Members of the Foreign Affairs and Development Committees of the European Parliament voted on Thursday for the three finalists for the 2025 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought (in alphabetical order):
-Imprisoned journalists fighting for your freedom and ours, Andrzej Poczobut from Belarus and Mzia Amaglobeli from Georgia
-Journalists and Humanitarian Aid Workers in Palestine and all conflict zones, represented by the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, the Red Crescent, and UNRWA ;
-Serbian students
Find the biographies of the candidates and finalists by following this link.
The Conference of Presidents, comprising European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and the leaders of the political groups, will choose the 2025 laureate from this shortlist. Their decision will be announced in the Strasbourg Hemicycle during the plenary session on 22 October 2025.
A Paris appeal court has confirmed that Kanak pro-independence leader Christian Téin is now cleared to return to New Caledonia.
In September, a panel of judges had pronounced they were in favour of Téin’s return to New Caledonia, but the Public Prosecution then appealed, suspending his return.
However, in a ruling delivered on Thursday, the Paris Appeal Court confirmed the Kanak leader is now free to travel back to the French Pacific territory.
In June 2024, at the height of violent riots, Téin and other pro-independence leaders were arrested in Nouméa and swiftly flown to mainland France aboard a specially-chartered plane.
They were suspected of playing a key role in the riots that broke out mid-May 2024 and were later indicted with criminal charges.
The charges for which Téin remains under judicial supervision include theft and destruction of property involving the use of weapons.
His pre-trial conditions had been eased in June 2025, when he was released from the Mulhouse jail in eastern France, but he was not allowed to return to New Caledonia at the time.
Téin’s lawyers react to the decision Téin’s lawyers said they were “satisfied and relieved”.
“This time, Téin is allowed to go back to his land after 18 months of being deprived [of freedom],” one of Téin’s counsels, Florian Medico, told French national media.
One main argument from the Public Prosecution was that under “fragile” post-riot circumstances, Téin’s return to New Caledonia was not safe.
Public Prosecutor Christine Forey also invoked the fact that an investigation in this case was still ongoing for a trial at a yet undetermined date.
Previous restrictions imposed on Téin (such as not interfering with other persons related to the same case) were also lifted.
The ruling also concerns four other defendants, all pro-independence leaders.
Case not closed yet “It’s now up to the investigating judges, in a few months’ time, to decide whether to rule on a lack of evidence, or to bring the indicted persons before a court to be judged . . . But this won’t happen before early 2026,” lawyer François Roux told reporters.
Téin is the leader of a CCAT “field action co-ordinating cell” set-up by one of the main pro-independence parties in New Caledonia — the Union Calédonienne (UC).
Although jailed at the time in mainland France to serve a pre-trial term, he was designated, in absentia, president of the main pro-independence umbrella, the FLNKS, during a congress in August 2024.
However, during the same congress, two other pillars of the FLNKS, the moderate pro-independence UPM (Union Progressiste en Mélanésie) and PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party), distanced themselves and de facto split from the UC-dominated FLNKS.
The two parties have since kept away from FLNKS political bureau meetings.
Meanwhile, in January 2025, the case was transferred from a panel of judges in Nouméa to another group of magistrates based in Paris.
They ruled on June 12 that, while Téin and five other pro-independent militants should be released from custody, they were not allowed to return to New Caledonia or interfere with other people associated with the same case.
Now allowed
But in a ruling delivered in Paris on September 23, the new panel of judges ruled Téin was now allowed to return to New Caledonia.
The ruling was based on the fact that since he was no longer kept in custody and even though he had expressed himself publicly and politically, Téin had not incited or called for violent actions.
He still faces charges related to organised crime for events that took place during the New Caledonia riots starting from 13 May 2024, following a series of demonstrations and marches that later degenerated, resulting in 14 dead and over 2 billion euros (NZ$4 billion) in damage.
The 2024 marches were to protest against a plan from the French government of the time to modify the French Constitution and “unfreeze” restrictions on the list of eligible voters at local provincial elections.
The Indigenous pro-independence movement says these changes would effectively “dilute” the Kanak Indigenous vote and bring it closer to a minority.
Back in New Caledonia, the prospect of Téin’s return has sparked reactions.
Outrage on the pro-France side On the pro-France side, most parties who oppose independence and support the notion that New Caledonia should remain part of France have reacted indignantly to the prospect of Téin’s return.
The uproar included reactions from outspoken leaders Nicolas Metzdorf and Sonia Backès, who insist that Téin’s return to New Caledonia could cause more unrest.
Le Rassemblement-LR leader Virginie Ruffenach also reacted saying she wondered whether “the judges realise the gravity of their ruling”.
“We’re opposed to this . . . it’s like bringing back a pyromaniac to New Caledonia’s field of ashes while we’re trying to rebuild,” she told local media.
Meanwhile, a “non-political” petition has been published online to express “firm opposition” to Téin’s return to New Caledonia “in the current circumstances” because of the “risks involved” in terms of civil peace in a “fragile” social and economic context after the May 2024 riots.
Since 30 September 2025, the online petition has collected more than 10,000 signatures from people who describe themselves as a “Citizens Collective Against the Return of Christian Téin”.
“Immense relief”: FLNKS Reacting on Friday on social networks, the FLNKS hailed the appeal ruling, saying this was “an immense relief for their families, loved ones and the whole pro-independence movement”.
“The struggle doesn’t stop, it goes on, even stronger”, the FLNKS said, referring to the current parliamentary battle in Paris to implement the “Bougival” agreement signed in July 2025, which FLNKS rejects.
Within the pro-independence movement, a rift within FLNKS has become increasingly apparent during recent negotiations on New Caledonia’s political future, held in Bougival, west of Paris, which led to the signature, on 12 July 2025, of a text that posed a roadmap for the French territory’s future status.
It mentions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, a short-term transfer of powers from Paris, including in foreign affairs matters and the dual French-New Caledonian nationality.
But while UPM and PALIKA delegates signed the text with all the other political tendencies, the UC-dominated FLNKS said a few days after the signing that the Bougival deal was rejected “in block” because it did not meet the party’s expectations in terms of full sovereignty.
Their negotiators’ signatures were then deemed as invalid because, the party said, they did not have the mandate to sign.
In a letter to French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, and copied to French President Emmanuel Macron and Speakers of both Houses of Parliament, in early October 2025, the FLNKS reiterated that they had “formally withdrawn” their signatures from the Bougival deal and that therefore these signatures should not be “used abusively”.
Bougival deal continues
However, despite a spate of instability that saw a succession of two French governments formed over the past two weeks, the implementation of the Bougival deal continues.
In the latest cabinet meeting this week, the French Minister for Overseas, Manuel Valls, was replaced by Naïma Moutchou.
France’s newly-appointed Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou . . . there “to listen” and “to act”. Image: Assemblée Nationale
Last Wednesday, the French Senate endorsed the postponement of New Caledonia’s provincial elections to June 2026.
The same piece of legislation will be tabled before the Lower house, the French National Assembly, on October 22.
In a media conference on Wednesday, Union Calédonienne (UC), the main component of FLNKS, warned against the risks associated with yet another “passage en force”.
“This is a message of alert, an appeal to good sense, not a threat”, UC secretary-general Dominique Fochi added.
“If this passage en force happens, we really don’t know what is going to happen,” Fochi said.
“The Bougival agreement allows a path to reconciliation. It must be transcribed into the Constitution,” Lecornu told the National Assembly.
Also speaking in Parliament for the first time since she was appointed Minister for Overseas, Naïma Moutchou assured that in her new capacity, she would be there “to listen” and “to act”.
This, she said, included trying to re-engage FLNKS into fresh talks, with the possibility of bringing some amendments to the much-contested Bougival text.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand’s major Palestine advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has condemned Defence Minister Judith Collins for “dog-whistling to her small choir” over Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza enclave.
Claiming that Collins’ open letter attacking teachers at the weekend was an attempt to “drown out Palestine” in discussions with the government, PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said that it demonstrated more about her own prejudices than teacher priorities.
Teachers, who had devoted their lives to educating children in Aotearoa, would be “appalled at the wholesale slaughter” of Palestinian school children in Gaza, he said in a statement today.
Israel has killed at least 97 Palestinians and wounded 230 since the start of the ceasefire, and violated the truce agreement 80 times, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.
“Teachers who are committed to the education and development of the next generation of our country would feel a special affinity with the children of another nation, who are being killed by Israeli bombing in their tens of thousands, seeing all their schools destroyed, and who will suffer the consequences of two years of malnutrition for the rest of their lives,” Nazzal said.
He added that just two months ago, Collins had featured on television standing next to a damaged residential building in Kiev while condemning Russia for attacks which had killed Ukrainian children.
“But not a critical word of Israel from her, or her cabinet colleagues, despite Israel just now resuming its mass bombing in Gaza,” Nazzal said.
Children ‘deserve protection’
“Ukrainian, Palestinian and New Zealand school children all deserve protection and we should expect our government to speak up loudly in their defence, without having to have a teachers’ union raise government inaction on Gaza with them.
“But even after 24 months of genocide, Collins won’t find the words to express New Zealand’s horror at the indiscriminate killing of school children in Gaza.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “not a critical word of Israel from her . . . despite Israel just now resuming its mass bombing in Gaza.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
“But she’s in her element dog-whistling to her small choir in the pro-Israel lobby.
“Collins has already been referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, for complicity in Israel’s genocide by facilitating the supply of military technology for Israeli use.
“It’s more than time for Luxon to pull back his Israeli fanatic colleagues and uphold an ethical rule-based policy, and not default to blind prejudices.”
A critique of the Collins open letter published in The Standard . . . “she makes a number of disturbing claims, as valued workers (doctors, mental health nurses, scientists, midwives, teachers, principals, social workers, oncologists, surgeons, dentists etc) ramp up to one of the biggest strikes in history”. Image: The Standard
Content warning: this article contains video and images some readers may find distressing
The ceasefire in Gaza was breached yet again by Israel. 11 members of the Abu Shaaban family were deliberately massacred by the Israeli occupation on Friday evening, October 17, in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City.
Ceasefire in shatters: a deliberate, unprovoked attack on civilians by Israeli occupation
A tank fired directly at their vehicle, while they were attempting to check on their home. The dead include seven children and three women.
Those killed were Ihab Shaaban, his wife Randa, their seven children — all aged 13 years and under — and Ihab’s sister and brother- in- law. Palestinian rescue workers, coordinating with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), were unable to retrieve the bodies until the following day due to the ongoing Israeli attacks. But, according to Civil Defense Spokesperson Mahmoud Basal, the remains of two of the children are still missing, as their bodies were torn apart by the ‘intensity of the bombardment’.
Basal said in a statement that no warning had been given before the attack, and ‘what happened confirms that the occupation remains thirsty for blood and determined to commit crimes against innocent civilians’.
Many Palestinians unaware of the position of the ‘yellow line’
Israeli media reports that Israeli occupation forces (IOF) fired at a ‘suspicious vehicle’ which had crossed the so-called ‘yellow line’, behind which the IOF were required to withdraw as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire terms. There are currently no physical markers to show where this line is. In a report on Al Jazeera, Hind Khoudary said many people in Gaza do not have internet, so are unaware of the position of the yellow line or the occupation forces, and their lives are put at risk. Defence Minister Israel Katz is also calling for markers to show its position, saying they will serve as a warning to ‘Hamas terrorists and Gaza residents that any violation or attempt to cross the line will be met with fire’.
Zionist regime breaks another ceasefire and continues with its crimes against Palestinians
The Israeli regime has not only systematically violated international law throughout the past two years, but has also broken the ceasefire agreement and continued with its wholesale slaughter of Palestinians across all governorates of the Gaza Strip since the ceasefire was implemented on October 10, confirming it has no intention of stopping the genocide.
Hamas is calling on Trump and the ‘ceasefire’ mediators to pressure the Israeli occupation to abide by the terms of the ceasefire, and asks the international community to fulfil its legal and moral obligations to prevent and also to stop the genocide, and hold the Israeli regime accountable for its many crimes.
Although the first phase of the ceasefire plan states that the IOF must withdraw its troops to the yellow line, Israeli forces are permitted to remain in several Palestinian neighbourhoods, and are still in control of 58 percent of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops have abducted two small children in Hebron, West Bank. The children clearly posed no threat, yet were dragged away, clearly terrified:
As it has done during previous Gaza ‘ceasefires’ — which continue to be violated daily by the murderous occupation — Israel has escalated its murders and kidnappings in the West Bank since the latest ‘deal’, gleefully applauded by its fascist ministers.
And a new United Nations report has confirmed that Israel has murdered more than a thousand Palestinians in the West Bank since October 2023 – well over two hundred of them children – with thousands more abducted. These events have rarely featured in the UK ‘mainstream’ media or the mouths of UK politicians as more than a side note, if even that.
Israel is a terror state and the UK establishment its eager collaborators.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) has faced a barrage of criticism this week from those spied upon by police and security services. The UCPI is tasked with uncovering the truth about how a Met Police unit infiltrated and undermined peaceful campaigns on issues such as racial justice and animal rights. Solicitors for Blacklist Support Group (BSG) leader Dave Smith has hammered the investigation for not permitting the persecuted former construction worker to provide oral evidence. The BSG has also accused the UCPI, chaired by John Mitting, of failing to sufficiently broaden the scope of the inquiry to examine how spycops evidence was used by the likes of MI5, and how it may still be in use today to ‘vet’ job applicants at the likes of the BBC.
One particularly egregious shortcoming, however, is its continued policy of allowing the very cops at the centre of the scandal to escape scrutiny. A key figure still permitted to skulk in the shadows is HN86, the former Met Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) manager described by spycop turned whistleblower Peter Francis as “overtly racist”. Francis was tasked by HN86 with gathering information on the campaign for justice undertaken by the Lawrence family. It was headed by Doreen and Neville Lawrence, whose son Stephen was murdered on 22 April 1993 by a gang of racist white thugs. A statement produced by solicitors for Neville Lawrence said the killing “remains a stain on the national conscience”.
Racist senior police officer said about Lawrence campaign: “the monkeys were being organised”
Francis was one of four cops to spy on the Lawrences, though he is the only one to be definitively identified by his real name. Intelligence gathering on the Stephen Lawrence campaign was described by Francis as the “SDS’ number one priority”. He said he was instructed by HN86 to:
…report anything I could find out about the Lawrence family and/or the campaign that could fundamentally alter the perception of the public about the campaign.
HN86 also:
…made reference to ‘stopping’, ‘undermining’, ‘combatting’ and ‘smearing’ the campaign.
The still anonymous bigot was concerned about the progress of the Lawrences in seeking justice, declaring that “the monkeys were being organised”.
The former SDS leader has been able to remain concealed thanks to a 2018 restriction order placed on both his cover name and real name by Mitting, on the basis that it would enable HN86 to participate as fully as possible while “mitigating personal harm”. The inquiry chair explained that he viewed it as more important to receive his evidence – given he was a manager – than to reveal his identity.
However, the racist boss is still refusing to provide oral evidence even with the cloak of secrecy flung around him. Mitting has moved to compel him to appear, but solicitors for HN86 have launched a Judicial Review to block the inquiry’s demand, arguing that it has no powers to force an individual living overseas to appear. HN86’s current country of residence is unknown.
Spycop traumatised by his own crimes dodges giving evidence
Another formerly uniformed abomination who continues to dodge the harsh glare of public scrutiny is HN81, known to have used the codename ‘David Hagan’ while intruding on grieving parents. The statement from Neville Lawrence says he is:
…deeply disappointed that HN81 (“David Hagan”) has been excused from giving evidence in person. As we identify below, HN81 was one of the most significant officers reporting on the Lawrence family and their supporters, and his evidence goes to the heart of the issues of race discrimination this Inquiry must confront.
He is thought to have supplied evidence on the separation of Doreen and Neville in the aftermath of their son’s murder. Doreen Lawrence’s statement on this cuts to the heart of much of what the inquiry is supposed to be about, pointing out this focus on “intimate facts about a bereaved couple” says:
…something clear about institutional priorities: at the very moment when confidence required a relentless focus on racist violence, the state was gathering and rating personal information about the victim’s family.
Hagan attempted to justify this obscene intrusion by saying the anti-racist campaign group he infiltrated – Movement for Justice (MFJ), which was supporting the Lawrences – might “exploit” news of the separation to disrupt public order. This was a common justification for much of the illegitimate spying done by the SDS – the notion that entirely peaceful political campaigns were perennially on the verge of triggering some form of insurrection.
Police claim they were saving Lawrences from ‘white saviours’
Another absurd justification that officers have put to Doreen Lawrence is that the surveilling:
…was done to ‘protect’ her and her family from left wing or anarchist groups displaying a form of racism known as the ‘white saviour complex’.
As her solicitors point out, among other issues with this reasoning, this explanation “strips Baroness Lawrence of her autonomy and intellectual capacity” and:
Undermines the legitimacy of the justice campaign by associating it with perceived extremist or politically motivated elements, rather than acknowledging its foundation in genuine grief and a demand for racial justice.
‘Hagan’ is also known to have participated in brawling that took place on the day that the five men were accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence. He had involved himself in the disorder, which the police ultimately quelled with CS gas, to avoid having his cover blown. The former SDS man has been permitted to recuse himself from proceedings on medical grounds, having been diagnosed with “post traumatic stress disorder in 2001”, now characterised as “complex post traumatic stress disorder”, according to a letter provided to the inquiry by a Doctor Tehrani. The medical opinion asserted Hagan’s:
…condition is such that the giving of oral evidence would risk a significant impact upon his behaviour and well-being when doing so.
Tom Fowler, host of Spycops Info podcast, described Dwayne Brooks as “furious” at the continued non-appearance of Hagan/HN81. Brooks was a close friend of Stephen Lawrence, and was with him at the time of his killing. It’s fair to say Fowler also isn’t the biggest fan of inquiry chair Mitting.
Officers were mere foot-soldiers for an establishment out to crush the left
These persecutors of the Lawrences are just two of the cops at the centre of the inquiry’s current phase who will evade the spotlight. HN26 (cover name ‘Christine Green’) infiltrated animal rights groups from the mid 90s until early 2000s, before being exposed in 2017. She will not be called to give oral evidence. Likewise HN123, another to be excluded on mental health grounds.
More serious than this, however, is the prospect that senior politicians potentially involved in the scandal will not have their misdeeds accounted for. The solicitors for Doreen Lawrence raise the:
…reporting of ‘great sensitivity around the Lawrence issue with both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister extremely concerned that the Metropolitan Police could end up with its credibility …..completely undermined’.
They ask:
Who was this Home Secretary and Prime Minister? Baroness Lawerence is deeply concerned that little, to no attention, is being paid by this Inquiry to those who were ultimately accountable for the conduct at the heart of this Inquiry.
The statement calls out the “cowardly fashion” in which officers hide from their crimes, but ultimately they are mere foot soldiers for an entire establishment that sought to use police and security services to undermine the left more broadly. Until an inquiry tackles this and meaningfully holds to account those who truly wield the levers of power, there will likely be more cruel invasions into the private lives of those who campaign for a fairer world.
Caroline Tracey’s debut book, a blend of environmental reportage and memoir titled Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, is forthcoming in March 2026 from W.W. Norton.
Originally from Colorado, Caroline holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. In 2025, she received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize for writing about the Southwest. She has also taught writing as a visiting professor at Deep Springs College.
As a journalist and critic, Caroline’s work focuses on the environment, migration, and the arts in the US Southwest, Mexico, and their borderlands. Her reporting appears in the New Yorker,n+1, New York Review of Books, High Country News, and elsewhere, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been commissioned by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art. Read more here.
Caroline lives with her wife, Mexican architect Mariana GJP, between Tucson, Arizona and Mexico City.
*****
So, the show is upcoming, Dec. 10. She’s the kind of writer we need covering climate, envirogees, the nuances of the Borderlands, finding the unusual in the world, and normalizing what it means to be a protector of land, culture, ecology, and the web of life.
These amazing salt lakes, which are basins for larger lakes draining and evaporating over thousands of years.
LISTEN here to our talk, prerecorded for my Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge radio program.
The good old days, into NOW:
These books are valuable, man, as they pile up in my office, and I hope to get Caroline’s new book; she’ll be at the Tucson Book Festival in March 2026, and alas, we hope to see her up here in the Pacific Northwest:
A gem: Learn about this amazing Madagascar as that real Island Biogeography!
I’ve had folk on about the Sky Islands and US-Mexico borderlands.
It will be well worth the journey to find her pieces outside or behind paywalls:
The state of journalism was discussed. The state of immigration predicated on economic conditions and environmental pressure were discussed.
Ironically, many of the environmental crusaders in the Southwest are parachutists, coming to the area from other areas of US and Canada. White people, in a land of cultures, indigenes, and here we are, the irony of so many good-intentioned people moving in and putting pressure on ecosystems in and around Tucson, and farther out, where that lovely lifestyle of the Sonoran Desert is their nirvana.
Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.
Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.
Western migrants are charging like bulls and the ground is shaking under their feet; they are fleeing Europe and North America in hordes. Deep down they cannot stand their own lifestyle, their own societies, but you would hardly hear them pronounce it. They are too proud and too arrogant! But, after recognizing innumerable areas of the world as suitable for their personal needs – as safe, attractive and cheap – they simply pack and go!
We are told that some few hundred thousand African and Asian exiles are now causing a great “refugee crises” all over Europe! Governments and media are spreading panic, borders are being re-erected and armed forces are interrupting the free movement of people. But the number of foreigners illegally entering Europe is incomparably smaller than the number of Western migrants that are inundating, often illegally, virtually all corners of the world.
No “secret paradise” can be hidden any longer and no country can maintain its reasonable price structure. Potential European, North American and Australian immigrants are determined to enrich themselves by any means, at the expense of local populations. They are constantly searching for bargains: monitoring prices everywhere, ready to move at the spur of the moment, as long as the place offers some great bargains, has lax immigration laws, and a weak legal framework.
Everything pure and untapped gets corrupted. With lightning speed, Western immigrants are snatching reasonably priced real estate and land. Then, they impose their lifestyle on all those “newly conquered territories”. As a result, entire cultures are collapsing or changing beyond recognition.
Overall, Western immigrants are arrogant and stubborn; they feel no pity for the countries they are inundating. What surrounds them is only some colorful background to their precious lives. They are unable and unwilling to “adopt” local customs, because they are used to the fact that theirs is the “leading culture” – the culture that controls the world.
They come, they demand, and they take whatever they can – often by force. If unchecked, they take everything. After, when there is almost nothing left to loot, they simply move on. After them, “no grass can grow”; everything is burned, ruined and corrupted. Like Bali, Phuket, Southern Sri Lanka, great parts of the Caribbean, Mexico and East African coast, just to name a few places.
Caroline is bright, quick-witted, and a real journalist’s journalist. Listen to the interview.
[The Rio Grande flows in a rugged and scenic part of northern New Mexico in May 2011. BobWick]
Here, behind a paywall: “The Indefensible Job of Policing the Border . . .” Against the Wall, a former border officer’s memoir, argues that when it comes to protecting the border, cruelty is the point.
In the summer of 2021, I sat in on a presentation given by two members of the US Border Patrol’s Missing Migrants Program—a small initiative of the agency to devote resources to identifying the recovered remains of deceased migrants—to a group of college students on a trip to learn more about the US-Mexico border.
The presentation took place at the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, a town of 5,000 long considered the epicenter of migrant death in the state, despite being 75 miles north of the border. The reason for the deaths is that the town is the site of a major Border Patrol checkpoint that migrants must circumvent on foot; many lose their lives in the hot, immense shrubland of the local ranches.
A national advocacy and protest group has demanded that Foreign Minister Winston Peters condemn Israeli torture of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti and failure to abide by the Gaza ceasefire.
Co-chair John Minto of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) said Barghouti was Palestine’s equivalent to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, jailed by the minority white regime for 27 years but who was elected president in 1994.
As nationwide protests against Israeli genocide across New Zealand continued this weekend into the third year, Minto said in a statement Barghouti had been held by Israel in prison since 2002.
Imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti . . . “equivalent” to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, says PSNA. Image: AJ+ screenshot APR
“He is revered as the most likely Palestinian to lead Palestinians out of occupation and apartheid. Though not affiliated to Hamas, he was top of their list of prisoners for Israel to release,” Minto said.
Minto says this was the clearest message to the world that Israel had no interest in allowing anybody like Nelson Mandela to ever emerge as a Palestinian leader to “bring real peace and justice”.
“Peters should be condemning this torture in the strongest terms.
“He loudly complained that the protest movement in this country didn’t congratulate [US President Donald] Trump with his plan to outsource the occupation of Gaza to Tony Blair, Egyptian secret police and Turkish soldiers.
“But now, when Israel continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza every day, Peters is silent.
‘We fear for my father’s life’: Marwan Barghouti’s son to Al Jazeera Video: AJ+
“Israeli snipers shot 35 Palestinians dead last Friday alone. Israel has also activated its al-Qaeda gangster gangs in Gaza to try to start of civil war.
“There is no ceasefire.”
Minto said that if Peters was to “atone for his completely mistaken optimism” about Trump’s peace plan, then he ought to be “hauling in the Israeli ambassador today for an official rebuke and then send the ambassador packing”.
“Peters has been quick to impose sanctions on Iran. But, as usual, no action on Israel.”
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on.
Janine Jackson interviewed academic and writer Gregory Shupak about how to deny Gaza genocide for the October 10, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The Committee to Protect Journalists states that in the first 10 weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Israel had already killed more media workers in Gaza than had ever been killed in a year anywhere. Israel has systematically targeted journalists and their families for reporting the realities of genocide, famine and displacement, with the murders often followed by official PR efforts depicting the journalists as Hamas propagandists, or simply as “terrorists.”
Journalists are civilians; killing them is a war crime. One would hope that, minimally, the rest of the world’s journalists would acknowledge that, and decry the unlawful, targeted erasure of those trying to bear witness to what is widely acknowledged as genocide, trying to show the world what only they can show. US news media, with all the resources and platform to lift up that reality, are running away from the responsibility, and worse.
Our guest has been following it all. We’re joined now by academic and writer Gregory Shupak, author of, among other titles, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone from Toronto. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.
Gregory Shupak: Hi, thanks for having me.
JJ: In August, Israeli military openly killed six journalists sheltering in a tent. They then accused one of them, Al Jazeera‘s Anas Al-Sharif, of being a terrorist. They had harassed him for months with phone calls explicitly telling him to stop reporting, and then an airstrike killed his father. They didn’t bother justifying the murder of the other five journalists.
Just as it’s increasingly clear that Israel is carrying out a genocide, it’s clear that that includes a plan to silence those who would show that to the world. You just wrote for FAIR.org about one outlet, the Wall Street Journal, but it’s emblematic of techniques that many corporate news outlets are using to deny what we all can see with our own eyes. Talk, if you would, about some of the methods that you see—which, to be clear, they wouldn’t use if they weren’t effective to some degree.
GS: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s worth keeping in mind that this type of propaganda doesn’t have to necessarily convince the audience to completely accept the point of view being put forth. Rather, it can still be effective if it merely disorients and confuses the audience, because that renders readers without the kind of clarity required to take political action.
So, yeah, I’ve identified in this piece five tactics that the Wall Street Journal has used over the last few months in its explicitly genocide-denying commentary on Gaza. And I do think, as you suggested, that this is much more widespread than, well, certainly than just this one period in the Journal, but also in a much larger range of outlets over the last two years. And so the five tactics that I’ve identified are hand-waving, victim-blaming, inverting perpetrator and victim, obscurantism and repudiation. So let me just try to briefly define each one.
So with hand-waving, you have the author just brushing aside the horrors that we’ve all, as you’ve said, seen with our own eyes, as just, “Oh well, this is the inevitable nature of war. What are you going to do? There’s no way this can be avoided,” as if it were a law of physics to burn people alive in their tents, or deliberately target children with snipers, as many doctors have observed has happened in Gaza.
Victim-blaming, another tactic I mentioned, is where the blame or responsibility for the mass murder of Palestinians is put on Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas. So you have here observers suggesting, “Well, it’s the Palestinians’ use of human shields that results in so many Palestinians being killed by Israel.” In fact, the record shows that there’s far, far, far more documented cases of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields than there are of Palestinians using each other as human shields. In fact, there’s effectively no evidence of that having happened, certainly not at any kind of large scale, or as a kind of consistent approach to war-fighting.
The third approach I point to is inverting perpetrator and victim. So this is where you see Palestinians portrayed as the genocidal ones, where the commentary suggests, Well, Palestinians, they would carry a genocide if they could, as one observer put it in the Journal, Israel can carry out a genocide and supposedly isn’t.
Of course, as with all of these forms of genocide denial, there is no actual factual record to support what these authors are saying. In fact, evidentiary record suggests exactly the opposite.
Obscurantism, the fourth type of genocide denial that I look at, is where the author offers questionable pieces of information, and presents them typically in a decontextualized way, as if Israel should be understood as actually going out of its way to pursue its goals in a humane fashion, consistent with international law. So you have authors spewing nonsense about “Oh, well, Israel allows in aid,” or “Israel warns people,” etc., etc., none of which stands up to scrutiny, as I explained in the piece.
And then, lastly, there’s repudiation, and here’s where the authors simply say X or Y isn’t true, and they just don’t really bother offering any counter evidence. So we have, of all people, Alan Dershowitz in the Journal recently saying that it’s preposterous for [New York City mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani to say that he would have [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu arrested for genocide if he were to come to New York and Mamdani were mayor. And so Dershowitz just dismisses it as outrageous to say that Israel has committed genocide, actually, as if there were not some mountain upon mountain upon mountain of evidence proving that it has carried out a genocide for two years.
JJ: Absolutely. I just saw a video of Tom Cotton simply stating, “There’s no famine in Gaza,” just declaratively. “There’s no famine in Gaza, and anyone who tells you there is lying.”
I saw a video of a history teacher talking about the new “slavery wasn’t that bad” line that we apparently are going to have to deal with in 2025. And she had a student who said, “Well, aren’t the terrible stories we hear coming from escaped slaves? We don’t hear from the ones who were happy, and maybe that would give us a different view.” And the teacher said, “Actually, our understandings of the horrors of slavery don’t come from enslaved people themselves, but from slave owners, who published, essentially, torture manuals.”
With Israel, we hear media apologists saying it’s ridiculous and terrible and unforgivable to accuse Israel of intentions and ideas that Israeli officials are on record stating openly. That is some peak denialism.
GS: Yeah, that’s a good point. And that’s one of the things that comes up in the piece is—OK, I can’t believe in one day I had to read Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual. That was like having a dentist appointment and then driving directly to have a prostate exam.
And so Lévy, he claims that, well, for there to be a genocide, there has to be a plan to destroy a people. And he says Israel does not have any such plan. I mean, it’s astonishing that people even can say such things, much less that they somehow get into print, and past whatever integrity-free people are editors at the Wall Street Journal, because anybody with a search engine can find one statement after another by Israeli political and military officials, especially political officials, saying quite explicitly that their plan is to carry out actions that are well within the definition of genocide, from the very start.
For example, we have the infamous statement from [then–Minister of Defense] Yoav Gallant about saying he’s going to implement a total siege of Gaza. We’ve had Netanyahu saying that Israel was going to only agree to cease hostilities if it were tied to Trump’s genocidal plan to make Gaza into a plaything for international tourists. Things like Gideon’s Chariots, which is a plot that Israel is seeking to implement as of May, which just involves destroying the remnants of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrating the Palestinians into, well, concentration camps. This was denounced as genocidal by Human Rights Watch.
So there’s one articulation after another of Israeli leaders saying, “Yes, we are going to do these genocidal things.” And yet you have a supposed intellectual, Lévy, just dismissing the idea that Israel has had genocidal plans. They themselves have told us very clearly over and over that they have such plans.
JJ: And with statements saying “There are no innocents in Gaza,” and other statements that are declarations about the nature, the way that certain Israeli officials look on Gazans, that suggests that they are subhuman. And in October 2023, you were noting in Middle East Eye that outlets like the Washington Post were even then criticizing as “unacceptable equivocation” just the very idea that the Hamas attack should be seen in a historical and political context. Suggesting that Palestinian actions have no historical context, no political context, removing them from history—that seems to me like a key part of dehumanization.
GS: So the way that I would characterize it, and have across various things I’ve written in these past two years, is that in the early phases of the genocide, you had US media carrying out what I would call incitement to genocide, and then shifting later to genocide denial. So in those early days, you had the really rabid dehumanization of Palestinians, and indeed decontextualization of the actions of Hamas and other armed groups on October 7.
The New York Times editorial board, as I recall, said something along the lines of, the attack occurred without “any immediate provocation.” Again, I may be slightly off in the quote, but it was roughly that.
And first of all, just the mere fact that there has been a siege on Gaza since 2006, 2007, depending on how you define “siege” and when this one began, but the point is that it is an immediate, omnipresent provocation. As is the fact that most people who reside in Gaza are there because they’ve been expelled from other parts of Palestine. That is an omnipresent and therefore, on October 7, immediate provocation.
And then you had all kinds of violence being enacted throughout that year against Gaza, and other parts of Palestine in which Palestinians reside. So you had Palestinians being shot at the security wall through which they broke on October 7 in the days leading up to it. You had children killed at record levels in the West Bank by Israeli forces that year. You had Israeli forces bombing Gaza in the months leading up to October 7.
So there’s a very, very, very rich documentary record of provocation, to put it mildly. So for the Times to have said that there was no immediate provocation is really jaw-dropping.
Gregory Shupak: “It’s necessary…for this genocide to unfold, to have the American public either ginned up for the violence, or confused about it.”
And that kind of decontextualization makes it seem as if Palestinian violence, or Palestinian recourse to armed force, is just illegible. Just makes no sense, right? This is what Max Boot was writing in the Washington Post; he was saying you can’t even expect Hamas to operate according to any sort of political logic. They’re like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
It was to reduce Palestinians and their representatives and their fighters to just irrational, bloodthirsty savages. And the message behind that is not difficult to discern. It’s these people are violent animals and they cannot be negotiated with, they can only be killed. They do not deserve rights because they are not human. And so that was really widespread in the early days of the post–October 7 world.
And, eventually, as the scale of Israeli crimes became more and more visible, you had a lot of the propaganda organs adopt various forms of genocide denial, once the genocide that they helped ignite was already up and running. Because it’s important to underscore that, of course, Israel could not do what it’s done without US support. So it’s necessary, for these events to unfold, for this genocide to unfold, to have the American public either ginned up for the violence, or confused about it and thus unable to see what’s happening and try to oppose it. That’s just as important as it is to whip Israeli society into a frenzy, to enact this sort of barbarism that we’ve seen inflicted in Gaza.
JJ: I could talk to you much longer, and I’m sure I will in future, including about the so-called “peace plan,” where the New York Times is saying it’s such an integral part of that peace plan that it’s going to help develop Gaza into a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors, right? So we’re going to put a pin in that.
But I want to ask you, finally: We do see, against all of this, we still see opposition to the genocide increasing: Gallup has a poll, US sympathy for Israel is at an all-time low, below 50% for the first time in the 25 years that Gallup has been doing this polling. I feel like the question is becoming less “how do we convince people to oppose genocide” and more “how do we create the circumstances where that opposition becomes power?”
And so I just want to leave you with the question of, it’s amazing to me that people, in the face of this PR onslaught, are believing what they see with their own eyes, and they’re acting on that. But what else needs to happen, and just what are your thoughts about going forward, and turning what many folks understand into real change?
GS: To me, what I take from history is that it can only be accomplished through painstaking and often unglamorous political organizing. I think this is how, or a huge part of how the Israeli narrative, the US/Israeli narrative, has lost its grip is, yeah, sure, it’s that people can share videos that independent Palestinian journalists have taken. You can share that online. Absolutely. That’s a key part of it. Nevertheless, it is also a very key part of developing a counter narrative to have organized activists who do things like share information to debunk all the lies, who hold teach-ins, who distribute their own literature, electronically and the old-fashioned way.
So I think that the only way to stop the US/Israeli genocide machine is fundamentally not that different from asking how it was possible to get the Voting Rights Act in the United States, or how it was possible to end the Vietnam War in the United States, or perhaps, most aptly, how it was possible to bring apartheid South Africa to its knees. These things happen, I think, typically at a slower pace than any of us would like, because grassroots organizing doesn’t have the resources that the ruling class does, obviously. So it requires tremendous people power, but people just getting together and forming political organizations, and linking up with other political organizations, and strategizing according to local conditions—that’s the way that these kinds of emerging consensuses can be translated into real-world change.
And I think that that’s the trajectory in which things seem to be headed. History doesn’t move in a linear way, so we don’t know what the future of Palestine will look like, but it does seem like Israel and its American backers have forever lost world public opinion on this issue. And there are large, large swaths of the populations around the world who have made resisting the oppression of the Palestinians as much a part of their daily lives as going to get the groceries or taking their dog for a walk.
So it does, of course, wear one down and cause excruciating pain to see just the relentlessness of US/Israeli cruelty in Gaza. But there is, at the same time, tremendous reason for hope and optimism, first and foremost, because of the resilience of the Palestinians themselves and their regional allies, but also because of just ordinary people around the world who don’t want to stand for this, and won’t take it lying down.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with academic and writer Gregory Shupak. The book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media is available from OR Books. Gregory Shupak, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The weapons manufacturer Saab was “directly linked” to a human rights violation when a missile it produced was found in an Indigenous heritage area, an investigation for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has found.
The four-year investigation could lead to more companies being held accountable for how their weapons are used by clients, according to human rights lawyers involved in the case.
Yesterday, 15 October, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) took down the interim trans guidance from its website. The EHRC rushed its guidelines out in April, just days after the Supreme Court decision to interpret “sex” as purely referring to sex recorded at birth for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.
The interim guidance told employers and service providers that they should prevent trans people from using gendered spaces and services, like public toilets. The guidance stated that this did not apply only to the services aligned with the trans person’s gender, but also the sex they were assigned at birth in some cases.
Weaponised guidance
The director of trans advocacy group TransActual, Jane Fae, said the EHRC had “gleefully weaponised” the Supreme Court’s decision:
As countless lawyers, including former Supreme Court judges lords Hale and Sumption, have pointed out: it merely defined terms in the Equality Act. What society, in the shape of the EHRC, did with that definition was then… up to society.
And, sadly, the EHRC is a body widely believed to have been stuffed with anti-trans ideologues by the last government, and, pointedly, not reformed by the current one.
The Good Law Project (GLP) is conducting an ongoing legal challenge against the interim guidance. The organisation is supporting several trans and intersex individuals who have been victimised by the temporary code. This case is set to begin in the High Court on 12 November 2025.
The GLP’s executive director, Jo Maugham, said:
I’ve spent six months talking to trans people who are afraid to go out because of the climate of fear the EHRC’s interim guidance created. Some are suicidal – and I am aware of people who have sought to take their own lives. The EHRC has finally taken it down – and my question to them is: if the High Court finds the guidance unlawful, will you apologise to those whose lives you have so profoundly harmed?
EHRC: Ask someone else
Now, in a bizarre move some six months after putting this guidance in place, the EHRC has taken it down from its website. Instead, the commission has told service providers to “take specialist legal advice”, in a complete abdication of its actual job.
Jess O’Thomson, the GLP’s trans rights lead, warned that the interim guidance may have caused organisations to break the law. O’Thomson said:
Now the guidance has been withdrawn, so should the exclusionary policies that organisations rashly implemented in its aftermath. If not, they could find themselves in hot water.
The EHRC’s current head is baroness Kwisher Falkner. She was appointed as chair of the commission by the Conservative Party in 2020. Under her lead, the equalities watchdog made a sharp U-turn towards outright transphobia.
Existing staff members at the commission branded her “transphobic,” “anti-LGBT+” and an “enemy of human rights”. The Lemkin Institute – an international organisation dedicated to opposing genocide – penned an open letter against her.
On 4 September, Falkner’s EHRC passed a 300-page document detailing its recommendations for a more permanent version of its transphobic code of practice to the Minister for Women and Equalities. However, the minister – Bridget Phillipson – hasn’t yet made the code into law. Likewise, the exact details of the new code haven’t been made public.
So what’s the law?
The lack of the interim guidance leaves only the trans-positive guidance from 2011 in place. However, in a letter to Phillipson, Falkner said:
We have been told by some organisations that they intend to continue using this now unlawful code until the revised code is published, therefore allowing practices inconsistent with the law to persist.
Our updated code of practice accurately reflects the law and is informed by the two public consultations we ran to ensure it is as clear as possible.
She also added that:
The updated code ought to be brought into force as soon as possible. How quickly this happens is now in the government’s hands. We urge them to act at speed.
However, the government has stated that it hasn’t yet implemented the new code because the EHRC has failed to do its job. A Whitehall source said:
Unfortunately this looks like the EHRC deflecting – they still haven’t sent ministers the information they’ve requested in order to assess the draft code. The EHRC should be cracking on with their job, not giving lectures on timing while government still awaits their material.
According to reporting from the Guardian, this missing information includes an equalities impact assessment. You know, the document laying out whether a group which has a protected characteristic – like trans people – might be discriminated against by the new laws.
Even in the ‘gender-critical’ fantasy land which believes that trans rights always take away from women’s rights, it’s got to be hard to pretend that banning trans people from both men’s and women’s spaces is anything other than outright bigotry. Sure, they’ll try — but that’s a feat of rank hypocrisy that even Falkner seems to have balked at.
Hundreds of Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent days have described scenes of systematic torture, starvation, and humiliation.
Their accounts, gathered by The Guardian, TRT, Al-Mayadeen, Quds News Network, and Palestine Online, among others, offer a rare glimpse into what human rights organisations call a “policy of abuse” targeting Palestinian detainees.
According to the reports, many of the freed prisoners returned to Gaza emaciated, injured, and traumatised, some learning only after their release that their families had been killed during Israel’s war on the besieged Strip.
In testimony published by The Guardian, 33-year-old Naseem al-Radee recalled the moment Israeli prison guards “gave him a farewell gift” before his release.
“They bound his hands, placed him on the ground and beat him without mercy,” the report said, describing how Radee’s first sight of Gaza after nearly two years was “blurry,” the result of a boot to the eye.
Radee, a government employee from Beit Lahia, was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers at a displacement shelter in Gaza in December 2023. He spent 22 months in detention, including 100 days in an underground cell, before being released alongside 1700 other Palestinians this week under the ceasefire agreement.
A freed Palestinian prisoner speaks in pain about the horrors and inhumane treatment inside Israeli occupation prisons. pic.twitter.com/KqNJjX2mza
“They used teargas and rubber bullets to intimidate us, in addition to constant verbal abuse and insults,” The Guardian cited Radee as saying regarding his time in Nafha prison in the Naqab desert.
“They had a strict system of repression; the electronic gate of the section would open when the soldiers entered, and they would come in with their dogs, shouting ‘on your stomach, on your stomach,’ and start beating us mercilessly”, the testimony continued.
According to the report, cramped and unsanitary cells, fungal infections, starvation, and routine beatings defined his captivity. Upon release, Radee tried to call his wife, only to learn that she and all but one of his children had been killed during his detention.
“I was very happy to be released because the date coincided with my youngest daughter Saba’s third birthday,” he said.
“I tried to find some joy in being released on this day, but sadly, Saba went with my family, and my joy went with her.”
Sound torture Also speaking to The Guardian, 22-year-old university student Mohammed al-Asaliya described contracting scabies in prison and being denied treatment.
“There was no medical care,” he said. “We tried to treat ourselves by using floor disinfectant on our wounds, but it only made them worse. The mattresses were filthy, the environment unhealthy, our immunity weak, and the food contaminated.”
He recalled an area “they called ‘the disco,’ where they played loud music nonstop for two days straight.”
The sound torture, he said, was combined with physical abuse: “They also hung us on walls, sprayed us with cold air and water, and sometimes threw chilli powder on detainees.”
By the time of his release, Asaliya’s weight had dropped from 75 kg to 42 kg.
‘We died a thousand times a day’ In testimony recorded by Palestine Online, journalist and former detainee Shadi Abu Sido described what he called “unimaginable torture”.
“They used to say: ‘Take, eat.’ But I didn’t want anything for myself. About 1800 of us were released, and thousands are still inside,” Abu Sido recounted.
“If you die once a day, we have died a thousand times a day, each day. We didn’t know the day, the hour, or even the date.
“We forgot what sleep feels like, how food tastes. In the middle of the night, they would splash water on us, in our cells.”
In another video posted by Palestine Online, Abu Sido added:
“They torture and abuse us in every possible way, physically and psychologically. We don’t sleep; they threaten us about our children. ‘We killed your children, we killed your children. There is no Gaza’.”
“I entered Gaza and I found a scene from the Day of Judgment,” he said.
‘I made this for my daughter’ In a video published by Al-Mayadeen, another recently freed detainee collapsed in tears as he learned that his entire family had been killed. Holding a handmade toy he crafted in prison, he said:
“My children are dead. I made this for my daughter. Her birthday was on October 18; my daughter was two years old. Bara is eight years old.
“My beloved ones have been killed.”
‘They amputated my leg’ Speaking to TRT World, Palestinian prisoner Jibril al-Safadi described the brutality that cost him his leg:
“My leg was amputated in prison due to severe torture. The situation was tough: relentless suffering. There were savage beatings and horrible torture,” he said. “They transferred me to Sde Teiman.
“There was no medical care. They amputated my right leg.
We faced everything you can expect, even the dogs’ raping, torturing of detainees. Killing men is usual, like it’s an ordinary thing.”
A system of abuse The Guardian report cited Palestinian medical officials in Gaza who confirmed that many detainees arrived “in poor physical health,” bearing “bruises, fractures, wounds, and marks from restraints that had bound their hands tightly.”
Eyad Qaddih, the director of public relations at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, reportedly said many of the released prisoners had to be transferred to the emergency room.
“The signs of beating and torture were clearly visible,” he told The Guardian.
The report cited the Israeli NGO Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), as saying that about 2800 Palestinians from Gaza remain in Israeli prisons without charge.
Most were detained under emergency laws amended after October 7, 2023, allowing for indefinite administrative detention of anyone deemed an “unlawful combatant”.
PCATI’s executive director, Tal Steiner, said that “the amount and scale of torture and abuse in Israeli prisons and military camps has skyrocketed since October 7.”
She described the escalation as “part of a policy led by Israeli decision-makers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and others.”
Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, has repeatedly bragged about providing Palestinian prisoners with “the minimum of the minimum” food and supplies.
The Guardian reports: In total, 88 Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons and sent to the occupied West Bank on Monday – the other nearly 2000, a number that includes about 1700 Palestinians seized from Gaza during the war and held without charge, were sent back to Gaza, where a minority would travel on to neighbouring countries.
Before Monday’s release, 11,056 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons, according to statistics from the Israeli NGO HaMoked in October 2025. At least 3500 of those were held in administrative detention without trial. An Israeli military database has indicated that only a quarter of those detained in Gaza were classified as fighters.
Republished with permission from The Palestine Chronicle
Ngāti Toa Rangatira have gathered near the peak of their sacred maunga, Whitireia, to celebrate its historic return to iwi ownership.
Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira has purchased 53 ha of land at Whitireia — just north of Tītahi Bay — from Radio New Zealand (RNZ) for just under $5 million — adjoining an earlier settlement acquisition on the peninsula.
Ngāti Toa have waited 177 years to get the whenua back. In 1848, the iwi gifted around 202 ha to the Anglican Church in exchange for the promise of a school to be built for Ngāti Toa tamariki.
The school was never built, but the land remained in church ownership.
That prompted Wiremu Te Kakakura Parata, a Ngāti Toa rangatira and MP, to take court action against the Bishop of Wellington who argued the whenua “ought to be given back to the donors” because the promise of a school was never fulfilled.
In his 1877 judgement, Chief Justice James Prendergast ruled that the Treaty of Waitangi was a “simple nullity” signed by “primitive barbarians”. It denied Ngāti Toa ownership of their maunga for decades and set a damaging precedent for other Māori seeking the return of their land.
Kuia Karanga Wineera . . . it’s “wonderful” to see the maunga finally returned. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Ngāti Toa kuia Karanga Wineera, 96, remembers listening to her elders discuss how her people had fought to reclaim Whitireia over the decades.
She told RNZ seeing the maunga finally returned was “wonderful”.
‘Wonderful gift’
“It’s a most wonderful, wonderful gift to Ngati Toa to have Whitireia come home after so many years of fighting for Whitireia and not getting anywhere, but today, oh, it’s wonderful,” she said.
In the early 1900s, Whitireia was vested in the Porirua College Trust Board, allowing the whenua to be sold. In 1935, the New Zealand Broadcasting Service purchased 40 ha for what would become Radio 2YA, now RNZ.
The maunga was returned to the iwi in a formal ceremony. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Iwi members, rūnanga chiefs and representatives from police, the Anglican Church and RNZ attended a formal ceremony to commemorate the sale.
In his speech, Ngāti Toa chair Callum Katene said the deal showed what a “Te Tiriti-centric” New Zealand could look like.
“The birds still sing here at dawn, the same winds sweep the hills and carry the scent of the sea. Beneath us, the earth remembers every footprint, every prayer — Whitireia holds these memories… in this morning, as the first light spills across the harbour, we are reminded that history is not carved in stone, it is living breath,” he said.
“As we look ahead, Whitireia can shine as a beacon of hope, a reminder that reconciliation is not about reclaiming the past so much, but about realising the future envisaged in 1848 — education, faith, unity, and enduring partnership.”
The rūnanga say all existing leases, easements, and public access agreements have been transferred to them as part of the acquisition and day-to-day operations for tenants, recreational users, and visitors will not change.
Lease back for AM
They will lease back 12 ha to RNZ to continue AM transmission operations.
Ngāti Toa Rangatira had a first right of refusal on the property under the Ngāti Toa Rangatira Claims Settlement Act 2014 and Public Works Act.
Speaking to media after the ceremony, Katene said he could not speak highly enough of how “accommodating” RNZ had been during the negotiation process, but admitted there were a few “hiccups”.
“There were a few hiccups when it came to the technical details of the exchanges, there always are in these sorts of things.
“The important distinction for us is this isn’t a financial transaction, it’s not economic for us — it’s returning the land,” he said.
RNZ chair Jim Mather . . . the RNZ board has responsibilities as governors of assets held in the interest of the public of Aoteaora. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Asked why the land could not be gifted back free of charge, RNZ chair Jim Mather said the possibility of gifting the land back was raised during negotiations.
“The return of the land recognised that Ngāti Toa Rangatira had been compensated previously as part of the settlement and were now in a position to actually effect that transaction,” he said.
“If it was up to us as a board we would have handed it over, but we have responsibilities as governors of assets held in the interest of the public of Aotearoa.”
Rūnanga chief executive Helmut Modlik Helmut Modlik . . . still a “conversation” that should be revisited. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
Breach of the Treaty
Rūnanga chief executive Helmut Modlik said while the negotiations were “principled”, there was still a “conversation” worth “revisiting” at some time.
“As everybody has admitted, the loss of this land was as a result of a breach of the Treaty, and as everybody knows, Treaty settlement processes are a take it or leave it exercise, and we weren’t able to have this whenua returned at that point,” he said.
“To me, that’s a matter of principle that’s worth a future conversation.”
Ngā uri o Wi Parata spokesperson Kahu Ropata . . . RNZ returning the whenua is a “great step” towards reconciliation. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Ngā uri o Wi Parata spokesperson Kahu Ropata said because Wiremu Te Kakakura Parata had had the audacity to take the case up he was discriminated against by the “Pākehā propaganda machine”.
The whānau have had to grow up with that hara (offence) against their tūpuna, he said.
“We grew up with the kōrero that it cost him his health and his wealth fighting this case.
“And so for many years, we grew up in that, I suppose, for some of my uncles and aunties, in that trauma of a loss of mana, I suppose you could say, and for a rangatira of his ilk, it would have been quite damaging knowing that he was to go to the grave and the case actually not settled in his name.”
Ropata said RNZ returning the whenua was a “great step” towards reconciliation.
“We’re still in discussions with the Anglican Church in terms of the whānau and the iwi about reconciliation and moving forward.
“Fifty-three-odd hectares, there’s still another . . . 450-odd acres that we still need to reconcile [and we’re] looking at discussions around how we can accomplish that.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On 15 October 2025 Sam Ellefson of ICII summarises the new report, which recounts recent reprisals from two dozen countries, underscores ICIJ’s reporting on how Beijing abuses international institutions in its campaign to silence critics abroad
The targeted repression of human rights activists across borders is becoming more frequent and sophisticated, according to the latest annual U.N. report detailing acts of intimidation and reprisals inside the international organization.
Two Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and a Uyghur linguist are among the cases compiled by the secretary-general between May 2024 and 2025, alongside updates on reprisals included in previous reports.
“Allegations of transnational repression across borders have increased, with examples from around the world,” the report said. “Targeted repression across borders appears to be growing in scale and sophistication, and the impact on the protection of human rights defenders and affected individuals in exile, as well as the chilling effect on those who continue to defend human rights in challenging contexts, is of increasing concern.”
Raphäel Viana David, the China and Latin America program manager at the International Service for Human Rights, a nonprofit that trains activists in U.N. advocacy, said the report reflected a shift within the U.N. in recognizing transnational repression as a tool states use to carry out reprisals.
In China Targets, ICIJ and 42 media partners exposed how Beijing has misused international institutions such as the U.N. and Interpol to target overseas dissidents. The investigation included interviews with 105 individuals across 23 countries who detailed how the Chinese government had reached beyond its borders to silence them.
The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) recently published its General Comment on the environmental dimension of sustainable development. In addition to recognising human rights defenders, the Comment clarifies State obligations towards marginalized communities and notes the importance of transitioning away from fossil fuels. It also outlines States’ extraterritorial obligations.
ISHR provided two written inputs to the draft of this General Comment earlier this year – a standalone submission regarding the recognition and protection of environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) based on the Declaration+25, a supplement to the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and a joint submission in partnership with the Center for International Environmental Law, Earthjustice, FIAN International, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam.
‘States parties should respect, protect, and promote the work of environmental and indigenous human rights defenders, as well as other civil society actors who support people in marginalized and disadvantaged situations in realizing their Covenant rights.’ States parties should take all necessary measures to ensure that environmental human rights defenders and journalists can carry out their work, without fear of harassment, intimidation or violence, including by protecting them from harm by third parties.’
ISHR welcomes that priorities from the joint NGO submission to the CESCR are reflected in the General Comment, in particular Indigenous Peoples’ right to ‘free, prior and informed consent’ and the need to transition away from fossil fuels (including by reducing ineffective subsidies).
However, we regret that the Comment does not more explicitly acknowledge the critical role of EHRDs in promoting sustainable development or strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) as an obstacle to their engagement. The CESCR has previously noted the risks faced by HRDs and provided guidance on their recognition and protection in the context of land issues in General Comment No. 26 and it should have extended this analysis to EHRDs in the context of sustainable development. The use of SLAPPs to silence HRDs has been acknowledged by other UN bodies, including in the most recent report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Ms. Mary Lawlor, to the Third Committee of the General Assembly.
Some additional highlights from the General Comment are set out below.
The Committee found that ‘[t]he full realization of Covenant rights demands a just transition towards a sustainable economy that centres human rights and the well-being of the planet’.
States should supervise commercial activity, establish a legal obligation for businesses in respect of environment and human rights due diligence, and ensure that victims of human rights violations stemming from businesses have redress.
States have obligations to conduct human rights and environmental impact assessments, which are to be undertaken with ‘meaningful public participation’.
States have an extraterritorial obligation to ensure that any activities within the State or in areas under its control do not substantially adversely affect the environment in another country. This also extends to preventing businesses in the State from causing such harm in another jurisdiction. Even though the CESCR does not expressly mention it in the Comment, this should also apply to cases of attacks against EHRDs.
The CESCR also clarifies States’ obligations towards marginalized communities, spotlighting the concept of intersectionality. It also explicitly notes that equal exercise of economic, social and cultural rights by women and men is a prerequisite for sustainable development, encouraging States to redistribute the unpaid domestic work undertaken by women and girls.
Environment-related obligations have also been set out for States in the context of specific Covenant rights, for example, the right to self-determination , right to freely utilize natural resources , right to work , right to an adequate standard of living, right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, right to education and other economic, social and cultural rights.
The General Comment recognises that certain communities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation – it calls on States to identify and protect those at risk. The CESCR focuses particularly on children (specifically calling for child rights defenders to be recognised and protected and for their participation in climate action to be facilitated), Indigenous Peoples, peasants, pastoralists, fishers and others in rural areas, and displaced persons.
‘Environmental degradation, including climate change, intensifies the vulnerabilities of individuals and groups who have historically experienced and/or experience marginalization. These vulnerabilities are shaped by intersecting factors such as socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, migratory status, sexual orientation, and gender identity.’
A controversial piece of legislation to postpone the date for New Caledonia’s crucial provincial elections passed its first hurdle in the French Senate on Wednesday.
The vote was endorsed in the French Upper House by a large majority of 299-42.
The day before, another piece of constitutional legislation was also tabled before the Council of Ministers as a matter of emergency just hours after Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s second Cabinet in a week was appointed.
Earlier this month, the postponement of the polls was approved in principle by New Caledonia’s Congress.
In the form of an “organic law”, it is part of the implementation process of the Bougival agreement text, which was signed on July 12 near Paris, and initially signed by all of New Caledonia’s parties, both pro-France and pro-independence.
However, one of the main components of the pro-independence movement, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), denounced the agreement a few days later, saying it did not meet the party’s demands in terms of quick accession to full sovereignty.
The FLNKS said their negotiators’ signatures were therefore now considered null and void.
For the purposes of implementing the text, despite very tight deadlines, one part of its implementation should leave more time for negotiations and it was perceived one way to achieve this was to postpone the elections (which were scheduled to be held not later than November 30) until not later than end of June 2026.
The move, if it succeeds, has to happen before November 2. It means that before then the same text has to be endorsed by the Lower House, the French National Assembly.
If it fails, then the provincial elections’ date will have to be maintained at the original date and under the current voting restrictions.
Before that, New Caledonia’s provincial elections were already postponed twice — initially scheduled to take place in May 2024, then re-scheduled to no later than December 2024 — mostly because of the civil unrest that shook New Caledonia after the deadly May 2024 riots.
The riots were themselves the culmination of pro-independence protests and marches that escalated in response to a French government project to modify the conditions of eligibility for local elections and lift previous restrictions on the electoral roll.
At the time, pro-independence opponents said this would have resulted in indigenous voters becoming a minority because their vote would be diluted.
During debates in the Senate this week, what was presented as a “bipartisan” Bill also stressed the need to resolve current disagreements on the Bougival agreement and take more time to include FLNKS with the rest of New Caledonian parties.
Opponents to the text, among others the French Greens (les Ecologistes) and the Communist Party, maintained that FLNKS had rejected the Bougival deal “in block”, because such agreement simply “doesn’t exist”.
Passage en force They are accusing the French government of attempting to pass the text “by force”.
The same text is scheduled to be tabled before the Lower House (National Assembly) next week on October 22.
But in the Lower House, debates will be tougher and the final vote will be much more uncertain. The Lower House majority is not clear, MPs being split between the centre right, the far right, the centre left and the far left.
While reactions from the pro-France politicians in Nouméa yesterday were mostly favourable to the latest Senate vote, the now-dominant component within FLNKS, the Union Calédonienne (UC), held a media conference to once again express its disapproval of postponing the local elections.
Instead, it wanted the original dates — before November 30 — to be maintained, along with the current voting eligibility restrictions.
Fresh talks with FLNKS? UC President Emmanuel Tjibaou told local media this did not exclude that further negotiations could be held after the local elections.
But in reference to the May 2024 riots, Tjibaou said he feared that “the same mistakes of the past … The passage en force… are being made again”.
He said discussions and debates must prevail on the Parliament floor.
Tjibaou is flying to Paris at the weekend to take part in the National Assembly (of which he is one of the two elected MPs for New Caledonia) vote on 22 October 2025.
“This is an alert, an appeal to good sense, not a threat,” UC secretary-general Dominique Fochi added.
“If this passage en force happens, we really don’t know what is going to happen,” Fochi said.
Another component of the pro-independence chessboard in New Caledonia, the PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party), usually described as more “moderate”, has also reacted on Thursday to the French Senate’s vote.
“This is rather good news, because it is part of the Bougival timeframe and we support this,” PALIKA leader Charles Washetine said.
PALIKA and UPM (Progressist Union in Melanesia) both decided to distance themselves from the FLNKS, of which they were both key members, at the end of August 2024.
Since the Bougival agreement was signed, PALIKA and UPM have sided in support of the deal, which envisions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, of a French-New Caledonian dual nationality and the short-term transfer of key powers from France, such as foreign affairs.
Those notions, amounting to a de facto Constitution for New Caledonia, are to be also later included to translate into appropriate legal terms in the French Constitution.
This should be submitted to Parliament “by the end of this year”, Lecornu said during his maiden Parliament address on Tuesday, October 14.
And sometime “this spring (2026)”, qualified citizens of New Caledonia would also have to vote on the text by way of a referendum dedicated to the subject.
Bougival agreement ‘allows a path to reconciliation’ – Lecornu “The Bougival agreement allows a path to reconciliation. It must be transcribed into the Constitution”, Lecornu told the National Assembly.
Also speaking in Parliament for the first time since she was appointed Minister for Overseas, Naïma Moutchou said that in her new capacity, she would be there “to listen” and “to act”.
This, she said, included trying to re-engage FLNKS into fresh talks, with the possibility of bringing some amendments to the much-contested Bougival text.
France’s new Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou . . .”We cannot do it without the FLNKS. And we will not do it without the FLNKS,” Image: Assemblée Nationale/RNZ
“To translate Bougival into facts takes time”.
She also admitted that a real consensus was needed.
“We cannot do it without the FLNKS. And we will not do it without the FLNKS,” she said.
She spoke in defence of the postponement of local elections.
“To postpone elections does not mean to postpone democracy, it means giving it back solid foundations, it is to choose lucidity rather than precipitation”, she told MPs.
Meanwhile, yesterday in Paris, PM Lecornu, who formed his cabinet last Sunday, survived his first batch of two simultaneous motions of no-confidence in the National Assembly.
The first, filed by far-right Rassemblement National (RN), received the support of 271 MPs, not enough to reach the necessary 289 votes.
The second, filed by far-left La France Insoumise (LFI, France Unbowed), received 144 votes.
During the pre-censure vote debates, New Caledonian MP pro-France Nicolas Metzdorf took the floor for a few minutes telling MPs that if it could serve as an inspiration, in the French Pacific territory, local laws made it impossible for a government to be toppled less than 18 months after it was formed.
Lecornu, who is very knowledgeable on New Caledonia’s affairs because of his two-year experience as French Minister for Overseas in 2020-2022, was all smiles.
Omid Djalili responds to criticism of his decision to perform at a comedy festival in Saudi Arabia
What the critics of the Riyadh comedy festival may have missed (Letters, 13 October) is the fact that performing comedy or any live event in Saudi Arabia was illegal until recently. Performers and organisers would run the very real risk of imprisonment by the authorities. Now those same authorities are paying comedians to come over.
I’m of the view that allowing comedians now, after banning them before, is progress. I could also make a robust argument that opposing this festival is unsupportive of progress. However, nuance is the hallmark of a mature approach to discourse, and while the festival could easily be seen as cosmetic, it was also a huge development.
The Council of Europe has warned that the government’s treatment of trans people could breach the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Specifically, the council warned the UK against banning transgender people from bathrooms based on their biological sex
According to the Independent, Michael O’Flaherty, commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe, said that new guidance after the Supreme Court ruling on trans people must:
Not leave them in an intermediate zone … as not quite one gender or the other.
O’Flaherty penned a letter to Sarah Owen, chair of parliament’s women and equalities committee, and David Alton, chair of the joint committee on human rights. He stated:
Lawmakers in the UK have viewed the human rights of different groups as a zero-sum game.
He also said that this has contributed to narratives which increase prejudice against trans people. Furthermore, it’s:
Portraying upholding their human rights as a de facto threat to the rights of others.
He added that this could lead to trans people being further excluded from public spaces. Additionally it could infringe on their ability to “participate fully and equally in society”.
Supreme court ruling
As the Canary previously reported back in April, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer exclusively to characteristics assigned at birth. This was due to a campaign by anti-trans campaigners.
The judgement is already having significant implications for the rights of trans people across the UK. As we previously reported:
By prioritising a gender normative definition of sex over legal gender recognition, the court’s decision disregards the lived experiences and identities of trans women. It raises questions about their access to single-sex spaces, participation in public life, and protection against discrimination.
The Supreme Court’s decision reflects a troubling trend within politics and justice to favour a narrow, right-wing view of gender, ignoring the complexities of gender identity and trampling over the rights of trans people.
This approach fails to consider the social and legal realities and plays right into the hands of the anti-trans lobby, the far-right, and bigots.
‘Specialist legal advice’
Meanwhile, the equalities watchdog has withdrawn interim advice on how institutions should react to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said the advice, published in April, shortly after that month’s supreme court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only, had been taken down from its website.
In its place, the EHRC says organisations seeking to understand how to implement the ruling should “take specialist legal advice” ahead of the approval by parliament of the watchdog’s statutory guidance, submitted to ministers in early September.
Previously, some MPs joined transgender activists to express alarm at the EHRC’s interim advice. In effect, the advice would exclude trans people from large parts of public life.
A lifetime of waiting
This comes as waiting times for gender-affirming care skyrocket, and NHS failures are forcing trans people to find hormones on the black market.
Across the UK, more than 37,000 people are on waiting lists for gender identity clinics (GICs). The average wait time is nearly five years. Obviously, this is far longer than the wait time for any other NHS treatment.
The ridiculous wait times are driving some young people to suicide.
Only this week, a coroner ruled that a 17-year-old girl who took her own life waiting to be seen by an NHS gender clinic, could have been saved if wait times were shorter.
Having to battle with changes to her body without receiving the necessary preventative treatment, together with the many hurdles and setbacks, gradually eroded her belief that she would succeed and everything would be alright.
He then urged NHS gender clinics to do more to bring down waiting lists. This will help prevent mental health risks among those waiting for care.
In a statement to PinkNews, a spokesperson TransLuscent, a trans campaign group, said Leia’s death was a:
Direct consequence of a healthcare system designed to delay, obstruct, and ultimately deny necessary medical treatment to vulnerable trans youth.
Benjamin Netanyahu insisted, until just hours before Donald Trump’s arrival, that the war in Gaza would not stop. Then, standing in the Knesset before Israel’s hardline ministers, Trump announced that it had — and whisked a delegation of world leaders to Egypt to formalise the ceasefire before a global audience.
The message was unmistakable: Israel’s prime minister could no longer block peace without suffering public humiliation. Facing ministers who, only a day earlier, had vowed to press on with the war, Trump imposed an abrupt reversal — one that only he could engineer.
He came to Jerusalem not merely to speak, but to enforce the deal already reached and leave Netanyahu no choice but to comply or lose face.
He then carried that spectacle to Sharm el-Sheikh, gathering heads of state and government from the Middle East, Asia, and Europe to witness and sign the cessation of war.
The first phase — halting hostilities and exchanging prisoners — represented the sole ground on which both sides could agree. But the phases that follow are riddled with complications: a path of shifting sands, vague clauses, and undefined timelines, where the devil hides in every single point.
Trump’s declaration, messages and summit Trump’s arrival in Israel was theatrical. He entered the Knesset, addressed lawmakers and ministers, praised Netanyahu’s wartime leadership, and then made a sweeping proclamation: the war was over.
That was a bold reversal from the very ministers he faced only hours earlier, who had publicly affirmed their intention to continue the conflict.
The symbolism mattered more than the logic. By announcing the end of the war in Israel’s Parliament, Trump cornered Netanyahu in front of his hardline allies and the world.
If the Israeli leader dared to resume hostilities, he would be defying not only his own coalition but a global consensus. Trump also asked President Isaac Herzog — then present — to pardon Netanyahu from his ongoing corruption charges, invoking the president’s constitutional prerogative.
The gesture fused diplomacy, domestic politics, and Israeli justice in a single, calculated act of theatre.
From Israel, Trump flew to Egypt, where on 13 October 2025 many of the world’s leaders convened at the Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit to formalise the Gaza ceasefire.
The event was co-chaired by Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The summit hosted delegations from approximately 27 countries, representing leaders from the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and international organisations.
The guest list included Emmanuel Macron, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, Pedro Sánchez, Mahmoud Abbas, António Guterres, António Costa, and the Arab League’s Ahmed Aboul Gheit.
Notably absent were formal representatives of Hamas and Israel itself. Netanyahu had accepted the invitation initially but later declined, citing a conflict with a Jewish holiday and diplomatic pressure from certain participants.
Many leaders refused to meet with him and declined the invitation for that very reason.
At the summit, Trump, Sisi, the Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Erdoğan signed what was called the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity — a symbolic document laying out commitments to maintain the ceasefire, support reconstruction, and discourage future conflict.
By bringing so many leaders together in one place, Trump embedded the ceasefire into a global diplomatic architecture, making it harder for Netanyahu and his extremist ministers to reverse course without triggering international backlash.
Israel’s unfulfilled objectives Despite the scale of destruction, Israel failed to achieve any of its declared military or political objectives in Gaza. The circumstances of this devastating war were unprecedented — and yet, even with such intensity, Israel failed to ethnically cleanse Gaza or alter its demographic reality.
It did not eliminate Hamas or its leadership; it could not rescue its captives through force; it failed to dismantle the movement’s military infrastructure or install a new governing authority in the enclave.
After months of bombardment, Israel still controlled only half of Gaza and faced renewed armed resistance in areas it claimed to have “cleared”. The campaign, designed to restore deterrence, instead exposed Israel’s limitations: overwhelming firepower, backed fully by the United States, but diminishing strategic capacity.
Internationally, the assault deepened Israel’s isolation, eroded its moral legitimacy, and unified global opinion against it. What Netanyahu had promised as a decisive victory ended in a political and military stalemate — the very failure that forced Trump’s intervention.
Many Arab leaders refused to meet with Netanyahu, and Trump himself failed to bring him to Sharm el-Sheikh.
Why Trump intervened
Netanyahu had long survived politically by delaying agreements, shifting blame, and keeping his options open. But this time, the war had devastated Gaza to such an extent that global public opinion — and even international institutions, including the United Nations — began to describe Israel’s actions as genocide.
Israel’s reputation, and Netanyahu’s with it, lay in ruins.
Trump’s intervention offered a lifeline. By casting himself as the architect of peace, he provided Netanyahu with an escape route — a political rescue disguised as diplomacy.
Netanyahu’s coalition, under pressure from its far-right partners, had no credible argument left against a deal once it was validated by world leaders. Trump’s carefully staged ceasefire left Netanyahu with only two choices: resist and face international isolation and sanctions, or comply and survive politically.
Trump also reminded Netanyahu, both publicly and privately, that Israel’s campaign had depended entirely on American weapons.
“He called for different kinds of weapons all the time,” Trump said — a remark that exposed the scale of US complicity. The message was unmistakable: if Israel defied the ceasefire, the stream of arms that had sustained its war could be cut off.
It was an implicit acknowledgment from Trump himself of Washington’s partnership in the devastation of Gaza — a conflict that killed and wounded more than 10 percent of the enclave’s population.
The bombs that rained down on civilians had been supplied on a fast track, lavishly and without restraint, enabling the destruction that Trump now sought to end.
The fragile structure of the deal The agreement Trump brokered was only the first stage. It prioritised the release of hostages and prisoners — a symbolic and political victory — but left withdrawal, reconstruction, governance, and disarmament undefined.
Netanyahu accepted phase one, but the path ahead is laced with traps. He intends to resume operations against Hamas, undermine clauses he dislikes, and prevent the formation of a Palestinian authority capable of governing Gaza.
Resistance groups are unlikely to lay down all arms; they may surrender heavy weapons like missiles while keeping small arms, ensuring that Israel remains vulnerable to renewed attacks.
The result is de facto partition: Palestinians control parts of Gaza while Israel holds the rest. Each side asserts authority over its zone, and both will use pressure to influence the other.
Netanyahu’s political calculus Domestically, Netanyahu faces a precarious balancing act. If President Herzog pardons him, it removes the legal threat but not the political cost of the failures of October 7.
Critics will question why Israel did not negotiate a prisoner exchange earlier, when more hostages might have survived.
Should his popularity fall, Netanyahu may dissolve his government and call snap elections — likely before October 2026 — to regain legitimacy. The far-right ministers in his coalition, such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, are unlikely to respect the ceasefire.
Nevertheless, they, along with Netanyahu who shares the same objective, have no intention of conceding Palestinian statehood or allowing lasting peace. Trump’s deal restricts Netanyahu’s room for manoeuvre, but whether he abides by it or quietly undermines it remains to be seen.
Trump positioned himself as the guarantor of the ceasefire. For the remaining three years of his mandate, Netanyahu will be constrained: he cannot break the agreement without triggering diplomatic consequences.
But ending the Gaza campaign is not the same as resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which remains untouched. Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, remain in Israel to monitor Netanyahu and ensure he does not quietly restart hostilities.
Their presence keeps pressure alive, but it cannot be permanent. Netanyahu, long known for exploiting ambiguities in past agreements, will test every margin.
Public trust in him is weak — among Israelis, world leaders, and his own ministers. If he obstructs the deal, he risks splitting from Washington’s agenda and losing what remains of Israel’s legitimacy.
Trump’s broader aim is to rehabilitate Israel’s global image. He believes halting the war helps Israel recover its reputation while giving Netanyahu a way to maintain power. But his gamble is that Netanyahu will accept limits; if he goes rogue, Trump may face the dilemma of confronting the ally he once defended.
The absent West Bank and the end of the two-state illusion The West Bank was conspicuously absent from Trump’s discourse. The United States no longer recognises the two-state solution — the very framework established under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, which Washington itself once sponsored to guarantee Palestinians the right to self-determination and statehood.
By omitting any reference to it, Trump effectively buried what little remained of that diplomatic vision.
This omission ensures that the conflict in Palestine will not end; it will only be renewed, sooner or later, and wherever resistance resurfaces.
In the two years of war, Israel has constructed 22 new settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, further erasing the territorial basis for a viable Palestinian state and dismantling the last vestiges of Oslo.
What now remains is not peace but a state of permanent instability — a no-peace condition that guarantees the cycle of violence will continue.
The unresolved core Trump’s ceasefire is a political theatre of control. It publicly enshrined a truce, placed Netanyahu under scrutiny, and allowed Trump to claim a diplomatic victory. But it did not resolve the Palestinian question.
The ceasefire applies to Gaza, not to the broader occupation, the blockade, or the issue of self-determination. The two sides now operate within a precarious arrangement: Israel controls roughly half of Gaza, the Palestinian resistance remains armed in the other half, and both test the boundaries daily.
Trump cannot hold his envoys indefinitely, and Netanyahu cannot be trusted to restrain himself. The US–Israeli alliance remains solid, but Trump’s personal intervention underscored a fundamental shift: unconditional support has limits when the costs to America’s reputation become too high.
Trump’s strategy was to save Netanyahu and Israel from total isolation — to stop a war that had already killed more than 76,000 people, 82 percent of them civilians, including more than 20,000 children. He halted the destruction at the price of ambiguity: a ceasefire without a settlement, peace without reconciliation.
The world leaders who gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh signed the end of a war, not the beginning of a solution.
Elijah J Magnier is a veteran war zone correspondent and political analyst with over 35 years of experience covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He specialises in real-time reporting of politics, strategic and military planning, terrorism and counter-terrorism; his strong analytical skills complement his reporting. His in-depth experience, extensive contacts and thorough political knowledge of complex political situations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria provide his writings with insights balancing the routine misreporting and propaganda in the Western press. He also comments on Al Jazeera.
Indonesian military forces have again bombed Kiwirok, the site of a massacre in 2021 that killed more than 300 West Papuan civilians, amid worsening violence, alleges a Papuan advocacy group.
“While President Prabowo talks about promoting peace in the Middle East, his military is trying to wipe out West Papua,” said United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) leader Benny Wenda.
“Evidence gathered by villagers in the Star Mountains shows the Indonesian military using Brazilian fighter jets to target houses, gardens, and cemeteries.”
He said in a statement the village had been destroyed and more civilians had become displaced in their own land, adding to more than 100,000 internal refugees.
The ULMWP website showed images from the attack.
Wenda said the bombing showed again “how the whole world is complicit in the genocide of my people”.
“Now, it is Brazilian jets that children in Kiwirok see before their homes are destroyed,” Wenda said.
West Papua was being facing several “colonial tactics to crush our spirit and destroy our resistance”.
“What is happening in Kiwirok is happening in different ways across West Papua,” Wenda said. He cited:
Riots and demos happening in Jayapura after a peaceful demonstration calling for the release Papuan political prisoners was violently crushed;
Indonesia occupying churches in Intan Jaya in violation of international law as they deployed soldiers for a new military base;
Indonesian military killing civilian Sadrak Yahome after anti-racism protests in Yalimo, which happenedfollowing Indonesian settlers racially abusing a Papuan student;
Militarisation happening across the Highlands, with more than 50 villages having being occupied by the TNI [Indonesian military] since August;
West Papuans being called “monkeys” by Indonesian settlers in Timika; and
A 52-year-old man being killed by police during a protest against the transfer of political prisoners in Manokwari.
The documentary Hostage Land. Video: Paradise Broadcasting
“It isn’t a coincidence that this escalation is happening while Indonesia is increasing environmental destruction in West Papua, trying to steal our resources and rip apart our forest for profit and food security,” Wenda said.
“In Raja Ampat, Merauke, Intan Jaya, and Kiwirok, new plantations and mines are killing our people and land.”
Wenda appealed to Pacific leaders to stand for West Papua as “the rest of the world stands for Palestine”.
“The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) and Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) must respond to this escalation — Indonesia is spilling Pacific and Melanesian blood in West Papua.
“They must not bow to Indonesian chequebook diplomacy.”
Mark Simms says the Charity Commission will support trustees in efforts to keep themselves, their staff and volunteers safe from harm
Charities’ struggles to protect their staff and deliver their work in the face of unwarranted attacks and hatred are profoundly worrying (UK charities say toxic immigration rhetoric leading to threats against staff, 13 October). Charities have championed the welfare of those who are vulnerable and ostracised, for centuries. That endeavour is vital not just to our civil society, but to our self-respect as a civilised nation.
The Charity Commission will defend and protect the right – and indeed the responsibility – of charities to deliver on their lawful purposes. Over recent weeks, I have met with a wide range of charities, including a group of charities working with refugees and migrants, to hear about the challenges they are facing.
Labor’s moves to expand Asio’s compulsory questioning powers could lead to “fishing expeditions” against individuals not charged with any crime and risk permanently damaging human rights, civil liberties groups warn.
The federal government is planning on making the domestic spy agency’s powers for compulsory questioning permanent, while also significantly expanding the offences covered by the rules.
Anthony Albanese needs support from the very superpower that is undermining the global principles and institutions Australia has long held dear
Anthony Albanese is scheduled to go to Washington DC next week for his first one-on-one meeting with the US president, Donald Trump. He is seeking to bolster US support for Aukus and ensure the US continues to provide military protection for Australia in the Asia-Pacific region. Of course, there will be talk of tariffs, too.
It’s traditional diplomacy – with a catch. Albanese needs support from the very superpower that is undermining the global principles and institutions Australia has long held dear, notably human rights, democracy and the international rule of law. These are principles and institutions that previous US administrations claimed to care about too.
Chinese president is behind patriarchal turn in politics with activists silenced for ‘promoting gender antagonism’
Addressing dignitaries gathered in Beijing on Monday, Xi Jinping praised the “historic achievements” of women’s rights in China. In the past 30 years, the Chinese president said, maternal mortality rates had dropped by nearly 80%, and women were now participating in the project of national governance with “unprecedented confidence and vigour”.
Xi was speaking at the global women’s summit, an event on Monday and Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic UN’s world conference on women, which took place in Beijing. It was there in 1995 that Hillary Clinton, the then US first lady, delivered her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, lines now often quoted by people in China advocating for women’s rights.
United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count.
Two protesting lawmakers undertook a brief outburst in support of “Palestinian sovereignty” but were swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”
It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.
I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end — for the moment — to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.
Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter.
To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.
‘Best weapons’
As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”
There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.
But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.
In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” — which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US President himself.
‘Path of terror’
This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it — and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.
Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.
I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.
When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”
And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.
Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), and other books and has written widely for global news media. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count.
Two protesting lawmakers undertook a brief outburst in support of “Palestinian sovereignty” but were swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”
It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.
I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end — for the moment — to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.
Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter.
To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.
‘Best weapons’
As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”
There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.
But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.
In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” — which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US President himself.
‘Path of terror’
This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it — and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.
Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.
I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.
When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”
And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.
Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), and other books and has written widely for global news media. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Brand defends decision to show in Saudi Arabia alongside Stella McCartney as ‘a way to encourage dialogue’
Vivienne Westwood’s granddaughter has said her brand’s decisions“do not align with the values or wishes” of the late designer, as it announced it would headline Riyadh fashion week despite Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
Cora Corré, the co-founder of the Vivienne Foundation, said that, by contrast, the legacy charity started by her grandmother before her death in 2022 will launch a range of T-shirts this week with proceeds going in part to LGBTQ+ charities.
Pacific Media Watch supports the call by the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) for justice for the victims of crimes against journalists in Gaza, and its demand for immediate access to the Palestinian enclave for exiled journalists and foreign press. The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, confirmed on Friday, 10 October 2025, came after two years of unprecedented massacres against the press in Gaza.
Since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed nearly 220 journalists, including at least 56 slain due to their work.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which has filed five complaints with the International Criminal Court, has called in a statement for justice for the victims, and the urgent evacuation of media professionals who wish to leave.
The ceasefire agreement in Gaza under US President Donald Trump’s peace plan has so far failed to produce an end to the media blockade imposed on the besieged Palestinian territory.
According to RSF information, several bombings struck the north of Gaza on the day the agreement was announced, 9 October. One of them wounded Abu Dhabi TV photojournalist Arafat al-Khour while he was documenting the damage in the Sabra neighbourhood in the centre of Gaza City.
While the agreement approved by the Israeli government and Hamas leaders allows humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, it does not explicitly mention authorising access for the foreign press or the possibility of evacuating local journalists.
‘Absolute urgency’
Jonathan Dagher, head of the RSF Middle East Desk, said in a statement: “The relief of a ceasefire in Gaza must not distract from the absolute urgency of the catastrophic situation facing journalists in the territory.
“Nearly 220 of them have been killed by the Israeli army in two years, and the reporters still alive in Gaza need immediate care, equipment and support. They also need justice — more than ever.
“If the impunity for the crimes committed against them continues, they will be repeated in Gaza, Palestine and elsewhere in the world. To bring justice to Gaza’s reporters and to protect the right to information around the world, we demand arrest warrants for the perpetrators of crimes against our fellow journalists in Gaza.
“RSF is counting on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to act on the complaints we filed for war crimes committed against these journalists. It’s high time that the international community’s response matched the courage shown by Palestinian reporters over the past two years.”
Since the start of the Israeli offensive in Gaza in October 2023, the Israeli army has killed nearly 220 journalists in the besieged territory. At least 56 of these victims were directly targeted or killed due to their work, according to RSF, which has filed five complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the past two years, seeking justice for these journalists and end impunity for the crimes against them.
In addition to killing news professionals on the ground and in their homes, the Israeli army has also targeted newsrooms, telecommunications infrastructure and journalistic equipment.
Famine hits journalists
Famine continues to afflict civilians in the Strip, including journalists, yet aid is barely trickling in and all communication services have been destroyed by two years of bombing.
On October 9, Israeli authorities and Hamas leaders reached a 20-point ceasefire agreement in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, as part of Donald Trump’s plan to establish “lasting peace” in the region.
This is the second ceasefire in Gaza since 7 October 2023, the first put in place at the beginning of the year and broken in March 2025, shortly after a strike killed the renowned Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat.
Israel is ranked 112th among the 180 nations surveyed by the annual RSF World Press Freedom Index and Palestine is 163rd.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
Currently, at least 20 different NHS trusts are using a technology called ‘Oxevision’ to monitor patients on their mental health inpatient wards. Oxevision uses a camera and an infrared sensor to take vital sign readings and observe patients remotely.
Oxehealth, the company that created Oxevision, recently rebranded itself as ‘LIO’. It describes itself as being:
passionate about making mental health care safe, supportive and empowering for everyone.
Campaign group Stop Oxevision has called on NHS England to halt the use of Oxevision, pending an independant review into the risks and legality of the new technology. The National Survivor User Network (NSUN) is also supporting the campaign.
Stop Oxevision’s website states that:
Stop Oxevision is a campaign to highlight the use of Oxevision, a patient monitoring system consisting of an infrared sensor and camera, which can be used to take vital signs and observe patients remotely. Currently, increasing numbers of psychiatric hospitals in England use Oxevision, in all patient bedrooms, thus enforcing blanket, 24-hour surveillance without ongoing informed consent and individualised risk assessments.
What is Oxevision?
According to NHS guidelines, any patient admitted to a mental health inpatient facility has to be observed at least once every hour. That applies 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The trusts using Oxevision reason that it can act as a replacement for in-person observations by staff members. The camera-sensor system can take video, and also monitors vital signs like pulse and breathing rate.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation’s patient-facing website explains that:
The system camera-sensors enables staff to see if you are in your bedroom and your location in your bedroom, to check you are safe and to measure your breathing rate and pulse without the need to enter your room and disturb you at night when you are asleep.
It notifies staff when you may need help or assistance, specifically, if you have been in the bathroom a long time, if someone else has entered your room while you are there, or when you are stood or sitting close to the main door and have been there a long time, or if you have left your room at night so that they can come to check on you.
Stop Oxevision
Stop Oxevision has written an open letter laying out its critique of Oxevision. It focuses on patients’ experiences of the technology being used in their care, and the potential legal and ethical pitfalls of its use. The letter acknowledges the draws of the technology, but is stark in its warnings:
While balancing a patient’s privacy and dignity with their safety is undoubtedly a challenge, surveillance is a restrictive practice and its use demands serious scrutiny. The use of blanket surveillance in this instance risks retraumatising patients who may have experienced trauma related to surveillance, compromises patient privacy and lacks clarity in relation to the use of footage and technology. Oxevision must not be used in place of sufficient staffing to benefit staff rather than to improve patient care, and consent needs to be specific, individual, informed and ongoing.
The comprehensive, referenced critique focuses on six key areas:
Surveillance as a restrictive practice.
Patient consent.
Impacts on privacy and dignity.
Data protection concerns.
Technology as a response to poor staffing/practices.
The failure to scrutinise healthcare innovations.
Invasive, harmful and ethically fraught
The letter highlighted that both the Restraint Reduction Network and The British Institution of Human Rights consider surveillance to be a form of restrictive practice. Because Oxevision is installed in all patient bedrooms, it doesn’t leave space for individualised care planning or the consideration of less-restrictive options.
It’s deeply unclear how different NHS trusts gain patient consent to use Oxevision, or even if they seek consent at all. Patients who’ve had experience on wards which use Oxevision have stated that it’s used as standard procedure without their consent. Even when they’re requested that Oxevision isn’t used, the facilities simply continued to use it regardless.
24-hour surveillance is obviously a massive compromise to a patient’s privacy. Stop Oxevision used the example of a patient being caught in a state of undress, or even whilst they’re masturbating. Normally, a staff member would knock before entering. This let’s a patient would know that they’re about to be seen and react accordingly. However, the use of Oxevision means that a patient would never know if they’re being observed or not. The letter states that:
there are no controls in place to prevent staff abusing these systems and using Oxevision devices to view video images of patients when undressing.
Worse still, this video footage can be clipped and seen by Oxehealth staff, to monitor how the equipment is working. There’s very little clarity about how long this footage can be stored, or how it might be used in legal investigations regarding assault or patient death.
Money first, patients last
Reviews of Oxevision have praised the possibility that it can save money through reducing need for additional staff. However, this shows that healthcare services are using the technology to benefit staff, rather than the patients themselves. The company’s website also claims that it can help prevent staff from falsifying observation records. Or, to put this another way, in reaction to staff members mistreating the people in their care, privacy and dignity is simply being taken away from the patients.
Finally, Stop Oxevision criticised the fact that NHS Innovation Accelerator awarded public funds for the development of the tech. This represents a failure to perform due diligence regarding the implications and risks of new technologies and models of care, prior to endorsing them.
(@OnlinePalEng) 
