United States.”
“I have to say that we do trust the Fijian forces,” she said during the joint press conference with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.
‘Skilled, neutral military’
“We know that you have very skilled military forces that are neutral, which is something especially important for peacekeeping.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel (left) with Ambassador to Fiji and the Pacific Roi Rosenblit at the MOU signing with Fiji this week. Image: Eliki Nukutabu/The Fiji Times
“We know this is a force you can trust, with skills, with morals and we’ve had close collaboration throughout history in many posts around the Middle East and surrounding our borders as well.”
She was referring to Fiji’s long UN history as a Middle East peacekeeping force, but admitted that the Gaza role would not be through the United Nations.
“Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians and withholding New Zealand aid from the people of Gaza,” Nazzal said.
“Why would we put out the welcome mat for a representative of such a monstrous regime?”
Haskell was recently interviewed by “genocide-denier Sean Plunket” on his radio show The Platform saying she would like to visit to “thank the New Zealand government for its support over the last two years”.
“That says it all. New Zealand has stood resolutely with a racist, apartheid regime as it continues to commit genocide against the Palestinian people – two years and counting,” Nazzal said.
Seven embassies in Jerusalem
Last month, Fiji inaugurated its embassy in Jerusalem — becoming the seventh nation to have its diplomatic mission in the city in defiance of the United Nations policy.
Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel with PNG Prime Minister James Marape at Melanesian House, Waigani during a courtesy visit this week. Image: PNG Bulletin
The other countries are: Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea and the United States.
Other nations that maintain ties with Israel have their embassies in Tel Aviv.
Papua New Guinea inaugurated its embassy in Jerusalem last year.
67 doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare workers, who were seized during Israeli occupation raids on health facilities, were released during the latest prisoner swap on 13 October.
Healthcare workers detained by Israeli occupation
Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW) has documented 95 Palestinian medical staff still being held in the occupation’s prisons. 80 of these detainees are from Gaza, while 15 are from the West Bank. According to the NGO, it has documented a total of 431 cases of detained Palestinian healthcare workers (HCW) since the start of the genocide. Five HCWs, all Gazans, have been killed by ‘Israel’ while imprisoned. Their bodies are still being withheld, and five are missing, their fate completely unknown.
Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention extended yet again
Among those still arbitrarily detained is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital. He was detained while on duty, and is being held without charge or trial. Since his detention, reports have emerged of torture and abuse. Abu Safiya holds foreign citizenship so could have left Gaza but instead decided to stay with his patients. Despite his name having previously appeared among those discussed for release, on 16 October, Abu Safiya’s administrative detention was instead extended for another six months.
Dr Marwan Al Hams, the director of field hospitals in Gaza, who was kidnapped by an Israel occupation undercover force in July was also not released. Nor was his daughter Tasneem who was abducted at the beginning of October.
‘Medical needs in Gaza are at their highest’
Dr Mohammed Obeid was also not released as part of the ceasefire deal. He is an orthopaedic surgeon who was arrested in October 2024 by the IOF during a military raid at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, and was detained along with 57 others from the hospital. Dr. Obeid has not made contact with his family for almost a year. He had been working with Medecins Sans Frontieres since 2018.
MSF has said it is “deeply disappointed” Obeid has not been released, with the organisation’s general director, Dr Tejshri Shah, saying in a statement:
We are extremely concerned for his safety and wellbeing. We stand in full solidarity with him and his family, and demand that his rights, dignity, and freedom be restored without further delay. At a time when medical needs in Gaza are at their highest, the role of medical and paramedical staff is crucial.
Majority of medical personnel arrested whilst on duty
According to HWW, 85% of Gazan healthcare workers currently in detention were abducted by the Israeli occupation’s military from their hospitals or ambulances while they were working. All because they refused to abandon their patients.
Testimonies from medical staff who have been released from Israeli occupation prisons speak of rampant abuse and torture. According to Dr Ahmed Muhanna, the director of Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, Northern Gaza:
doctors have been singled out as targets for detention.
Muhanna was abducted by Israeli occupation forces (IOF) during a raid at his hospital in December 2023, while he was working. During his 665 days in illegal detention he lost almost a third of his body weight.
Muhanna, who was released as part of the ‘ceasefire’ deal, described in a video testimony how several Palestinian detainees died as “Israeli jailers looked on”, and detained healthcare workers were prevented from helping other injured detainees. But he said:
Al-Awda Hospital will be restored, its staff will rebuild it with their own hands. … I am proud of what we have done and will do.
Asaliya is released but hospitalised due to effects of torture
Dr Mohammed Asaliya was released from detention during the latest prisoner swap. He had been abducted by the IOF from Al-Shifa Hospital, but is now back in the hospital, as a patient. Dr. Asaliya suffers from convulsions, dizziness, and severe chest pain due to the torture he endured at the hands of the Israeli regime while behind bars.
Scores of medical workers are still being physically and mentally abused. They are enduring degrading treatment and starvation in Israeli occupation torture camps and prisons. Most of these are held under ‘administrative detention’, meaning without charge or trial. Many, including Dr Abu Safiyah, are labelled ‘unlawful combatants’. Under the Detention of Unlawful Combatants Law, anyone from Gaza can be detained, for indefinitely-renewable periods, if suspected of engaging in hostilities against ‘Israel’ or of posing a threat to state security. No evidence is necessary.
Deliberately destroying Gaza’s healthcare system
UN experts have accused the Israeli regime of deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics, and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the Gaza Strip. This is a blatant violation of international and humanitarian law, which guarantees the protection of medical personnel and infrastructure during war.
The experts have said that:
In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide,’ a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza which constitutes an act of genocide.
Gaza’s healthcare system has been intentionally annihilated. Most hospitals have been bombed or destroyed, and none are fully functional. This ensures they are unable to provide life-saving functions, while the Israeli occupation has continued its bombardment of civilians.
Legal and moral duty to act to stop genocide
Between 7 October 2023 – 5 September 2025, more than 1,722 healthcare workers were killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. This is an average of more than two every day. Those who have managed to survive are struggling to cope with the number of patients and lack of supplies. They themselves facing displaced, exhausted, traumatised, and hungry.
All countries have a legal and moral duty to protect them. They also have a duty to prevent and stop genocide, including by suspending arms transfers to the illegal Israeli occupation. Perpetrators of violations of international law must be held to account.
Venezuelanalysis (7/8/24): “Washington’s unswerving support for Machado may be related to her extreme version of neoliberalism, which includes the privatization of the oil industry.”
The awarding of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan far-right leader María Corina Machado took nearly everyone by surprise (with the exception of insiders who apparently used advance knowledge to profit on betting markets—New York Times, 10/10/25).
The Nobel Committee justified the award on the basis of Machado’s “tireless work promoting democratic rights” and “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” However, Machado’s track record paints a very different picture (Sovereign Media, 10/11/25; Venezuelanalysis, 7/8/24).
Rather than scrutinize the opposition politician’s credentials, the media establishment seized the opportunity to whitewash the most unpeaceful elements in her background in order to advance its cynical pro–regime change agenda targeting Venezuela’s socialist government (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 1/11/23, 6/13/22, 4/15/20). Not coincidentally, Machado’s award coincided with an escalation of US military threats against Venezuela, meaning that corporate pundits used a “peace” prize as a platform for war propaganda.
Whitewashed profiles
The New York Times (10/16/25) was one of the few outlets to acknowledge the tension between the Nobel Committee presenting Machado as a supporter of a “peaceful transition” in Venezuela and her “calls for a military insurrection and unconditional support for President Trump’s military strikes” against Venezuelan boats.
The Nobel Prize meant corporate outlets had to give their readers an idea of Machado’s political trajectory. And though some had profile pieces (Reuters, 10/10/25; New York Times, 10/10/25), there was a concerted effort to conceal the most unsavory elements. The Financial Times (10/10/25) euphemistically stated that Machado “enter[ed] politics in opposition to Hugo Chávez”—president of Venezuela from 1999 through 2013—while the Guardian (10/10/25) summed up that she has been “involved in politics for more than two decades.”
No establishment outlet mentioned Machado’s first relevant political action: supporting the short-lived April 2002 coup against the Chávez government, and signing the infamous “Carmona Decree.” In one fell swoop, this decree did away with all democratically elected institutions, annulled the 1999 Constitution, and established a de facto dictatorship headed by the leader of Venezuela’s corporate business lobby. Machado later denied signing the decree, though her name appeared on a list published by Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.
Looking past the undemocratic debut, establishment journalists instead started the story with the mid-2002 creation of Súmate, calling it an NGO dedicated to election monitoring or transparency (Bloomberg, 10/10/25; Washington Post, 10/10/25; Reuters, 10/10/25; New York Times, 10/10/25). Yet they did not mention that this alleged quest to safeguard democracy was funded by the US, or that the opposition made unfounded fraud claims after failing to unseat Chávez in a 2004 recall referendum (Venezuelanalysis, 8/21/04, 9/9/04).
Machado’s second act was also the antithesis of peace and democracy, as the opposition politician led the 2014 “La Salida” (“The Exit”) campaign of street violence to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro administration, leaving dozens dead. That same year, in order to denounce the Venezuelan government, she acted as an “alternate ambassador” for Panama at a meeting of the Organization of American States (BBC, 3/25/15). The stunt led to Machado losing her parliamentary seat.
Yet instead of scrutinizing the new laureate’s less-than-peaceful actions, corporate outlets chose to ignore or misrepresent them as “denouncing the regime’s abuses” (Washington Post, 10/10/25), “participating in anti-regime protests” (New York Times, 10/10/25) or “allegations she’d tried to foment a coup” (Bloomberg, 10/10/25). Only the Associated Press (10/10/25) offered a minimal concession that the Machado-led “anti-government protests…at times turned violent.”
Another key aspect of the opposition operator’s political career has been outspoken advocacy for US sanctions, which have caused economic devastation and led to tens of thousands of deaths (CEPR, 4/25/19). But Western media ignored Machado’s lobbying for collective punishment of the Venezuelan people—with the New York Times (10/16/25) a notable exception.
The US-backed figure has also made no secret of her plans to repress her political opponents. Machado is on the record making thinly veiled threats to “eradicate socialism,” and pledging to “neutralize” destabilizing groups should she eventually take power. Factoring in the Venezuelan far right’s history of racist violence (Venezuelanalysis, 3/28/14, 7/30/17), it is not unreasonable to predict a dirty war against Chavistas if Machado ever reached Miraflores.
The company you keep
Reuters (10/17/25) was the only major outlet to highlight Machado’s support for the genocidal Israeli government.
The reporting on the Nobel Peace Prize plainly described Machado as belonging to the Venezuelan opposition, but few outlets bothered to disclose her political views, apart from euphemistically labeling her a “conservative” (New York Times, 10/10/25; Guardian, 10/10/25) or a supporter of “economic liberalism” (New York Times, 10/16/25; Reuters, 10/10/25).
Machado has heaped praise on far-right former presidents Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, who was responsible for serious human rights violations, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to foment a coup.
In February, Machado sent a video message during a “Patriots for Europe” summit, calling for far-right leaders’ support and openly referring to them as “allies.” The high-profile gathering featured neo-fascist parties like Spain’s Vox, Italy’s Lega and France’s Rassemblement National (RN). The same media establishment that paints the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a threat to democracy (Guardian, 2/7/25; NPR, 4/22/25) chose to ignore Machado’s quite open alignment with his politics.
But more damning is the complete erasure of Machado’s outspoken support for Israel, even amidst the recent genocide. Venezuela’s far-right leader has repeatedlypraised Israel’s defense of “Western values” and “freedom,” while her party established an alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in 2020. In 2018, Machado penned a letter to the Israeli prime minister, asking him to lead a foreign intervention to “dismantle the criminal Venezuelan regime.”
At a time when the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine has sparked outrage around the world, no corporate outlet found it relevant to mention that this year’s “peace” laureate did not utter a single word of condemnation. On the contrary, according to Netanyahu himself, Machado told the prime minister she “appreciates” his “resolute” actions in a recent congratulatory phone call. Unsurprisingly, only Reuters (10/17/25) briefly reported on the Nobel laureate’s war criminal ally.
Beating the war drums
Sovereign Media (10/11/25) noted Machado’s support for “sanctions that have caused tens of thousands of deaths since 2017” and “on-the-record requests for a foreign military intervention.”
The media establishment’s careful whitewashing of Machado’s undemocratic past and genocidal allies is particularly damning, given the present context of a US military buildup and overt threats against Venezuela. One of the US-backed politician’s most persistent habits has been calling for a foreign intervention against her country (Sovereign Media, 10/11/25).
In the wake of her peace prize, Machado has wasted no time in lobbying for violent regime change. In a BBC interview (10/11/25), she argued that Venezuela needs to be “liberated” via a “coordination of internal and external forces,” an expression she also used in an interview with El País (10/10/25).
Borrowing a page from US administration’s book of redefining concepts such as “imminent threat” or “civilian,” Machado bombastically claimed that the Maduro government “has declared a war” against the Venezuelan people, and urged Trump to help her side “win” this war (BBC, 10/11/25; Infobae, 10/11/25; CNN, 10/15/25). The opposition leader has latched onto the administration’s “narcoterrorism” fairy tale that has been debunked over the years (FAIR.org, 9/24/19; Venezuelanalysis, 9/2/25), just like she supported the White House’s Tren de Aragua narrative, even if it meant a gruesome crackdown against Venezuelan migrants.
Machado has gone as far as to cheerlead the Trump administration extrajudicially executing her fellow citizens, arguing that the lethal US strikes in the Caribbean, which have killed at least 30 people, are “saving lives, not only Venezuelan lives, but also life of American people” (Daily Beast, 10/10/25).
But it is not just Machado using her new platform to promote US military intervention. The Washington Post editorial board (10/10/25) openly expressed that US interests would be “better served” with a “reliable American partner” like Machado. True to form, the Wall Street Journal (10/10/25, 10/12/25) also used Machado’s award to double down on calls for Trump to bomb Venezuela in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”
The warmonger lineup was complete with the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (10/10/25), who never needs excuses to endorse the murder of Venezuelans in the name of US interests (FAIR.org, 2/12/25). In this case, Stephens claimed that regime change is the only option to address the “catastrophe of Chavismo,” even if it means “full-scale military confrontation.”
The Nobel Peace Prize has long lost any credibility when it comes to upholding actual peace. With Machado’s award, it followed a recent tradition of aligning itself with Western foreign policy. And even more predictable was the corporate media seizing the opportunity to advance its war and regime-change propaganda against Venezuela.
Student Usama Ghanem is taking King’s College London (KCL) to court for suspending him, on penalty of permanent exclusion, for anti-genocide activism — and revoking his visa, putting him at risk of deportation by the Zionist Starmer regime that has targeted anti-genocide activists throughout Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Ghanem, an Egyptian citizen, was the victim of an extensive Israel lobby smear campaign after taking part in pro-Palestine protests at the university and then punished by KCL along with other students who participated. Human rights group CAGE International, which has accused KCL of weaponising its disciplinary procedures to silence solidarity with Palestine, says that Ghanem was the only one permanently excluded.
CAGE has released a video in which Ghanem outlines the university’s links with Israel and the violence, smears and discrimination he has suffered:
CAGE is asking supporters to use its form letter to contact King’s College London to demand Ghanem’s reinstatement.
Today, 23 October, a High Court will weigh evidence in human rights lawyer Fahad Ansari’s judicial review against the home secretary and North Wales Police. The trial focuses on the fact that police detained Ansari under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at Holyhead Port in August 2024.
The police seized Ansari’s work phone during the stop. Given that Ansari is a lawyer, his phone contains legally privileged information on his clients. Schedule 7 grants cops extra powers to use against people at the UK’s borders:
It allows them to stop, question and when necessary, search and detain individuals and goods travelling through the UK’s borders to determine whether they may be involved or concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
This is likely the first time that Schedule 7 powers have been used against a practicing lawyer. As such, the decisions in today’s case could have lasting repercussions for privacy and surveillance in the UK.
Today’s hearing was intended to decide whether there will be a ‘closed’ session to the proceedings, and whether the police could be prevented from examining Ansari’s phone. However, Ansari stepped outside the courtroom earlier to announce that the hearing had entered that closed proceeding.
‘That’s what this is all about’
Ansari thanked the assembled crowd outside of the courthouse for braving the rain. He recognised that they were showing solidarity “not just with me, but with Palestine, because that’s what this is all about.”
Ansari was one of the lawyers who filed Hamas’ challenge against their proscription in the UK. He’s consistently called out his harassment by UK authorities as being motivated by his legal work. As such, he told the assembled crowd today:
Whatever the smokescreen, whatever the charade that’s been going on inside, we all know in our bones that this is about Gaza, this is about Palestine, and that’s why I’ve been dragged through these courts this morning.
Anti-government-overreach campaigners CAGE reported that Ansari had decided ahead of time to boycott the Closed Material Procedure (CMP) element of the trial. Anas Mustapha, head of public advocacy at CAGE, stated that:
Mr Ansari’s decision exposes a growing crisis of accountability in the UK’s justice system. The use of closed hearings and secret evidence has long eroded public confidence in due process – but for this to extend to the legal profession itself marks a dangerous new threshold. That this entire process was triggered by a Schedule 7 stop highlights how this mass surveillance tool is an all-pervasive power that enables the circumvention of due process at every level.
‘What’s the point of that?’
Today, Ansari explained:
It’s not break time, it’s not lunch time, I’ve unceremoniously been kicked out of the courtroom, as have my lawyers and the members of the public, because now the court is going to go into secret, into closed, where they will justify to the judge – only – why they detained me, why they felt the need to take my phone.
They’ve kindly given me what’s called a ‘special advocate’. This is a security-vetted barrister who is not allowed to speak to me because he’s seen the closed material. So I’ve decided that I’m not going to engage with that process at all. I told them I did not want a special advocate. But they said ‘we have to give you one because the rules say so, and that will give some level of fairness to you.
A judge who has previously acted as a special advocate is presiding over today’s hearing. More specifically, this was as part of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). The judge reportedly withdrew from a case in the commission, citing the unfairness baked into the secret court system.
Ansari echoed that same sentiment, calling it a “rigged system”, and telling the crowd:
The way the closed material procedure works is, the special advocate who is given to me to represent me, I can only speak with him and he can only speak with me until he sees the material. But what’s the point of that? He doesn’t know what to ask me, I don’t know what to tell him. So what I’ll end up doing is shooting in the dark, offering up information that could be there, about people I know, places I’ve been, my opinions, anything and everything that could be on my phone[…]
A veneer of legitimacy
According to Ansari, that data given over to the special advocate ends up feeding into UK intelligence-gathering mechanisms. It would be used to harass other people connected to him, “and through me connected to anyone they feel I’m connected to.”
As such, he stated that:
So, it is simply a mechanism for the police, for the intelligence agencies, to gather, collect and refine intelligence. By giving this a legal term, closed material procedure, by having a special advocate who will represent my interests, apparently, in court, all they are simply pretending to give it some sort of judicial oversight, legitimacy, when there is a symbiotic relationship between the judiciary and the intelligence services. The judiciary say ‘look, there’s due process’ and the intelligence services have a way to gather intelligence and say there’s accountability. In reality there’s nothing, there is simply a false economy […] that there can be such a thing as fairness coupled with secrecy.
Ansari made it clear: if the courts truly believed he was guilty, then the public deserved to see the evidence. Secrecy, he told the crowd, could not lead to justice. He went on to highlight the fact that the UK has sold its fundamental rights to privacy and a fair trial. We’ve traded our freedom away in the name of fighting terrorism.
The last 25 years of war and terror has conditioned the British public to accept secret evidence in our courts, to accept an abandonment of the rule of law, to accept people being arrested for terrorism for holding up placards.
At that, the crowd responded with cries of ‘shame, shame!’ Ansari finished by saying:
We have been fighting this for over two decades. Now is not the time to back off, and the fact that all of you guys are here today really encourages me. It’s not about me, it’s not the fact that I’m a solicitor, a lawyer, the principle is greater than this.
Nobody should be allowed to take your phone at a border without suspicion, I need to stress that, and do a digital strip-search on you, under the compulsion that if you do not comply you will be convicted of terrorism. That is not what should be happening. And it is not about me, I need to stress this, it is about all of us, and most fundamentally, it is about Palestine.
Free Palestine.
This goes beyond one person’s rights, it’s a reckoning with the death of due process in a state ruled by secrecy. When the law itself becomes a tool of surveillance, justice doesn’t just fail — it vanishes.
SAVE THE DATE for the 31st Martin Ennals Award Ceremony: 26 November 2025 at 18:30 CET. (Doors open at 18:00 CET).
I will certainly be there as Chair of the Jury of he MEA but [SPOILERS ALERT] it will be the last time I attend in this function. After more than 10 years, it is time someone else takes over. The Ceremony, as usual, is co-hosted by the City of Geneva, and will take place at the Salle communale de Plainpalais in Geneva. Happy to see that the participation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is expected.
Please note that entry to the venue is on a first first-come, first-served basis.
The event will also be livestreamed on the MEA’s media platforms.
Two journalists, one imprisoned in Belarus and the other in Georgia, have won the European Union’s top human rights honor, the Sakharov Prize, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola announced on Wednesday 22 October 2025.
Andrzej Poczobut is a correspondent for the influential Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. He was convicted of “harming Belarus’ national security” and sentenced to eight years, which he is serving in the Novopolotsk penal colony.
Mzia Amaghlobeli, a prominent journalist who founded two of Georgia’s independent media outlets, was in August convicted of slapping a police chief during an anti-government protest. She was sentenced to two years in prison in a case that was condemned by rights groups as an attempt to curb media freedom.
“Both are journalists currently in prison on trumped up charges simply for doing their work and for speaking out against injustice. Their courage has made them symbols of the struggle for freedom and democracy,” Metsola said at the parliament in Strasbourg, France.
After fleeing Chinese repression, Uyghurs Idris and Zeynure Hasan thought their family would be safe. But Beijing’s growing influence led to Idris’s arrest and a long battle to be reunited
Zeynure Hasan was at home in Istanbul in July 2021 when her husband finally called. It had been four days since she last heard from him as he got ready to board a flight to Casablanca. The silence had been torturous.
But the news Idris now shared with her was even worse. He had been arrested and imprisoned on arrival in Morocco and told he was going to be deported to China. “You should call anyone who can help me, anyone who can rescue me,” he told her, before the phone went dead.
Returning to Aotearoa after half a year in the occupied West Bank, Cole Martin says a peace deal that fails to address the root causes — and ignores the brutal reality of life for Palestinians — is no peace deal at all.
COMMENTARY:By Cole Martin
A ceasefire in Gaza last week brought scenes reminiscent of January’s brief pause — tears, relief, exhaustion and devastation as families reunited after months, years and even decades in captivity.
Others were exiled or discovered their entire family had been killed; thousands returned to their homes in northern Gaza, others to rubble – but just like last time, it didn’t last.
An Israeli checkpoint near Al-Khalil, Hebron . . . Palestinians stand in a crowded, fenced corridor with metal bars, waiting to pass through a turnstile gate. Image: Cole Martin
The prevention of food, water, aid and critical infrastructure continues; the borders remain closed; and across the rest of Palestine, Israel’s brutal system of domination, apartheid and displacement continues.
It’s impossible to ignore two critical elements that this deal omitted: a failure to address the root causes and a jarring lack of international accountability.
I returned to Aotearoa this week after six months documenting and reporting from the occupied West Bank, where Israel continues its campaign of violent displacement and colonial expansion. Almost everyone I know has tasted the terror of Israeli domination.
Broke into bedroom
My Arabic tutor described how soldiers broke into her bedroom at night to interrogate her family about a man they didn’t even know. My climbing partner warned you can be shot for climbing in the wrong place, with most of their crags now inaccessible.
I visited Jerusalem with a friend who scored a one-day permit. He lives in Bethlehem, just a half-hour away, but they’re barred from visiting and must return by midnight; a process involving biometric scanners and intrusive searches.
And I was based in Aida refugee camp, one of dozens across the land where thousands of families have lived since their violent displacement in 1948 — the ethnic cleansing which saw 750,000 expelled, 15,000 killed and 530 villages destroyed.
Refused the right to return, their homes are now dormant ruins in “nature reserves” or inhabited by Israeli families. Israel was built on the land, farms, businesses and stolen wealth of these families — and countless more who remain as “present absentees” within the state of Israel.
Left: Palestinian climbers enjoy one of their last accessible crags, the others too dangerous to access because of settler violence. Right: Yacoub Odeh, 84, walks the ruins of his childhood village Lifta, denied his right to return to live, despite living just 10 minutes away. Images: Cole Martin
I visited the Ofer military courts and witnessed a corrupt system designed to funnel Palestinians to prison based on extortion, plea bargains and “secret evidence” which the detainee and lawyer aren’t allowed to see. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers receive full legal rights in Israeli civil courts; two vastly different legal systems based on race — if the settler is arrested at all.
Almost everyone I met has experienced detention firsthand or through a close family member — involving beatings, humiliation, starvation and threats. A nurse my age humorously asked why I wasn’t married yet; when I asked the same, he explained he’d only recently left years of Israeli captivity.
His killer was free within five days, back harassing the family, and has established an illegal settlement in the middle of their village — destroying homes, olive groves, water and electrical infrastructure with no repercussions.
Tariq Hathaleen stares at the bloodstained courtyard where his cousin and best friend Awdah was shot. Tariq was detained for several days following Awdah’s death. Image: Cole Martin
I visited countless communities across the West Bank who face daily harassment, violence and incursions from Israeli settlers, police and military. Settlements continue to expand, preventing Palestinians from reaching their land.
All of this continues, none of it is halted by the “ceasefire”; and most of it will escalate as soldiers leave Gaza and look to exert their dominance elsewhere.
I’m truly fearful for my friends in the West Bank, particularly as Israel openly threatens annexation. A peace deal that ignores these realities is no peace deal.
Resilience and courage
But I also witnessed resilience and courageous persistence. Palestinian civil society and individuals have spent decades committed to creative non-violence in the face of these atrocities — from court battles to academia, education, art, demonstrations, general strikes, hīkoi (marches), sit-ins, civil disobedience.
These are the overlooked stories that don’t make catchy headlines, but their success depends on the international community to provide accountability. Without global support, Palestinians have been refused their right to self-defence, resistance and self-determination.
If we really care about peace, we need to support justice. To talk about peace without liberation is to suggest submission to a system of displacement, imprisonment, violence and erasure.
This is not the time to turn away, this is the time to ensure that international law is upheld, that Palestinians are given their dignity, self-determination, right to return and reparations for the horror they’ve faced.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist who has been based in the occupied West Bank for six months and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by the The Spinoff and is republished with the author’s permission.
Thousands have marched through major city streets and rallied in small towns across Aotearoa New Zealand as part of today’s “mega strike” of public workers.
More than 100,000 workers from several sectors walked off the job in increasingly bitter disputes over pay and conditions.
It was billed as possibly the country’s biggest labour action in four decades.
Strike action in Auckland’s Aotea Square. Video: RNZ
Among those on strike were doctors, dentists, nurses, social workers and primary and secondary school teachers.
Several rallies were cancelled by severe weather in the South Island and lower North Island.
Auckland One of the day’s main rallies got underway shortly after midday with thousands of protesters gathering in Aotea Square for speeches, before marching down Queen Street.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down.
“Mega strike” protesters in Auckland today. Image: Nick Monro/RNZ
“Of course this is political. Politics is about power and it’s about resources and it’s about who gets to make decisions that saturate and shape our daily lives,” she said.
There was a smaller, earlier rally in the morning in Henderson.
Tupe Tai from Western Springs College, who has been teaching for several decades, said the situation had become untenable.
“We’ve got really underpaid and overworked teachers, they need that support.”
She also said teachers needed an environment where they could work on the curriculum, have time to do it, but also have a life.
Protesters in the “mega strike” in Hamilton today. Image: Libby Kirkby-McLeod/RNZ
Hamilton The crowd swelled to an estimated 10,000 in Hamilton’s rally.
Kimberly Jackson and her daughter were at the rally on behalf of her husband, a senior doctor who had to be at the hospital working as part of lifesaving measures.
“For us it is personal, but it’s also about this country that I love, that I’ve grown up in, and I can see terrible things happening in this country and I feel really passionate about public health care,” she said.
Jackson said she had seen the system deteriorate over her lifetime.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down Auckland’s Queen Street today. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Chloe Wilshaw-Sparkes, regional chair of the Waikato PPTA said teachers were on strike because the offers from the government were not good enough.
“They’ve been saying ‘get round the table, have a conversation,’ but a conversation goes two ways and I think they need to be reminded of that,” she said.
Principal of Hamilton East School, Pippa Wright, was at the rally with some of the school’s teachers.
She said she believed in the NZEI’s principles, and she wanted changes which would ensure schools had really good teachers in front of students.
Wright also said pay rates needed to rise.
“So they’re not treated like graduates, and we need better conditions for teachers, and nurses, and all the public sector,” she said.
“Mega strike” protesters in Whangārei today. Image: Peter de Graaf/RNZ
Northland In Whangārei, the weather was sweltering and a stark contrast from conditions further south.
About 1200 people marched through several city blocks, after leaving Laurie Hall Park.
As well as teachers, nurses and other union members there were students and patients showing support.
Sydney Heremaia of Whangārei had heart surgery a few weeks ago but said he was marching to show his concern about staffing levels and creeping privatisation.
Deserei Davis, a teacher at Whangārei Primary School, feared there would be no new teachers soon if pay and conditions were not improved.
“We’ve voted to strike because we feel that the government hasn’t been addressing our issues, and especially at bargaining,” she told RNZ.
“The government scrapped pay equity claims. And that was a shocking blow to women in general, but an absolute shock and a blow for us women in education. And it’s completely scrapped it.
“More importantly, we are standing up for our tamariki, who are really poorly resourced in schools, in terms of support and the requirements coming down on teachers on a daily basis, on a monthly basis.
“It’s burning out our teachers. We’re fighting for our support staff, our teacher aides, the most vulnerable of all our staff who don’t have job security.”
She said the ministry’s offer was “absolutely atrocious”.
“$1 extra an hour over a period of three years. Like let that sink in. 60 cents one year, maybe 25 cents the following and 15 cents the following year. How does that keep up with the rate of inflation?”
Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda told RNZ it was “pretty important to support our essential public services”.
“We don’t like what’s been going on. Then the understaffing, the refusal to acknowledge the severity of the understaffing and then, of course, pay offers that are below the cost of living, which means . . . pay cut. None of those things seem fair to the group of public workers that are working harder than ever under huge demand.”
Striking staff called in after power outage A union organiser said striking staff returned to Nelson Hospital to care for patients after its backup generator failed in a power outage.
The top of the South Island lost power on Thursday as wild weather hit the country. It began to be restored from 9.30am.
PSA organiser Toby Beesley said the generators at the hospital started, but it’s understood they blew out an electrical board, which led to a 45-minute total power outage.
“The senior leadership at Nelson Hospital reached out to us under our pre-agreed crisis management protocol that we’ve been working on with them for the last three weeks for an event of this nature, and they asked for additional PSA member support, which we immediately agreed to to protect the community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Thousands have marched through major city streets and rallied in small towns across Aotearoa New Zealand as part of today’s “mega strike” of public workers.
More than 100,000 workers from several sectors walked off the job in increasingly bitter disputes over pay and conditions.
It was billed as possibly the country’s biggest labour action in four decades.
Strike action in Auckland’s Aotea Square. Video: RNZ
Among those on strike were doctors, dentists, nurses, social workers and primary and secondary school teachers.
Several rallies were cancelled by severe weather in the South Island and lower North Island.
Auckland One of the day’s main rallies got underway shortly after midday with thousands of protesters gathering in Aotea Square for speeches, before marching down Queen Street.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down.
“Mega strike” protesters in Auckland today. Image: Nick Monro/RNZ
“Of course this is political. Politics is about power and it’s about resources and it’s about who gets to make decisions that saturate and shape our daily lives,” she said.
There was a smaller, earlier rally in the morning in Henderson.
Tupe Tai from Western Springs College, who has been teaching for several decades, said the situation had become untenable.
“We’ve got really underpaid and overworked teachers, they need that support.”
She also said teachers needed an environment where they could work on the curriculum, have time to do it, but also have a life.
Protesters in the “mega strike” in Hamilton today. Image: Libby Kirkby-McLeod/RNZ
Hamilton The crowd swelled to an estimated 10,000 in Hamilton’s rally.
Kimberly Jackson and her daughter were at the rally on behalf of her husband, a senior doctor who had to be at the hospital working as part of lifesaving measures.
“For us it is personal, but it’s also about this country that I love, that I’ve grown up in, and I can see terrible things happening in this country and I feel really passionate about public health care,” she said.
Jackson said she had seen the system deteriorate over her lifetime.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down Auckland’s Queen Street today. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Chloe Wilshaw-Sparkes, regional chair of the Waikato PPTA said teachers were on strike because the offers from the government were not good enough.
“They’ve been saying ‘get round the table, have a conversation,’ but a conversation goes two ways and I think they need to be reminded of that,” she said.
Principal of Hamilton East School, Pippa Wright, was at the rally with some of the school’s teachers.
She said she believed in the NZEI’s principles, and she wanted changes which would ensure schools had really good teachers in front of students.
Wright also said pay rates needed to rise.
“So they’re not treated like graduates, and we need better conditions for teachers, and nurses, and all the public sector,” she said.
“Mega strike” protesters in Whangārei today. Image: Peter de Graaf/RNZ
Northland In Whangārei, the weather was sweltering and a stark contrast from conditions further south.
About 1200 people marched through several city blocks, after leaving Laurie Hall Park.
As well as teachers, nurses and other union members there were students and patients showing support.
Sydney Heremaia of Whangārei had heart surgery a few weeks ago but said he was marching to show his concern about staffing levels and creeping privatisation.
Deserei Davis, a teacher at Whangārei Primary School, feared there would be no new teachers soon if pay and conditions were not improved.
“We’ve voted to strike because we feel that the government hasn’t been addressing our issues, and especially at bargaining,” she told RNZ.
“The government scrapped pay equity claims. And that was a shocking blow to women in general, but an absolute shock and a blow for us women in education. And it’s completely scrapped it.
“More importantly, we are standing up for our tamariki, who are really poorly resourced in schools, in terms of support and the requirements coming down on teachers on a daily basis, on a monthly basis.
“It’s burning out our teachers. We’re fighting for our support staff, our teacher aides, the most vulnerable of all our staff who don’t have job security.”
She said the ministry’s offer was “absolutely atrocious”.
“$1 extra an hour over a period of three years. Like let that sink in. 60 cents one year, maybe 25 cents the following and 15 cents the following year. How does that keep up with the rate of inflation?”
Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda told RNZ it was “pretty important to support our essential public services”.
“We don’t like what’s been going on. Then the understaffing, the refusal to acknowledge the severity of the understaffing and then, of course, pay offers that are below the cost of living, which means . . . pay cut. None of those things seem fair to the group of public workers that are working harder than ever under huge demand.”
Striking staff called in after power outage A union organiser said striking staff returned to Nelson Hospital to care for patients after its backup generator failed in a power outage.
The top of the South Island lost power on Thursday as wild weather hit the country. It began to be restored from 9.30am.
PSA organiser Toby Beesley said the generators at the hospital started, but it’s understood they blew out an electrical board, which led to a 45-minute total power outage.
“The senior leadership at Nelson Hospital reached out to us under our pre-agreed crisis management protocol that we’ve been working on with them for the last three weeks for an event of this nature, and they asked for additional PSA member support, which we immediately agreed to to protect the community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) claims more than a dozen civilians have been killed in the Papuan highlands, including three men who were allegedly tortured and a woman who was allegedly raped.
However, the Indonesian government claims the accusations “baseless”.
ULMWP president Benny Wenda said 15 civilians had been killed, and the women who was allegedly raped fled from soldiers and drowned in the Hiabu River.
A spokesperson for the Indonesian embassy in Wellington said the actual number was 14, and all those killed were members of an “armed criminal group”.
The spokesperson described the alleged torture and rape as “false and baseless”.
“What Benny Wenda does not mention is their usual ploy to try to intimidate and terrorise local communities, to pressure communities to support his lost cause,” the spokesperson said.
‘Covert military posts’
According to the Indonesian embassy spokesperson, those killed were involved in burning down schools and health facilities, while falsely claiming they were being used as “covert military posts” by Indonesia.
“Their accusations were not based on any proof or arguments, other than the intention to create chaos and intimidate local communities.”
The spokesperson added the Indonesian National Police and Armed Forces had conducted “measured action” in Kiwirok.
West Papua Action Aotearoa spokesperson Catherine Delahunty said Indonesia’s military had become more active since President Prabowo Subianto came to power in October last year.
“The last year or so, it’s depressing to say, but things have actually got a whole lot worse under this president and a whole lot more violent,” Delahunty said.
“That’s his only strategy, the reign of terror, and certainly his history and the alleged war crimes he’s associated with, makes it very, very difficult to see how else it was going to go.”
Delahunty said the kidnapping of New Zealand helicopter pilot Phillip Mehrtens in 2023 also triggered increased military activity.
Schoolchildren tear gassed
Meanwhile, a video taken from a primary school in Jayapura on October 15 shows children and staff distressed and crying after being tear gassed.
The Indonesian embassy spokesperson said authorities were trying to disperse a riot that started as a peaceful protest until some people started to burn police vehicles.
They said tear gas was used near a primary school, where some rioters took shelter.
“The authorities pledge to improve their code and procedure, taking extra precautions before turning to extreme measures while always being mindful of their surroundings.”
Jakarta-based Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono said the level of care using tear gas would have been much higher if the students were not indigenous Papuan.
“If it is a school with predominantly settler children, the police will be very, very careful. They will have utmost care,” he said.
“The mistreatment of indigenous children dominated schools in West Papua is not an isolated case, there are many, many reports.”
‘Ignored by world’
Despite the increased violence in the region, Wenda said the focus of Pacific neighbours like New Zealand and Australia remained on the Middle East and Ukraine.
“What has happened in West Papua is almost a 60-year war. If the world ignores us, our people will disappear,” he said.
Delahunty said there had been a weak response from the international community as Indonesia used drones to bomb villages.
“The reign of terror that is taking place by the Indonesian military, they’re getting away with it because nobody else seems to care.
“If you look at the recent Pacific Islands Forums, it’s very disappointing, it came up with a very standard statement, like ‘it would be good if Indonesia would invite the human rights people from the UN in’.
“We close our eyes, Palestine rightly gets our support and attention for the genocide that’s being visited upon the people of Palestine, but in our own region, we’re not interested in what is happening to our neighbours.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced on Wednesday that there is no evidence that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has violated the principle of neutrality or practised discrimination in the distribution of aid within the occupied Palestinian territories, refuting Israel’s repeated allegations in this regard.
During a hearing held by the court in The Hague to issue its advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations towards humanitarian aid to Palestinians, the president of the court, Yuji Iwasawa, confirmed that Israel has failed to prove its claims that a large proportion of UNRWA employees are affiliated with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) or any other factions classified as terrorist organisations.
ICJ warns against the use of starvation as a weapon of war
The court, which is the highest judicial body of the United Nations, stressed that Israel is legally obliged to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, especially that provided by UNRWA, warning against the use of starvation as a weapon of war in the Strip.
The court affirmed that Israel must enable all humanitarian relief plans for the population in the occupied Palestinian territories and ensure the provision of basic necessities for their survival, including food, medicine, water and fuel. It also unanimously concluded that, as an occupying power, Israel is obliged to respect its international legal obligations and must refrain from imposing its laws and legislation within the occupied Palestinian territories.
This is the third such ruling issued by the International Court of Justice regarding Israel’s practices since it began its aggression against Gaza more than two years ago. In July last year, the court ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories was illegal, and it had previously issued a ruling in a genocide case demanding that Israel take immediate measures to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.
The case stems from a lawsuit filed by South Africa in December 2023, accusing Israel of committing crimes amounting to genocide against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, prompting the court to issue provisional measures requiring Israel to protect the population and ensure the unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid.
After the sounds of bombing ceased, the women of Gaza faced a new reality imposed on their lives by the war, one that not only included the loss of loved ones, but also placed enormous responsibilities on their shoulders. Thousands of widows who lost their husbands and children suddenly became the main breadwinners for their families, in a society already suffering from stifling economic and social constraints, where unemployment, poverty and destruction determine daily life.
Figures indicate that the Israeli aggression in the war of extermination left 56,000 children orphaned, while the number of widows rose to tens of thousands of women who are divided between caring for children, securing shelter, and trying to provide the minimum basic needs.
These numbers reflect the catastrophic scale of the loss, but they also highlight women’s ability to face challenges despite limited support from the government and humanitarian organisations.
Gaza women: anxiety and depression
Psychological and social loss is no less devastating than material loss. According to a report by the Gaza Centre for Social Research, high rates of depression and anxiety among women after the war reflect a complex crisis of trauma, social isolation, and societal pressure that limits women’s opportunities for work and economic initiative.
Women’s testimonies reflect this reality: Amira, a 32-year-old widow who lost her husband and three sons, says, “I live to survive. Every day I live is a victory over grief.” Her story represents thousands of women who embody silent resilience every day.
Education is an additional challenge, as children face difficulties accessing schools or pursuing distance learning due to a lack of family support or resources. Many women have been forced to divide their time between work and childcare, which has affected their mental and physical health.
Self empowerment
The long-term impact of war extends to all aspects of life in Gaza. Women breadwinners are a fundamental pillar of rebuilding society and key to any future efforts for social and economic recovery. This requires the integration of women into reconstruction plans, through educational and training programmes and economic and psychological empowerment, not only to secure the future of their families, but also to ensure the rebuilding of a cohesive and influential society after the destruction.
In post-war Gaza, resilience is not just a feeling, but a daily act that redraws the map of life despite the wounds. It affirms that women are the beating heart of confronting loss and transforming pain into strength and self-reliance, in a dual battle between grief and empowerment, between loss and hope.
Women’s resilience in Gaza is proof, to the world, of the ability to adapt despite loss. But it also highlights the need for urgent and sustained support for women breadwinners; whether through financial and training programmes or psychological and social support that alleviates the burdens of their daily lives.
On 16 October 2025 Amazon Watch reported that more than 130 civil society and human rights organizations from across Latin America and around the world have issued an urgent appeal for an immediate end to repression, militarization, and human rights violations by the Ecuadorian government. The statement follows weeks of violent crackdowns against Indigenous-led protests that began on September 21, when social movements mobilized to defend democracy, rights, and the environment amid controversial government reforms.
According to Ecuadorian human rights groups, the government’s response has been brutal and disproportionate: at least three people have been killed, including Indigenous leader Efraín Fuerez; over 282 people injured; 172 detained; and 15 temporarily disappeared. Reports also confirm attacks on journalists, raids without warrants, internet blackouts, and summary deportations, while military operations continue across several provinces.
The joint declaration denounces the criminalization of Indigenous and human rights defenders, who face fabricated charges of terrorism, sabotage, and illicit enrichment, along with the freezing of organizational bank accounts. The signatories condemn President Daniel Noboa’s use of racist and stigmatizing rhetoric to justify state violence and to discredit legitimate social protest.
“Defending life, land, human rights, and freedom of expression cannot be criminalized. Peace cannot be imposed by force; it is built on truth, justice, and dialogue,” the statement affirms.
The organizations also point to international alarm: on October 8, seven United Nations Special Rapporteurs expressed concern about the repression and institutional rollbacks that weaken environmental protections and Indigenous rights. Two days later, members of the European Parliament called for a public EU statement, a monitoring mission, and a review of the E.U.–Ecuador Trade Agreement under its human rights clauses.
In response to the escalating crisis, Amazon Watch has launched an international action urging President Noboa to cease all violence immediately, end the criminalization of Indigenous movements, and ensure full respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Download the statement in PDF format to view a complete list of signatories.
Panelists discussing the need for stronger protection for human rights defenders in exile. Warsaw, 16 October 2025 (OSCE/Piotr Dziubak) Photo details
As civil society space shrinks and attacks against activists increase in many places, a growing number of human rights defenders are being forced into exile as they seek a safe environment to continue their work freely and securely. This was the focus of an event organized by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Araminta, and the World Organisation Against Torture at the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference on 16 October 2025.
“Human rights defenders face inherent risks in their work, and relocating does not address all their needs. Adopting robust safeguarding mechanisms is essential to ensure minimum standards for mobility and a safe environment for defenders in exile,“ said Jennifer Gaspar, Araminta Managing Director.
While defenders in exile play a crucial role in promoting human rights, they face serious challenges, from urgent personal and legal issues to long-term barriers such as legal insecurity, restricted mobility and limited opportunities to continue their work. Participants discussed the need to establish minimum standards to protect human rights defenders in exile in the OSCE region, as well as EU legislation to ensure stronger legal and practical safeguards for them, participants discussed.
The discussion drew on both institutional perspectives and the lived experiences of exiled defenders, highlighting the need for coordinated action and policy tools to address these gaps. Participants emphasized that ensuring human rights defenders can continue their work in safety is vital to protect human rights and promote democratic values across the OSCE region and beyond.
A video has emerged of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters in Sudan suspending a young woman from a tree.
The video, from North Darfur, shows the militia torturing 22-year-old Gisma Ali Omer. She is hanging from a tree by her arms, and the fighter shows his face, looking proud.
A young unarmed Sudanese woman is filmed by a member of the UAE-backed RSF militia hanging from a tree by pieces of rope tied across her arms.
This is what the United Arab Emirates is funding, orchestrating and supporting for almost two years in the Darfour region. pic.twitter.com/VWd4Np7bSj
Sudan’s civil war began in April 2023, as fighting broke out between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
Since then, the war has displaced over 13m people, with 30m people needing assistance and 25m “experiencing acute hunger”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has described the situation as a catastrophe of “staggering scale and brutality.”
“More than 150,000 people have died across the country, and about 12 million have fled their homes in what the UN has called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”
Social media doesn’t speak about Sudan enough. We need to speak up the same way we did for Palestine https://t.co/xHunDw3RKd
In 2013, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo formally established the RSF. It was previously accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the region’s non-Arab population. But even before 2013, it had around 5,000 active militia which were armed and active.
Back in 2003, Sudan’s then-leader, Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, mobilised Arab herders to fight against Black African insurgents in Darfur. Then, between 2003 and 2005, the government of Sudan, with the aid of Janjaweed militias, carried out mass atrocities against the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit communities in Darfur.
Armed conflict and targeted killings in Darfur caused about 300,000 civilian deaths and displaced around 2.7m people.
As the Canary previously reported, Human Rights Watch has accused the RSF of ethnic cleansing of the Masalit ethnic group and other non-Arab groups.
HRW added that the widespread killings raised the possibility that the RSF and their allies had “the intent to destroy in whole or in part” the Massalit people, which constitutes a genocide.
The US has accused Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the RSF, of “systematic atrocities”.
He also controls some of Sudan’s gold mines and smuggles the metal to the UAE.
This is the evil that the UAE are sponsoring against non Arab groups in Sudan through the RSF to secure and loot resources most especially Gold.
What we are seeing is a proxy war and a genocide perpetrated through famine, rape and destruction. https://t.co/lmiAKOPBe9
The RSF terrorist group in Sudan are waging brutal wars against innocent Black Sudanese civilians. This is unacceptable and we hold UAE Government, who are funding and financing the terrorist group, responsible for these crimes.
A United Nations investigation concluded that the RSF and its allied militias had:
Committed the war crimes of violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; committing outrages upon personal dignity; rape, sexual slavery and any form of indecent assault; pillage; conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 or using them to participate actively in hostilities; intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population; intentionally
directing attacks against persons and objects involved in humanitarian assistance and other specially protected objects; and ordering the displacement of the civilian population for reasons related to the conflict. The Fact-Finding Mission further considers that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the RSF has committed the crimes against humanity of murder; torture; enslavement; rape, sexual slavery, and acts of a sexual nature of comparable gravity; persecution on the basis of intersecting ethnic and gender grounds in connection with the foregoing acts; and forcible displacement of population
Additionally, it found that the SAF and its allied forces had:
Committed the war crimes of violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.
Massacres
The UAE-backed RSF have committed massacre after massacre in Sudan.
In one village, Shag Alnom, more than 200 people were killed in a “terrible massacre”, the group said. The victims were either “burned inside their homes” or shot. In the neighbouring villages, 38 other civilians were also killed and dozens more have been forcibly disappeared.
Emergency Lawyers also condemned RSF for turning villages full of civilians into military targets:
Unfortunately this is happening on a daily basis in sudan and the world media has imposed a near total blackout https://t.co/WWnHgmaQIn
Back in July, a senior prosecutor for the International Criminal Court found that:
On the basis of our independent investigations, the position of our office is clear. We have reasonable grounds to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been and are continuing to be committed in Darfur
She also added that there was an “inescapable pattern” of offending, which targets gender and ethnicity through rape and sexual violence.
Sudanese girls & women are being tortured.
Sudanese girls & women are being tortured.
Sudanese girls & women are being tortured.
Sudanese girls & women are being tortured.
Sudanese girls &women are being tortured.
Sudanese girls & women are being tortured https://t.co/EQPr4FVhSf
A long and systematic history of violence against women in Sudan.
Makawi pointed to a confluence of laws designed to criminalise and subjugate women. Both RSF armed militias and government security forces have perpetrated mass sexual violence to intimidate and assert control, making women’s bodies a ‘battleground’ in the ongoing conflict.
In short, Makawi summed up that:
Women in Sudan today are once again the victims of mass atrocities committed by armed actors in pursuit of political and economic gain.
This footage of RSF forces torturing Omer is visual evidence of these heinous crimes against Sudanese women from marginalised groups. It’s a reminder that the cost of conflict and genocide is a gendered one – and it is often shouldered by women and girls from oppressed communities most of all.
This lecture“Requiem for Gaza” was delivered to a sold out audience at the University of South Australia in Adelaide after journalist Chris Hedges’ appearance was cancelled by the Australian National Press Club.
EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE:By Chris Hedges
The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble.
My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.
Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.
The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church.
I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.
The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.
The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.
There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.
It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.
The Edward Said Memorial Lecture. The Chris Hedges Report
Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate.
Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.
Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.
Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned.
And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”
Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”
Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?
How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?
How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?
Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?
By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?
Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?
How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?
How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?
Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?
What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?
And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?
Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, bellowed:
“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death. I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”
Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.
The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force.
Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed.
Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favour of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians”.
The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.
The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo:
“A sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”
Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept.
The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.
This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.
The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.
History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabise an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions.
It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.
When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.
The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.
This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.
As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism.
This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures — the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The incursion on October 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II.
German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies.
It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of October 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.
The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.
The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1700 and injuring thousands more.
The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure 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, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass 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 sexual assaults 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 ceasefire agreements.
Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.
The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.
But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the US in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The US and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation — Yemen — which has tried to halt the genocide.
The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.
The militarised drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.
Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book Rise and Kill First in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation”.
Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.
Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”
The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “Western civilization”.”
The moral philosophers who make up the Western canon — Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke — excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonised people, women of all races and the criminalised from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.
So, when you hear that the Western canon is an imperative, ask yourself for whom?
“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans.
American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.
The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.
The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers”.
Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.
Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.
Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018:
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. [W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites.
Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.
There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.
Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad — who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.
Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.
Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”
The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.
Pankaj Mishra writes:
“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West.”
We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialised nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable.
It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.
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 Edward Said Memorial Lecture was hosted by the Australian Friends of Palestine and delivered at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, on 18 October 2025.
Fifteen years ago today a contingent of six New Zealanders drove three aid-packed ambulances into Gaza as part of the epic international Viva Palestina 5 solidarity convoy of 145 vehicles — to a rock-star reception from locals.
The featured PressTV report includes a short interview with Kia Ora Gaza team volunteer Hone Fowler.
Kia Ora Gaza was established from a series of public meetings to organise Kiwi participation in international efforts to end the siege of Gaza and promote practical solidarity for Palestine.
This followed the Israeli commando raid on the Mavi Marmara-led peace flotilla in international waters in 2010 which resulted in the deaths of 10 civilian peace activists.
Since then Kia Ora Gaza has organised or supported many projects.
Many more reports, photos and videos of this historic siege-busting convoy can be seen by by scrolling back to October 2010 on the Kia Ora Gaza website.
New Zealand’s opposition parties have promised to repeal the coalition government’s changes to the Marine and Coastal Area Act (MACA) if re-elected in the face of criticism over “mindsets of colonisation”.
It has been contested in the courts, with a key Court of Appeal ruling making it easier for groups to win customary title in 2023.
The Supreme Court went on to overturn that decision last year, though the government considered it and said the test remained too broad.
National had agreed to tighten up the legislative test, making it harder for Māori to secure titles, in its coalition agreement with New Zealand First.
It has been contested in the courts, with a key Court of Appeal ruling making it easier for groups to win customary title in 2023.
The Supreme Court went on to overturn that decision last year, though the government considered it and said the test remained too broad.
The coalition has pitched changes to the Marine and Coastal Area Act as restoring the legislation to its original intent, while critics argue they diminish Māori rights. Image: RNZ/Nick Monro
National had agreed to tighten up the legislative test, making it harder for Māori to secure titles, in its coalition agreement with New Zealand First.
‘This is not something that we’ve done lightly’ – Justice Minister Speaking in the third reading last night, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said the courts had interpreted the test in a way that “materially reduced” its intended effect.
“The bill clarifies the wording of the current test and provides additional guidance to decision makers in interpreting and applying the test,” he said.
Justice Minister Dr Paul Goldsmith . . . “more tightly defining what exclusive use and occupation means.” Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
“Key elements include more tightly defining what exclusive use and occupation means, requiring decision makers to base any inferences on a firm basis of physical evidence, not just cultural associations in that second part of the test, and thirdly placing the burden of proof more squarely on applicants to demonstrate that they meet both legs of the test.”
Goldsmith said the legislation was retrospective, overriding court decisions made after 24 July 2024, and the government had provided $15 million to support Māori groups to cover the costs of going back to court.
“I recognise that this will be very disappointing to groups who have been through the process. This is not something that we’ve done lightly but there is a long way to go and much of our coastline still to be considered and we believe as a government that it’s important to get that right.”
New Zealand First’s Casey Costello . . . “This is not removing the rights for Māori.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
New Zealand First’s Casey Costello said her leader Winston Peters had been a “champion of equal citizenship and protecting the legitimate interests of all New Zealanders and the marine and coastal area of New Zealand”.
“This is not removing the rights for Māori. Māori, like any New Zealander, have the opportunity to enjoy their coastline and enjoy their benefits.”
The ACT party’s Todd Stephenson said the bill restored the exacting test to establish customary marine title that had been undermined by a number of court decisions.
“We will be supporting this because it does restore what Parliament intended.”
ACT’s Todd Stephenson . . . restored the exacting test to establish customary marine title. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Labour says bill ‘treating Māori as second class citizens’ Labour’s Peeni Henare said the bill’s third reading continued a “long legacy” of Parliament “treating Māori as second class citizens”.
“For whatever reason, this government continues to say co-governance, co-management, or working alongside Māori is not the thing to do and would rather score political points instead of underscoring the good frameworks that are already in place that allow management of places like the marine and takutai moana.”
The Green Party’s Steve Abel said New Zealand had no decent future if Parliament kept doing “shitty legislation like this”.
“No good can come from a bill of this character. It is a bill that explicitly leads in to those worst mindsets of colonisation; that at every turn Māori are cut against and undermined and undone and for all the efforts of this chamber and this house to make amends for those cruel histories of colonisations, this bill forces the Crown back into a position of dishonorability.”
The Green Party’s Steve Abel . . . “this bill forces the Crown back into a position of dishonorability.” Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Te Pāti Māori’s Tākuta Ferris said Māori would mobilise, given no government in history had ever had the right or authority to extinguish the Tiriti-based rights of Māori.
“What this government is doing now guarantees that the fight for Te Tiriti justice only deepens from this point on and continues on into the next generations.
“They’ve set the playing field for generations to come, condemning our children, our tamariki to needless, endless, perpetual fighting, costly court cases, societal disharmony and time, energy and money-wasting on a staggering scale.”
Te Pāti Māori MP Tākuta Ferris . . . “the fight for Te Tiriti justice only deepens from this point on.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Israel and the West pretend they want a real peace in Israel-Palestine yet the Israelis have beaten unconscious the man most likely to help realise a sustainable end to the conflict: Marwan Barghouti.
The ethnocentrism of Western culture is such that 20 Israeli hostages received vastly more coverage than thousands of Palestinian hostages, nearly 2000 of whom were released as part of the recent exchange.
These prisoners, physically emaciated, most emotionally shattered, many children, most having never been charged, some held for decades, emerged from the Dantesque Inferno of the Israeli prison system. Most had some kind of disease, commonly scabies, due to the infested and infected conditions of the gulag.
Five Palestinian detainees released and exiled to Egypt brought with them terrible news: the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti — the person most likely to lead a free Palestine — had recently been beaten unconscious by his captors.
According to the Times of Israel, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who oversees the Israeli Prison System says he is “proud that Barghouti’s conditions have changed drastically”.
What Nelson Mandela would say about the beating of Marwan Marwan Barghouti — Palestine’s most loved and revered leader, a living symbol of the resistance — was beaten unconscious by 8 Israeli guards, according to the testimony of fellow prisoners on arrival in Cairo. The attack left the 66-year-old with broken ribs and head injuries.
When called on to demand his protection, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western leaders yawned and looked the other way. That response defined the depths that the Western world has reached in its permissiveness of violence towards Palestinian prisoners.
Marwan Barghouti is commonly referred to as the Palestinian Mandela, a man who has the attributes to not only unite the many Palestinian factions but also negotiate a lasting peace, if given the opportunity.
Mandela couldn’t have been “Mandela” without him surviving and being released — which is a tribute to the ANC and other fighters for freedom, as well as to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns that finally convinced the regime to negotiate.
The same was true of the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland which saw the release of prisoners that one side considered terrorists. The British also came to accept that negotiation with leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the IRA was essential precisely because they had the street credibility to deliver peace.
It is worth pointing out that Mandela said he was not personally beaten during his 27 years of captivity by the racist South African apartheid regime.
Barghouti, who has spent the last 23 years in prisons has had at least four beatings by the Israelis in the past three years alone. The Israelis have shown nothing but contempt for the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, Red Cross requests, or any benchmark of human decency.
They are our “friends and allies” with whom we share values.
‘He has been in a struggle for 50 years’. Video: TRT News
Rules on prisoner treatment
After leaving Robben Island to eventually become South Africa’s first black President, the convicted terrorist and revolutionary Prisoner 46664 helped author the Nelson Mandela Rules on prisoner treatment, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. He had seen the mistreatment of many of his comrades by racist white South Africa, a close ally of most of our governments.
The scale of what is being done by Israel in its mass torture centres would be beyond anything Mandela could have imagined. Unlike morally repellent leaders like New Zealand’s Luxon, UK’s Starmer, France’s Macron or Germany’s Merz, he would never have failed to act.
A central tenet of the Mandela Rules is that people behind bars are not beyond human rights. Countries — and, yes, that includes Israel — must adhere to minimum standards such as, “No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.”
Recently released Palestinians, most in shocking physical condition, talked of having to drink toilet water, beatings, being denied medical treatment, constant humiliations, including sexual violence, committed by the Israelis.
This kind of behaviour has long been documented by international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — and largely ignored by the mainstream media.
The Israelis, never forget, are our close friends, with whom we share “values”.
I have written a number of articles about Marwan and, to avoid repetition, I recommend those unfamiliar with his astonishing story to read them. My last article, Saving Marwan Barghouti is our duty, in August, was part of a global push to prevent Marwan facing further mistreatment. I was shocked at the time to see the video that Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir posted to show the power he personally had over Marwan whose physical condition had obviously deteriorated to a terrible extent. Now he has been beaten, for the fourth time.
“It is a clear declaration that they are threatening my father’s life,” his son Arab Barghouti said this week.
Prisons are ‘Israeli sadism in a nutshell’ One person who watched the release of the prisoners last week was veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, correspondent on the Occupied Palestinian Territories for Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz.
“It was a kind of parade of skeletons,” Hass said. “These last two years, it’s like the Israeli prisons have become Israeli sadism in a nutshell,” she told Democracy Now!.
“The way that prisoners were treated during these two years is unprecedented in Israel. They didn’t only come out emaciated; they came out ill, sick. Some of them have lost limbs. It’s indescribable.”
Hass’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, her mother surviving nine months in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now, along with all of us, she is witness to genocide.
She makes the fine observation that people aren’t born cruel; they become so. I would add: we in the West helped the Israelis become so depraved by ignoring their abuses for so long. Former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is a case in point.
“Can I ask the Prime Minister what recent representation his government has made in the last few days to secure the immediate release of Mr Barghouti, given his widespread popularity as a unifying voice for Palestinian rights, dignity and freedom, and therefore his potential crucial role in securing a meaningful and lasting peace in the region?”
Starmer is an avatar for the West: complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Starmer is an avatar for the West . . . complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Starmer, who has less human decency in his entire being than Nelson Mandela had in one nostril hair, refused to even mention Barghouti by name. His lawyerly reply:
“Thank you for raising the individual case. We offer to provide such further information as we can, as soon as we can, in relation to that particular case.”
Western leaders, including in my own country, have refused to even reply to requests that petitions/insistences be made to the Israelis to save the great Palestinian leader. They have shown more empathy for the remains of deceased Israeli hostages crushed under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Israelis, hypocritically blaming Hamas for not releasing the remains fast enough!
Such is the moral calibre of our leaders.
None of them, it should be pointed out, had anything to say when footage appeared of Israeli soldiers committing gang rape at Sde Temein Prison last year. Not only were the men not punished but by week’s end they had been blessed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Meir Mazuz who assured one of the rapists that he had done “no wrong” and “In another country they would have given him an award”.
Never forget, the Israelis are our close friends and allies with whom, our leaders tell us, we share values.
‘Israel doesn’t want peace – they want ethnic cleansing’ Such is Marwan Barghouti’s standing that he is respected by all Palestinian factions and acknowledged as a unifying figure, a peacemaker and someone who should be leading Palestine not getting his head punched by Israeli thugs.
“That’s why they see him as a danger,” says his son, Arab Barghouti. “Because he wants to bring stability, he wants to end the cycle of violence.
“He wants a unifying Palestinian vision that is accepted by everyone, and the international community as well. But they’re [Israelis] not interested in any political settlement; they’re only interested in ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.”
True words, those — and they demolish the fake narrative peddled by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.
The Israelis have killed so many Palestinian negotiators, so many Palestinians leaders that the opposite is now clear: the Israelis and the West are the true enemies of peace.
I’ll give the last word to another Palestinian. I dedicate it to Keir Starmer, Christopher Luxon, Anthony Albanese and all those other leaders who stand deaf, dumb and blind to Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of Palestinian souls still suffering in Israeli captivity:
“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
– Matthew 25, King James Bible
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed “deep gratitude” for Papua New Guinea’s support to his country over many years and during the Middle East conflict.
Prime Minister James Marape was given the message directly yesterday by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel during a courtesy call at Melanesian House, Waigani.
The support by PNG, Fiji and a handful of other Pacific nations is controversial in the face of Israel’s growing global pariah status over its two-year genocidal war on the besieged enclave of Gaza that has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians.
A fragile ceasefire is in place between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas with the last 20 living Israeli captives being released last week in exchange for almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners, most of them held without charge.
Ten countries voted against, half of them from the Pacific — Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, PNG, and Tonga — while the only other countries supporting Israel and its backer United States, were Argentina, Hungary and Paraguay. Twelve countries abstained.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel highlighted Prime Minister Marape’s earlier decision to open the PNG embassy in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv — the first Asia Pacific country to do so — and for supporting Israel at the UN, report the Post-Courierand the PNG Bulletin.
“My visit here was specifically addressed by the Prime Minister [Netanyahu] to see how we can strengthen our friendship further, and to say ‘thank you’ for standing beside us especially in the last two years,” she said.
‘Darkest hours’
“These have been some of our darkest hours since 7 October 2023 . . .
“And you have been one of the most outstanding friends we have standing together on the international front, on bilateral relationship, and in international forums.
She said the people of Israel were “extremely grateful” for the opening of the PNG embassy in Jerusalem.
“This is acknowledgement of our history, our tradition, and of us — the Jewish people — who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel; that we are able to return to revive our religion, culture and language in our ancestral homeland,” Haskel claimed.
She said Netanyahu had requested that the visit to PNG and the Pacific should proceed without delay.
Prime Minister Marape reaffirmed Papua New Guinea’s commitment to the bilateral relationship, highlighting that PNG recognised Israel’s “rights to the land of Israel through its Judeo-Christian worldview”, and continued to recognise Jerusalem as the “eternal” capital of Israel through the PNG embassy.
He added that the embassy opening had encouraged other Pacific countries — such as Fiji — to also establish their diplomatic missions in Jerusalem.
Only four other countries have done so.
Haskel reconfirmed Israel’s commitment to continue assisting PNG in the fields of science and technology, agriculture, health, small business development, and women’s empowerment.
During her two-day visit to PNG, Haskel and her delegation are meeting with ministers in respective fields.
Earlier this month Australian Surya McEwen was among hundreds of humanitarians and activists onboard an aid flotilla bound for Gaza when the fleet was intercepted by the Israeli military.
McEwen joins Nour Haydar to talk about what it was like being inside Israel’s Ketziot prison, the conditions detainees face and why he continues to fight for Palestine
On 17 October, 2025, Minnesota-based NGO Advocates for Human Rights appointed Michele Garnett McKenzie as the new Executive Director.
In accepting her new role, McKenzie said, “I am honored to lead our smart, experienced, and dedicated team at a moment when our work could not be more urgent. My vision is clear: strengthen our capacity to protect human rights, forge strategic partnerships that amplify our collective power, and ensure The Advocates’ independence and resilience.“
During October 2025, new guidelines on Environmental Protest and Civil Disobedience were released by Michel Forst, UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention.
The new guidelines aim to support states, civil society, environmental activists, and legal practitioners in understanding and implementing the rights guaranteed under the Aarhus Convention. The document underscores that individuals and groups have a recognised international right to engage in peaceful environmental demonstrations, even when challenging public or private actors whose practices may harm the environment.
The document outlines five guiding principles to help states ensure that peaceful environmental activism is respected, not repressed:
Address the root causes of the protest: Governments should tackle the real reasons behind environmental protests, such as inaction on environmental protection, lack of transparency, or exclusion from decision-making.
Reject criminalization of defenders: Authorities and media must stop portraying environmental activists as criminals and instead recognize their legitimate role in defending public interests.
Protect civic space: Civil disobedience must not be used as a pretext to restrict fundamental freedoms or limit peaceful public expression.
Ensure human rights–based policing: Law enforcement responses must be lawful, necessary, and proportionate — never arbitrary, excessive, or punitive.
Uphold justice and civic freedom: Courts should avoid rulings or sanctions that discourage peaceful protest or shrink civic space.
Furthermore, the guidelines recognize that some environmental defenders may resort to civil disobedience when legal channels fail, and the guidelines set out conditions under which such acts may be tolerated (e.g., proportionality, non-violence, necessity, public interest). The guidelines stress the need for states to prevent and remediate retaliatory actions against protestors, such as legal harassment, surveillance, excessive use of force, or criminalisation of protest. The text encourages states to review and reform national laws, police protocols, and judicial practices to ensure that protest rights are respected, especially for environmental defenders, and it calls for transparent mechanisms to monitor how protests are handled, report abuses, and hold responsible persons and institutions to account.
The guideline highlights that public authorities (including political figures) should refrain from using language labelling protesters as threats, “eco-terrorists,” or “foreign agents”, and media (especially public or state media) should maintain factual accuracy, avoid derogatory language, and refrain from mischaracterising environmental defenders.
A young unarmed Sudanese woman is filmed by a member of the UAE-backed RSF militia hanging from a tree by pieces of rope tied across her arms.
are sponsoring against non Arab groups in Sudan 
(@anais_frenchy) 
