radiofree.asia

Category: Human Rights

  • Eyes of Fire is an updated Rainbow Warrior classic and must read for activism

    REVIEW: By Jenny Nicholls

    Author David Robie left his cabin on the Rainbow Warrior three days before it was blown up by the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency

    The ship was destroyed at Marsden Wharf on 10 July 1985 by two limpet mines attached
    below the waterline.

    As New Zealand soon learned to its shock, the second explosion killed crew member and photographer Fernando Pereira as he tried to retrieve his cameras.

    “I had planned to spend the night of the bombing onboard with my two young sons, to give them a brief taste of shipboard life,” Dr Robie writes. “At the last moment I decided to leave it to another night.”

    He left the ship after 11 weeks documenting what turned out to be the last of her humanitarian missions — a voyage which highlighted the exploitation of Pacific nations
    by countries who used them to test nuclear weapons.

    Dr Robie was the only journalist on board to cover both the evacuation of the people
    of Rongelap Atoll after their land, fishing grounds and bodies were ravaged by US nuclear fallout, and the continued voyage to nuclear-free Vanuatu and New Zealand.

    Eyes of Fire is not only the authoritative biography of the Rainbow Warrior and her
    missions, but a gripping account of the infiltration of Greenpeace by a French spy, the bombing, its planning, the capture of the French agents, the political fallout, and ongoing
    challenges for Pacific nations.

    Dr Robie corrects the widely held belief that the first explosion on the Rainbow Warrior
    was intended as a warning, to avoid loss of life. No, it turns out, the French state really
    did mean to kill people.

    “It was remarkable,” he writes, “that Fernando Pereira was the only person who
    died.”

    The explosives were set to detonate shortly before midnight, when members of the
    crew would be asleep. (One of them was the ship’s relief cook, Waihekean Margaret Mills. She awoke in the nick of time. The next explosion blew in the wall of her cabin).

    “Two cabins on the main deck had their floors ruptured by pieces of steel flying from
    the [first] engine room blast,” writes Dr Robie.

    “By chance, the four crew who slept in those rooms were not on board. If they had been,
    they almost certainly would have been killed.”

    Eyes of Fire author David Robie with Rainbow Warrior III . . . not only an account of the Rongelap humanitarian voyage, but also a gripping account of the infiltration of Greenpeace and the bombing. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    Eyes of Fire was first published in 1986 — and also in the UK and USA, and has been reissued in 2005, 2015 and again this year to coincide with the 40th anniversary
    of the bombing.

    If you are lucky enough to own the first edition, you will find plenty that is new here; updated text, an index, new photographs, a prologue by former NZ prime minister Helen Clark and a searing preface by Waihekean Bunny McDiarmid, former executive director
    of Greenpeace International.

    As you would expect from the former head of journalism schools at the University
    of Papua New Guinea and University of the South Pacific, and founder of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre, Eyes of Fire is not only a brilliant piece of research, it is an absolutely
    fascinating read, filled with human detail.

    The bombing and its aftermath make up a couple of chapters in a book which covers an enormous amount of ground.

    Professor David Robie is a photographer, journalist and teacher who was awarded an MNZM in 2024 for his services to journalism and Asia-Pacific media education. He is founding editor of the Pacific Journalism Review, also well worth seeking out.

    Eyes of Fire is an updated classic and required reading for anyone interested in activism
    or the contemporary history of the Pacific.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Hong Kong activist Tony Chung says he has been granted asylum in the UK

    Chung, one of youngest people to get jail sentence under security law, posts Home Office letter agreeing he has ‘well-founded fear of persecution’

    The Hong Kong independence activist Tony Chung says he has been granted asylum in the UK, two years after fleeing the Chinese region.

    Chung, 24, revealed the news on his Instagram page on Sunday, the day after the former Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui said he had been granted asylum in Australia. Both Chung and Hui are among dozens of pro-democracy activists targeted with arrest warrants and 1m Hong Kong dollar bounties by authorities.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • New Australia-Vanuatu deal won’t replicate Falepili-style pact, says analyst

    By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor

    A Pacific analyst and commentator says it is unlikely that Vanuatu will agree to any exclusive rights in the new security and economic pact with Australia.

    Senior ministers of both countries, including deputy prime ministers Richard Marles and Johnny Koanapo, initialled the Nakamal Agreement at the summit of Mount Yasur volcano on Tanna Island, ahead of formal sign-off next month.

    The two nations have agreed to a landmark deal worth A$500 million that will replace the previous security pact that was scrapped in 2022.

    Dr Tess Newton Cain of the Griffith Asia Institute said she did not believe Vanuatu would agree to anything similar to what Tuvalu (Falepili Union) and Papua New Guinea (Bilateral Security Agreement) had agreed to in recent times.

    She said that the Australian government had been wanting the deal for some time, but had been “progressing quite slowly” because there was “significant pushback” on the Vanuatu side.

    “Back in 2022, it took people by surprise that there was an announcement made that a security agreement had been signed while Senator Penny Wong, Australia’s Foreign Minister was in Port Vila. She and then-prime minister Ishmael Kalsakau had signed a security agreement.

    “On the Australian side, they referred to it as having not been ratified. But essentially it was totally disregarded and thrown out by Vanuatu officials, and not considered to [be a] meaningful agreement.”

    Tess Newton Cain
    Analyst Dr Tess Newton Cain . . . significant process of negotiation between Vanuatu and Australian officials. Image: ResearchGate

    High-level engagement
    However, this time around, Dr Newton Cain said, there had been a significant process of negotiation between Vanuatu and Australian officials.

    “There has been a lot of high-level engagement. We have had a lot of senior Australian officials visiting Vanuatu over the last six months, and possibly for a bit longer. So, it has been a steady process of negotiation.”

    Dr Newton Cain said the text of the agreement had undergone a much more rigorous process, involving input from a wider range of people at the government level.

    “And in the last few days leading up to the initialling of this agreement, it was brought before the National Security Council in Vanuatu, which discussed it and signed off on it.

    “Then it went to the Council of Ministers, which also discussed it and made reference to further amendments. So there were some last-minute changes to the text, and then it was initialled.”

    She said that while the agreement had been “substantially agreed”, more details on what it actually entailed remained scarce.

    Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat said earlier this month that he would not sign the agreement unless visa-free travel was agreed.

    Visa sticking point
    Dr Newton Cain said visa-free travel between the two countries remained a sticking point.

    “Prime Minister Napat said he hoped Prime Minister Albanese would travel to Port Vila in order to sign this agreement. But we know there is still more work to do — both Australia and Vanuatu [have] indicated that there were still aspects that were not completely aligned yet.

    “I think it is reasonable to think that this is around text relating to visa-free access to Australia. There is a circle there that is yet to be squared.”

    Australia is Vanuatu’s biggest development partner, as well as the biggest provider of foreign direct investment. Its support covers a range of critical sectors such as health, education, security, and infrastructure.

    According to Dr Newton Cain, from Canberra’s point of view, they have concerns that countries like Vanuatu have “more visible, diversified and stronger” relations with China.

    “As we have seen in other parts of the region, that has provoked a response from countries like Australia, New Zealand, the United States and others that want to be seen to be offering Vanuatu different options.”

    However, she said it was not surprising that Vanuatu was looking to have a range of conversations with partners that can support the country.

    “China’s relationship has moved more into security areas. There are aspects of policing that China is involved in in Vanuatu, and that this is a bit of a tipping point for countries like Australia and New Zealand.

    “So these sorts of agreements with Australia [are] part of trying to cement the relationship [and] demonstrate that this relationship is built on lasting foundations and strong ties.”

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New Australia-Vanuatu deal won’t replicate Falepili-style pact, says analyst

    By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor

    A Pacific analyst and commentator says it is unlikely that Vanuatu will agree to any exclusive rights in the new security and economic pact with Australia.

    Senior ministers of both countries, including deputy prime ministers Richard Marles and Johnny Koanapo, initialled the Nakamal Agreement at the summit of Mount Yasur volcano on Tanna Island, ahead of formal sign-off next month.

    The two nations have agreed to a landmark deal worth A$500 million that will replace the previous security pact that was scrapped in 2022.

    Dr Tess Newton Cain of the Griffith Asia Institute said she did not believe Vanuatu would agree to anything similar to what Tuvalu (Falepili Union) and Papua New Guinea (Bilateral Security Agreement) had agreed to in recent times.

    She said that the Australian government had been wanting the deal for some time, but had been “progressing quite slowly” because there was “significant pushback” on the Vanuatu side.

    “Back in 2022, it took people by surprise that there was an announcement made that a security agreement had been signed while Senator Penny Wong, Australia’s Foreign Minister was in Port Vila. She and then-prime minister Ishmael Kalsakau had signed a security agreement.

    “On the Australian side, they referred to it as having not been ratified. But essentially it was totally disregarded and thrown out by Vanuatu officials, and not considered to [be a] meaningful agreement.”

    Tess Newton Cain
    Analyst Dr Tess Newton Cain . . . significant process of negotiation between Vanuatu and Australian officials. Image: ResearchGate

    High-level engagement
    However, this time around, Dr Newton Cain said, there had been a significant process of negotiation between Vanuatu and Australian officials.

    “There has been a lot of high-level engagement. We have had a lot of senior Australian officials visiting Vanuatu over the last six months, and possibly for a bit longer. So, it has been a steady process of negotiation.”

    Dr Newton Cain said the text of the agreement had undergone a much more rigorous process, involving input from a wider range of people at the government level.

    “And in the last few days leading up to the initialling of this agreement, it was brought before the National Security Council in Vanuatu, which discussed it and signed off on it.

    “Then it went to the Council of Ministers, which also discussed it and made reference to further amendments. So there were some last-minute changes to the text, and then it was initialled.”

    She said that while the agreement had been “substantially agreed”, more details on what it actually entailed remained scarce.

    Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat said earlier this month that he would not sign the agreement unless visa-free travel was agreed.

    Visa sticking point
    Dr Newton Cain said visa-free travel between the two countries remained a sticking point.

    “Prime Minister Napat said he hoped Prime Minister Albanese would travel to Port Vila in order to sign this agreement. But we know there is still more work to do — both Australia and Vanuatu [have] indicated that there were still aspects that were not completely aligned yet.

    “I think it is reasonable to think that this is around text relating to visa-free access to Australia. There is a circle there that is yet to be squared.”

    Australia is Vanuatu’s biggest development partner, as well as the biggest provider of foreign direct investment. Its support covers a range of critical sectors such as health, education, security, and infrastructure.

    According to Dr Newton Cain, from Canberra’s point of view, they have concerns that countries like Vanuatu have “more visible, diversified and stronger” relations with China.

    “As we have seen in other parts of the region, that has provoked a response from countries like Australia, New Zealand, the United States and others that want to be seen to be offering Vanuatu different options.”

    However, she said it was not surprising that Vanuatu was looking to have a range of conversations with partners that can support the country.

    “China’s relationship has moved more into security areas. There are aspects of policing that China is involved in in Vanuatu, and that this is a bit of a tipping point for countries like Australia and New Zealand.

    “So these sorts of agreements with Australia [are] part of trying to cement the relationship [and] demonstrate that this relationship is built on lasting foundations and strong ties.”

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Starmer v Starmer: why is the former human rights lawyer so cautious about defending human rights? – podcast

    Many of his supporters hoped the prime minister would restore the UK’s commitment to international law. Yet Labour’s record over the past year has been curiously mixed

    By Daniel Trilling. Read by Simon Darwen

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Will I make it back alive?’: Gaza journalists tell of being targeted by Israel

    Pacific Media Watch

    Palestinian journalists have long known Gaza to be the most dangerous place on earth for media workers, but Israel’s attack on a tent housing journalists in Gaza City last Sunday has left many reeling from shock and fear, reports Al Jazeera.

    Four Al Jazeera staff members were among the seven people killed in an Israeli drone strike outside al-Shifa Hospital.

    The Israeli military admitted to deliberately targeting the tent after making unsubstantiated accusations that one of those killed, Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, was a member of Hamas.

    Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed at least 238 media workers since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office. This toll is higher than that of World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, the war in Afghanistan and the Yugoslavia wars combined.

    Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud said in a video report about the plight of journalists this week that  “press vests and helmets, once considered a shield, now feel like a target.”

    “The fear is constant — and justified,” Mahmoud said. “Every assignment is accompanied by the same unspoken question: Will [I] make it back alive?”

    The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have been among several organisations denouncing Israel’s longstanding pattern of accusing journalists of being “terrorists” without credible proof.

    Smears no coincidence
    “It is no coincidence that the smears against al-Sharif — who has reported night and day for Al Jazeera since the start of the war — surfaced every time he reported on a major development in the war, most recently the starvation brought about by Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient aid into the territory,” CPJ regional director Sara Qudah said in the aftermath of Israel’s attack.

    In light of Israel’s systematic targeting of journalists, media workers in Gaza are forced to make difficult choices.

    Palestinian reporter Sally Thabet told Al Jazeera: “As a mother and a journalist, I go through this mental dissonance almost daily, whether to go to work or stay with my daughters and being afraid of the random shelling of the Israeli occupation army.”

    "It's about time for Luxon to grow a spine"
    “Journalism is not a crime . . . oppressing it is” placards at the Auckland free Palestine rally in Te Komititanga Square last weekend. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    Across the street from the ruins of the School of Media Studies at al-Quds Open University in Gaza City, where he used to teach, Hussein Saad has been recovering from an injury he sustained while running to safety.

    “The deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists has a strong effect on the disappearance of the Palestinian story and the disappearance of the media narrative,” he said.

    Saad argued the Gaza Strip was witnessing “the disappearance of the truth”.

    While journalists report on mass killings, human suffering and starvation, they also cope with their own losses and deprivation. Photographer and correspondent Amer al-Sultan said hunger was a major challenge.

    “I used to go to work, and when I didn’t find anything to eat, I would just drink water,” he said.

    Palestinian journalists under fire.             Video: Al Jazeera

    ‘We are all . . . confused’
    “I did this for two days. I had to live for two or three days on water. This is one of the most difficult challenges we face amid this war against our people — starvation.”

    Journalist and film director Hassan Abu Dan said reporters “live in conditions that are more difficult than the mind can imagine.”

    “You live in a tent. You drink water that is not good for drinking. You eat unhealthy food …

    “We are all, as journalists, confused. There is a part of our lives that has been ruined and gone far away,” he said.

    Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud said that despite the psychological trauma and the personal risks, Palestinian journalists continue to do their jobs, “driven by a belief that documenting the truth is not just a profession, but a duty to their people and history”.

    Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud
    Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud . . . the fear in Gaza is constant – and justified – after Israel’s targeted attack killed four colleagues. Image: Al Jazeera

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Pro-Palestinian protests across NZ call on government to sanction Israel

    RNZ News

    Protesters staged pro-Palestinian demonstrations across Aotearoa New Zealand at the weekend, calling on the government to place sanctions on Israel for its war on Gaza.

    The government announced last week it was considering whether to join other countries like France, Canada and Australia in recognising Palestinian statehood at a United Nations leader’s meeting next month.

    Demonstrators took to the streets in about 20 cities and towns on Saturday in a “National Day of Protest”, waving Palestinian and other flags, holding vigils, and banging pots and pans to represent what a UN-backed food security agency has called “the worst case scenario of famine”.

    They also condemned Israel’s targeted killing of journalists.

    In Wellington, about 2000 protesters gathered at Te Aro Park, and formed a crowd almost a kilometre long during the march, an RNZ journalist estimated.

    One demonstrator, who carried a sign which read “Palestine is in our hearts”, said the government had been “woefully silent” on what was happening in Gaza.


    The Wellington Gaza protest on Saturday.    Video: RNZ

    It was her first protest, she said, and she intended to go to others in order to “agitate for our politicians to listen and take a stand”.

    “I hope the country comes out in force today right across all of our regions, to give Palestine a voice, to show that we care, and to inspire action from our politicians — who have been woefully silent and as a result compliant in the genocide in Palestine.”

    Pro Palestinian protesters gather in Wellington on 16 August 2025 as part of nationwide demonstrations.
    A protester’s “Palestine is in our hearts” placard at the Wellington protest. Image: Mark Papalii/RNZ News

    She said she wanted to see the New Zealand government sanction Israel and take a global stand against the war in Gaza.

    Another protester said the killings of four Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza this week was what had spurred him to join the crowd.

    Wellington Gaza protest
    A “grow a spine Luxon!” placard at the Wellington protest in reference to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s “woeful” stance on the Israeli war on Gaza. Photo: Mark Papalii/RNZ

    “You know hearing about the attack on the journalists, the way they were targeting just one purportedly but were willing to kill [others] just to get their man.

    “It’s not right.”

    Pro-Palestinian protesters gather in Wellington on 16 August 2025 as part of nationwide demonstrations.
    Pro-Palestinian protesters condemn the killing of journalists by Israel and call for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador as part of nationwide demonstrations. Image: Mark Papalii/RNZ

    Others in the capital carried signs showing Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif and his three Al Jazeera colleagues who were killed by an Israeli strike on a tent of reporters in Gaza.

    The IDF claimed that al-Sharif was working for the Hamas resistance — something Al Jazeera has strongly denied.

    Wellington Gaza protest
    Some of the demonstrators at the Wellington protest against Israel. Image: Mark Papalii/RNZ


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jack Straw urges Labour not to panic about threat of Nigel Farage

    Former home secretary praises Keir Starmer’s success on world stage and says PM can win over sceptical UK public

    Keir Starmer and his ministers must not “panic” about the threat of Nigel Farage, the former home secretary Jack Straw has said, adding that the prime minister had impressed on the world stage and should show more of that side of himself at home.

    In an interview with the Guardian, he praised Starmer’s intention to recognise a Palestinian state after an ultimatum to Israel – but defended the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, saying he would also have proscribed the direct action group Palestine Action.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Gerard Otto on Palestine, genocide and the media: ‘Not if – but when – but not now’

    COMMENTARY: By Gerard Otto

    This morning there is no article on the political page of The New Zealand Herald about the plight of people in Gaza, the same is the case at The Post and at RNZ. Even the 1News political page is Gaza free but what may stun you over a Sunday morning coffee is the fact that there is also no mention of Gaza on the “World Pages” of any of these so-called news organisations.

    It’s not news in the world of our mainstream media journalists.

    Instead, there is articles about “no deal” between Trump and Putin, 300 dead in Pakistan, Trump will meet Zelenskyy, Stone Age Humans were picky about what stones they used . . . and other things — in fact the only article in the “big ” New Zealand mainstream media “World” pages about Gaza is at Stuff and it’s a link to a three minute news video item from yesterday’s Auckland protest about Neil Finn supporting Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick.

    Chlöe said the evidence is pretty clear and you don’t kill journalists for no reason when Israel laughed off claims that people in Gaza were starving.

    Last night, TVNZ 1News broadcast a news item that led with Neil Finn singing “Don’t Dream it’s Over” and Simon Mercep interviewing Chlöe about her stance on an apology.

    The news Chlöe would be back next week at Parliament probably shocked Duncan Garner but there was precious little coverage of what was said in protest speeches because the limitations of broadcasting news concision (a sequence of soundbites) prevent the New Zealand public from hearing too much about Gaza from our own mainstream news services.

    Gordon’s action list
    Over on social media many people are sharing Gordon Campbell’s article around — where he details the actions you could take and points out how the people of Gaza don’t have time for symbolic stances and the kinds of actions that might help — like sanctions and UN peacekeeping intervention on the ground.

    Gordon Campbell has “a go at” the stance taken by the NZ government that “it’s not a matter of if, but when” by adding “but not now” and why not now?

    One reason for “but not now” pitched by Campbell is that with Todd McClay now heading over to the US to beg for a return to 10 percent tariffs, New Zealand is stalling and playing a wait and see game — watching whether Australia will be punished for backing a Palestinian state and whether tariffs will be part of the game.


    G News on yesterday’s Palestine solidarity rally in Te Komititanga Square, Auckland.

    A map of the nations in the world who support a Palestinian state shows most of it in green — and the holdouts in white — with New Zealand holding out in white as we recite “Not if, but when, but not now”.

    The editorial at The New Zealand Herald this morning is about how Labour MPs should have shown up and performed publicly at the Covid Circus Phase 2 Royal Commission of Inquiry in the opinion of the Herald (run by Steven Joyce and cookers from The Centrist) — because an urgent Taxpayers’ Union Poll claims 53 percent say so with a giant margin for error not even mentioned — nor how the Royal Commission has all the information it needs from the previous government but it needs the same questions answered in public.

    The priorities and partisanship of The NZ Herald are on show as it campaigns hard against Labour and the left bloc even while there’s an unfolding genocide taking place in the world and it’s “World” pages are empty about this — while decent people cancel their subscriptions.

    Many of us are still aghast at the way senior political correspondent Audrey Young wished Chlöe would go away when all she was doing was asking National MPs to act with their conscience and Speaker Gerry Brownlee had taken offence and dished out injustice — which now has backfired at grassroots level across the nation and media starve us all of the real content in those speeches.

    Chlöe has said from the start this is not about her and she was telling people this again yesterday as folks thanked her for taking an unapologetic stand.

    Green Party's Chlöe Swarbrick has said from the start this is not about her and she was telling people this again
    Green Party’s Chlöe Swarbrick has said from the start this is not about her and she was telling people this again yesterday as folks thanked her for taking an unapologetic stand. Image: Stuff screenshot APR

    Who controls the spotlight? Media!
    We wanted to hear from Chlöe and we wanted to hear those speeches.

    I personally felt I had let down the show yesterday because my cell and sound gear seized up in the bitter cold wind and rain so I missed Chlöe’s speech and some of the other messages — Hey Now Don’t Dream it’s Over — but with no umbrella, no raincoat and standing in the rain my frozen fingers took some time to come right and I sat on a ferry in cold wet clothes like a failure afterwards but it is what it is.

    My apologies for not being better prepared.

    It was pointed out in speeches at the rally (there has almost been 100 of them now) how NZ journalists do not support their colleagues who are being murdered for doing their jobs in Gaza and when I got home and warmed up we discussed the way Al Jazeera is a good news channel and how crap things are in New Zealand media.

    Gordon Campbell and a few other notable exceptions keep the faith and his observation “but not now” has done the thinking for many of us about the spineless government who are stalling and pretending this is complex and needs to take weeks while every day more people starve to death, get shot going for food. And it all just happens as if — it’s “a mystery” – while our government names Hamas strongly but nobody else.

    Criticism of State Terror is more toned down and we care more about our US relationship than anything much else it seems — putting our own interests first and not reporting much about the facts.

    RNZ has finally published “Spine and Punishment: A review of Swarbrick v Brownlee” because the media spotlight was on this local issue and the history of Speakers’ rulings versus “a new decency” because Gerry was offended and overreached.

    Gerry must withdraw
    In my opinion, Gerry has got to withdraw and apologise or step down and any more stick about this towards Chlöe is going to further the focus on National MPs who are silent and hiding behind “But not now”.

    If only six of 68 National MPs voted with their conscience and not their party “but not now” instructions then we’d be actively progressing a new law to sanction Israel — and our actions would speak louder than merely words and symbolic gestures.

    “But not now” is the order of the day for New Zealand’s mainstream media as Dr Paul Goldsmith is caught out supporting what David Seymour wrote to the UN — Education Minister Erica Stanford overreaches banning Te Reo words, Public Service Minister Judith Collins is threatening to prevent strikes, and PM Christopher Luxon is now loathed by the business community as his fluffers at The NZ Herald look the other way.

    The unfolding genocide in Gaza seems to be going to plan as NZ news media also lack a spine and any kind of support for their dead colleagues while this one term government clings to “Not if, but when — but not now”.

    Might as well carry on starving until September.

    “He’s lost the plot” – “but not now”.

    Because this government and its sycophantic media need more time to argue about this very “complex” issue.

    Gerard Otto is a digital creator and independent commentator on politics and the media through his G News column and video reports. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Why we need protection from brutality of some thuggish NZ police

    COMMENTARY: By Saige England

    A New Zealand policeman pushed over an elderly man who was doing nothing but waving a Palestinian flag at a solidarity rally in Ōtautahi yesterday.

    Yes the man employed to protect the public committed a violent assault. Not a wee shove, a great big push that caused the man to fall the ground – onto hard tarmac.

    It comes on top of a woman being fatally shot this week by police and her partner being shot and injured. In that case a knife was involved but it’s kind of like paper-scissors-rock, is it not?

    Police wear protective clothing and where are the tasers?

    In other, different, situations I know for a fact that some of our police are violent against peaceful people.

    I have experienced their brutality directly while filming their brutality. Like the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) they see journalists who film their offensive actions as the enemy.They used pepper spray against me illegally to stop me filming their perversity.

    But look, it’s a hard job so they need how-not-to-be-thugs training.

    Pre-trained as thugs
    Some young men are already pre-trained to be thugs and they seem to be out at the front. They feel great in this mostly white gang.

    I have witnessed police haul people off the pavement, beat them up, and then arrest the victims of their assaults “for assault”.

    False accusations to protect themselves? Twisting the narrative completely to hide their own violence?

    False arrests when they themselves should face arrest.

    I think we’ve had enough.

    Some of the boys in blue really really need to grow up.

    They need training that teaches them that manning or womaning up (some women cops play the thug game too) doesn’t mean training to be a wanker white supremacist.

    Self awareness
    Good training means teaching police to be self aware, aware of thoughts and feelings, not just learning cognitive behavioural tools but applying them.

    They are in the community to protect the community. They should not see people who are supporting human rights or kids attending a party as their opposition, their enemy.

    These thug police need to unlearn their thuggery and learn instead, how to relate to the people. They are not defending themselves against the public. They must not view people — real human beings — as their enemy.

    The thug cops are adept at dehumanising others. They need to learn to see people as individuals and this includes people attending group functions like parties or protests or club activities. People have human rights.

    This includes the right to be respected and treated with dignity.

    The perpetrators of violent crime are — far too often — the police. I’ve seen it happen with no provocation time and again. Too many times to count.

    They don the black gloves and black sunnies and wear bullet proof vests and feel what?How do they feel when they gear up? Threatened or threatening?

    Public protection
    Questions need to be asked.

    The public needs protection from some — not all — of our police.

    And the legal system, the justice system — (I’m trying not use an ironic tone here) needs to be applied to violent crimes, including the police crims who assault members of the public.

    I worry for unseen victims too. I worry for their wives and children because if they assault with no provocation on the street what do they do at home?

    Do people who behave like street devils turn into angels at home?

    Investigations must be held about why our police are assaulting bystanders and peaceful protesters.

    Tragedy investigation
    I guess there wll be an investigation into the bullets against knife tragedy. But we need other investigations too.

    I know the footage of what happened to our innocent elderly protester will be posted on social media.


    New footage emerges of policeman pushing partygoer (2021 1News video)

    In the meantime, here’s other footage above of Christchurch police doing what they are in danger of doing best.

    This footage is four years ago but this alarming, aggressive behaviour continues as demonstrated yesterday by a cop shoving to the ground an unarmed, unprotected, elderly man waving a Palestinian flag whom they then — so wrongly — charged with assault!

    Saige England is an Aotearoa New Zealand journalist, author, and poet, member of the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA), and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This commentary was first published on her social media.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • US Guts Mentions of Indigenous Rights, Climate Change From Human Rights Reports

    This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. Forget Indigenous rights, climate change and environmental protection. That’s the stark message from the latest edition of the U.S. Department of State’s reports on human rights practices across the world…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Luxon ‘get a spine’ chants as big rallies call for NZ to recognise Palestine state

    Asia Pacific Report

    “Grow a spine for Palestine!” was a frequent theme among about 5000 people protesting in the heart of New Zealand’s largest city today as the protesters demanded that the coalition government should recognise the state of Palestine and stop supporting impunity for Israel.

    More than 62,000 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza in the past 22 months and the country’s military have doubled down on their attacks on residential areas in the besieged enclave.

    Several speakers, including opposition parliamentarians, spoke at the rally, strongly condemning Israel for its genocidal policies and crimes against humanity.

    Many children took part in the rally at Te Komititanga Square and the return march up Queen Street in spite of the bitterly wet and cold weather. Many of them carried placards and Palestinian flags like their parents.

    One young boy carried a placard declaring “Just a kid standing in front of his PM asking him to grow a heart and a spine”. The heart was illustrated as a Palestinian flag.

    Other placards included slogans such as “Wanted MPs with a spine” and “Grow a spine for Palestine”, and “They try to bury us forgetting we are seeds” with the resistance watermelon symbol.

    Many placards demanded sanctions and condemned Israel, saying “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them — sanction Israel now”, “NZ government: Your silence is complicity with Israeli genocide” and “Free Palestine now”.

    Disillusionment with leaders
    One poster expressed disillusionment with both the coalition government and opposition Labour Party leaders, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins, denouncing “apologists for genocide”.

    Another poster challenged both Hipkins and Luxon over “what values” they stood for. It said:

    “Our ‘leaders’ have refused to call for a ceasefire even after 10,000+ innocent civilians have been brutally murdered in their own homes, including 4000+ CHILDREN all under the name of “Kiwi values”.

    “They, like a lot of other world politicians, are apologists for genocide.”

    A "Palestine forever" banner at the head of the Auckland march
    A “Palestine forever” banner at the head of the Auckland march today as it prepares to walk up Queen Street. Image: APR

    Frustration has been growing among the public with the government’s reluctance to declare support for Palestinian statehood after 96 consecutive weeks of protests organised by the Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and other groups, not just in the largest city of Auckland and the capital Wellington, but also in Christchurch and in at least 20 other towns and communities across the motu.

    The “spine” theme in chants and posters followed just days after Parliament suspended Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick following a fiery speech about Gaza when she said government MPs should grow a spine and sanction Israel for its atrocities.

    She had refused to apologise to the House and supporters at the rally today gave her rousing cheers in support of her defiance.

    ‘We need your help’
    Te Pati Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told the crowd: “We need you to help her put the pressure on so that we can fight together in that place [Parliament] for our people to free, free Palestine; from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

    “Return our dignity Aotearoa. Stand up for what is right. There is only one side to support in genocide, only one side. And Te Pati Māori will only work with those.”

    When Swarbrick spoke to the crowd, she repeated her goal to find six government MPs “with a spine” to support her bill to “sanction Israel for its war crimes”.

    She also said the Palestinian people were being “starved and slaughtered by Israel” in Gaza, adding that their breath was being “stolen from them” by the IDF (Israeli “Defence” Force).

    “It is our duty, all human beings with breath left in our lungs, with the freedom to chant and to move and to demand action from our politicians, to do all that we can to fight for liberation for all peoples,” she said.

    Other politicians speaking were Orini Kaipara, the Te Pati Māori candidate for the Tāmaki Mākaurau byelection, and Kerrin Leoni, mayoral candidate for Tamaki.

    Targeted assassinations
    Earlier, the targeted assassinations of six journalists by the Israeli military last Sunday — taking the toll to 272 — was condemned by independent journalist and Asia Pacific Report editor Dr David Robie. He also criticised the NZ media silence.

    Noting that New Zealand journalists had not condemned the killings or held a vigil as the Media Alliance (MEAA) had done in Australia, he cited an Al Jazeera journalist, Hind Khoudary, whose message to the world was:

    “We are being hunted and killed in Gaza while you watch in silence. For two years, your fellow journalists here have been slaughtered.

    What did you do? Nothing.”

    Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick (left) and Te Pati Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer
    Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick (left) and Te Pati Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer at today’s rally in Te Komitanga Square, Auckland. Image: APR

    A recent poll on whether New Zealanders want sanctions to be imposed on Israel, showed that of those who gave an opinion, 60 percent favoured sanctions.

    The PSNA commissioned survey by Talbot Mills in July with 1216 respondents gave a similar result to one commissioned by Justice for Palestine a year ago.

    Popular support for sanctions
    PSNA co-chair John Minto said the numbers showed strong popular support for sanctions. The 60 percent overall rose to 68 percent for the 18–29 year category.

    “The government is well out of step with public opinion and ignores this message at its peril.  There is popular support for sanctions against Israel,” he said.

    “People see that Israel is committing the worst atrocities of the 21st century with impunity. It is starving a whole population.

    “It has destroyed just about every building in Gaza. It is assassinating journalists. It holds 7000 Palestinian hostages in its jails without charge.  Its goal of occupying all of Gaza and ethnically cleansing its people into the Sudan desert, is all public knowledge.”

    Minto said Israel’s “depraved Prime Minister” who was wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICJ) for war crimes and crimes against humanity, had boasting that if Israel was really committing genocide, “it could have killed everyone in Gaza in a single afternoon”.

    “The poll shows New Zealand First supporters are most opposed to sanctions against Israel (59 percent of those who gave an opinion were opposed) so it’s little surprise Winston Peters is dragging the chain.”

    "Just a kid" with his message to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon
    “Just a kid” with his blunt message to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Image: APR

  • Palestinian Youth Movement Vows to Make Genocide Support Too Costly for Maersk

    After two years of continuous effort in research, agitation and direct action, the organizers of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) celebrated a landmark organizing victory in late June. Their “Mask Off Maersk” campaign had sought to prove the complicity of the Danish freight-logistics titan A.P. Møller – Maersk A/S in the genocide in Gaza. Maersk, as it’s generally known, was found by PYM…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘I’m proud to have made this stand’: over-60s arrested at Palestine Action ban protest explain their decision

    From a retired British colonel to a Catholic priest, half of the 532 people arrested in Parliament Square were 60 or older. Many believe they had a greater share of responsibility to take in defending the right to free speech

    In recent weeks, hundreds of people have been arrested for taking part in demonstrations organised by the campaign group Defend Our Juries. Their alleged crime is calling for an end to the ban against Palestine Action, which has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary.

    One striking detail among those detained is their age. Half of those arrested at the largest protest yet, in Parliament Square in London on Saturday, were 60 or older. Some said they had taken part to give a voice to younger people who have more to lose by breaking the law, some simply felt they must challenge the government’s stance.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Israel is using its manufactured famine of Palestinians as a silent weapon in genocide

    Israel’s manufactured famine is being used, according to Amnesty International, as a “weapon of war.” However, public support for the famine amongst Israelis is also disturbingly widespread. During a speech to a large audience on 28 July, which was streamed live on TVs and social media in Israel, Rabbi Ronen Shaulov said:

    All of Gaza, and every child in Gaza should starve to death. I have no mercy for them…even though they are still young and hungry, I hope they starve to death.

     

    Starvation as policy: decades of blockade

    Restricting the entry of food and aid into Gaza has been a decades-long policy of the Israeli occupation. And, it has been consciously designed to control and exert pressure over the civilian population.

    In 2006, after Hamas’s electoral victory, a senior adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister said that when it came to tightening the blockade that:

    The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.

    In 2011, under court order, Israel released documents showing it calculated the minimal daily calorie intake required to avoid malnutrition in Gaza, planning aid only for subsistence – not nutritional health.

    Restrictions have intensified, reaching a new level of depravity. The humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding was manufactured from day one with the goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza. Crossings have been closed, food and medicine blocked, warehouses and bakeries destroyed, farmland obliterated. Only 1.5% of Gaza’s cropland remains accessible.

    According to Gaza’s Media Office, vegetable production has plummeted from 405,000 tonnes to 25,000. On top of that, 665 livestock and poultry farms have been destroyed. Beyond aid prevention, 44 food kitchens and 57 food distribution centres have been bombed. Palestinians queuing for water and food have been continually targeted.

    Since March 2 there has been a blockade on aid – initially total, now partial. Despite pressure forcing the occupation to allow the ‘limited’ entry of trucks, on 27 July, more than 430 food items, including frozen meats, dairy products, frozen vegetables and fruits, are still prohibited from entering.

    Pre-genocide, 500 aid trucks entered daily. Now at least 600 are needed, but between July 27–Aug 12, only 1,535 trucks entered—92 per day, according to Gaza’s Media Office. This is “a drop in the ocean” , compared to what is needed by Gaza’s starving population. Even those permitted to cross the border still face many problems.

    Chaos at the checkpoints: aid access and lawlessness

    The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA’s) spokesperson in Gaza, Olga Cherevko, said that:

    Our convoys continue to face delays at checkpoints, where we have to wait hours for authorisation to move. Once we enter the strip, we find that the routes given by the Israeli authorities are often congested, dangerous or impassable, and roads are severely damaged.

    With no organised distribution in most areas, crowds mob the few trucks that cross. Looting is rife amid a deliberately manufactured insecurity created by the occupation arming and protecting criminal gangs in Gaza.

    Amjad Al-Shawa is director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO), a coalition that unites over 130 independent Palestinian civil society organisations working in a variety of areas.

    He said:

    Its an unprecedented situation. We are not only suffering from starvation, but also from engineered chaos, imposed by the Israelis from day one of this war, through the systematic attacks on the rule of law, and the order bodies in Gaza- the Civil Police, the Attorney General, the court system, the jails, the prisons.

    Everything was attacked. Also the escorting teams for the aid supplies, the warehouses, the distribution points- all these were attacked. So these things led to such chaos, and also people are starving. Such conditions have led to disputes between individuals, and families.

    The battle is how to survive. There is no other option, just to risk your life to get a piece of bread or some flour.

    The purpose of this policy of engineered starvation and chaos is fundamentally to turn people against each other. This policy exists to undermine resilience, spread anarchy, and destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state. One way the occupation is doing this is by arming and protecting gangs, such as that led by Yasser Abu Shabab, previously jailed by Hamas, for drug smuggling and theft.

    Manufactured famine: aid distribution as deadly trap

    Rana Yassin lives in Tel al-Hawa, a neighbourhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Her brother had gone to the flour trucks, to try and get some food. Instead, he came back frightened and empty handed.

    Yassin said that:

    My brother was feeling very sad because he saw my little sister starving in front of his eyes. She was crying before sleeping, from hunger. So he made the decision to go to the flour trucks at the Kerem Shalom border crossing the next day. He told me it was very crowded and the condition there is crazy. People were fighting to get a packet of flour, but even if you are lucky enough to get something, people will steal it from you. He said the thieves had knives, and randomly shot at people, along with the army. These people aren’t of us.

    We didn’t see these people living with us in the days before the war. These are not Gazan people-really! We are very honest people, very generous, very good people. Who are these people? We don’t know. The things they are doing – stealing other people’s food and selling it, are not the principles we have been raised on. We were raised to give our neighbour food, if he is hungry and he is poor. We help each other. These people, of course, are supported by Israel, because they know when the trucks arrive, and they are protected by the army- which shoots other people, but lets them steal.

    Aid restrictions

    The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Alert tells us that the worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in Gaza. Two famine indicators – acute malnutrition and severely reduced food consumption – are already surpassed in parts of the enclave. Namely, more than one in three people now regularly go days without food, and over half a million are in famine-like conditions, while the rest suffer emergency-level hunger. Gaza is at Phase 5 ’catastrophe’, where food vanishes and communities fall apart. Warnings, issued as early as December 2023, went unheeded.

    To enable the ethnic cleansing and genocide to continue, the occupation has not permitted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to bring any aid into Gaza since March 2. That’s in spite of the fact that the organisation have operated with great efficiency in Gaza since 1950. Instead, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), run by US mercenaries and the Israeli military, has replaced UNRWA’s four hundred decentralised aid points with just four heavily militarised ‘aid distribution sites’.

    GHF has nothing to do with providing aid, and everything to do with control. Armed guards patrol these sites, while the biometric data and digital IDs of the starving population, who have turned up in the hopes of some food, are collected to identify those of interest to the occupation. These checkpoints are nothing more than death traps for desperate, starving Palestinians. People have no choice but to risk death for a piece of bread, or some flour.

    GHF aid distribution sites: ‘Bloodbaths’

    Al-Shawa said that:

    Israel is trying its best to paralyse the humanitarian structure- the UN, and international and national NGOs, who are committed to the humanitarian principles. If this will continue, there will be total collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza, where people will be left with nothing, and at the same time it will be a step forward to issue the forcible deportation of the people, through the establishment of a concentration camp in the south.

    This is the real plan of the Israelis, through the GHF and through these attacks on the Palestinian civilians, wherever they are. Now all ages are suffering from starvation. It has appeared now, on the faces, and the energy of everyone. Myself, my children- everyone is affected.

    Through their new report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) spoke with a whistleblower – a former contractor that worked with GHF. They also interviewed multiple witnesses who saw violence at aid distribution sites. HRW also spoke to humanitarian workers and doctors who treated those that were injured or killed during aid distributions to understand more about how GHF operates.

    What it found was a deeply flawed and problematic method of aid distribution, which lead HRW to accuse GHF of turning its sites into regular “bloodbaths”.

    Israel’s deliberate massacres at GHF aid sites

    Omar Shakir is the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch (HRW). He investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. And, he explained that:

    We are able to confirm that Israeli forces are routinely opening fire on starving Palestinian civilians seeking aid at these sites, and we determine that those acts amount to wilful killings and are therefore war crimes. But our findings aren’t just limited to the killings.

    These companies are operating in militarized areas on land that has been largely raised by the Israeli army and ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. So Palestinians are forced to trek many, many kilometres over many hours to reach these aid sites. Because of the nature of how desperate the situation is – because Israel is deliberately starving civilians- there are many thousands of people, while the Israeli army uses live ammunition, essentially as crowd control. We’ve talked to people who’ve gone to, in some cases, scores of aid distributions, often coming back empty handed, witnessing friends and relatives that have been gunned down.

    Even if all the sites were to operate at full capacity, they would not be able to even bring in one tenth of the food, the number of trucks worth of food that was being brought in during the ceasefire by the UN mechanism.

    By reviewing GHF’s Facebook posts, which is where they make their official announcements, HRW also learnt that GHF’s four sites are only open for an average of 11 minutes. Even then, they’re not even open every day. Sometimes, they announced that sites were closed at the end of distribution. But they had not even announced when distribution had begun, making it impossible for Palestinians to know when aid was being distributed.

    Shakir said:

    So basically it’s a free for all. Suddenly the site is open. People run, they sprint. They’re being fired on by contractors using lethal and non lethal use of force. We also corresponded with these contractors, and they have acknowledged using live fire. They say they fire in the air or at people’s feet, but the evidence suggests that they’re firing on the crowd. So it’s a scenario where only the strong and powerful are able to, if they’re lucky, get food.

    As of 14 August, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, since 27 May, 1,881 aid seekers have been killed, and 13,863 injured. Deaths from famine and malnutrition total 239, including 106 children. Huge numbers of injured people have been flooding into Gaza’s hospitals, because of repeated attacks and the targeting of aid seekers.

    Hospitals are overwhelmed, and deaths are rapidly rising

    Dr Atef Al-Hout is the director of Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, the only major hospital still functioning in Southern Gaza Strip. We spoke with him recently, and were told a mass casualty event had taken place. 287 injured people, and more than 40 martyrs had been brought to the hospital. They had been at what he calls “the inhumane aid distribution area”.

    Dr Al-Hout said that:

    We have all kinds of cases here, including those resulting from shelling that targeted residential areas, in what are known as ‘safe zones’, and injuries from the aid distribution area. The situation is extremely critical and continues to deteriorate. The number of martyrs is increasing daily. We are treating more than double the number of patients compared to 22 months ago, while medical supplies are critically low: Before the war, our hospital had 342 beds, but today we are treating over 800 patients. We’ve added a 100 bed field hospital, there are tents in the courtyard, and patients are even being treated on the floor in the corridors, because of severe overcrowding.

    Supplies are critically low, so patients have to go three to four days without having their wound gauze dressings changed because there is not enough supply, and this can lead to blood poisoning and life-threatening complications. There are also no painkillers, IV fluids or intravenous nutrition, which are essential for patients with injuries and malnutrition.

    Stocks of blood and plasma units are also running very low in several hospitals. This is not only because of the growing number of mass casualty events, but also the rise in malnutrition, which prevents a person being able to donate their blood to help the injured.

    Malnutrition: ‘tired from the slightest effort’

    Dr Mohammed Wael Shaheen is resident orthopaedic surgeon and head of the Medical Delegation Committee at Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital, Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip where he works. He said:

    Everyone is suffering from malnutrition here, and there is a shortage of food which contain essential elements that strengthen the blood, such as vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs and other items. These have been missing in Gaza since March, due to the blockade.

    Although Al-Aqsa Martyr’s hospital now provides one meal -a small plate of rice, pasta, or a Palestinian dish called Majadra – for its medical staff during their 24-hour shift, Dr Shaheen said:

    Of course, this is not enough to even sustain a small child for two days, let alone medical staff throughout their shift. Medical staff, as well as their patients, are suffering from malnutrition and are unable to work continuously. I used to be able to stand in the operating room for ten, twelve, or fifteen hours straight, without feeling the slightest bit of fatigue, exhaustion or lack of concentration, but now I can’t even last two to three hours. After that, you feel a severe headache, dizziness, nausea, and exhaustion. You cannot continue to stand, and you cannot complete your work. You get tired from the slightest effort you make at these times.

    One of the most vulnerable groups to malnutrition are children, and UNICEF has warned all under fives  – over 320,000 children – are at risk of acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of undernutrition. Dr Al-Hout said:

    Children, especially infants are arriving in horrific conditions, as breastfeeding mothers do not have milk to feed their babies, due to their own malnutrition, and milk, though very rare in the local markets, is unaffordable, at more than $100 per carton- which is enough for a child for four days.

    The toll on children and families: starvation and trauma

    Dr Shaheen confided that:

    Malnutrition in children is a terrible thing. It is frightening when you see young children with their thin, emaciated bodies, and their parents and families unable to do anything for them. I mean, it chills the bones.

    Even a heart of stone would break. How can the people of the free world not be moved? The scenes are unbelievable. We see children in the wards, their chest bones and hand bones protruding from weakness, emaciation, and humiliation. No one in the free world, the honorable world, can imagine that, God forbid, this could be their child or one of their relatives.

    Nine-year-old Maryam used to be a healthy happy child, but is now too weak to move. Doctors have not been able to discover any illnesses other than acute malnutrition from starvation. The number of children in Gaza like Maryam are increasing daily.

    Abdulaziz Dawas, Maryam’s father is appealing for help. He said:

    We began to notice her weight loss around five or six months ago, especially in the last two months. Although Maryam’s malnutrition is extremely severe, I haven’t been able to find a doctor who can assess her condition because all of her tests are clean. Before the war, Maryam was like a princess and weighed 25kg. She now weighs 9kg, has acute diarrhea and blood in her stools, and is in a critical condition. Her situation is deteriorating daily, in a very serious way. She is dying quickly, and we need to save her life. My message to the whole world is that my daughter needs evacuating, it’s the only solution. Please help us!

    You can donate to Maryam’s Go Fund Me here.

    Profound long-term effects on Palestinian children’s cognitive development

    Childhood malnutrition has mental symptoms as well as physical. It can impair brain development – which can have profound long-term effects. Malnourished children struggle with concentration, memory, and learning. Mental development issues can become irreversible if malnutrition continues through early development.

    Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. But unless aid and medical supplies are allowed to now flow freely across the borders, to all parts of the Gaza Strip, the occupation’s enforced starvation campaign will lead to a generation of Palestinians suffering from cognitive decline, with a destroyed future.

    Parents in Gaza often sacrifice meals so their children can eat. Yassin, who has a two year old son, said:

    When we buy food we eat hardly anything, and keep the rest for our son. We say we have eaten enough during our lives, but he is a child and doesn’t deserve to feel hungry. So we always keep the biggest portion for him. Most days we don’t have anything except bread-two pieces of bread- and duqqa made with lentils. Yousef doesn’t like it, so refuses to eat, so keeps crying and sleeps with hunger. He wakes up in the morning hungry, saying mummy can you give me cake? Can you give me egg? I want apple. We have nothing but duqqa again. In the end he eats a little bit, because he is hungry.

    Yassin said she is unable to buy Yousef multivitamins because the occupation has blocked their entry into the Strip.

    Malnutrition and contaminated water leading to an explosion of infections and diseases

    Good nutrition is also essential for older people and those with chronic illnesses, who have weakened immune systems, such as kidney and cancer patients. But in Gaza, these people are not only hungry, thirsty, and malnourished, but also unable to receive dialysis treatment or chemotherapy, and cannot get essential medicines. Dr Al-Hout said that the condition of these patients is deteriorating by the day, and their death rates are rapidly increasing in Nasser hospital. Only 580 of the approximately 1200 dialysis patients being treated at Nasser Hospital before October 2023 are now still alive.

    Overcrowding, lack of sanitary conditions, and contaminated water, combined with immune deficiency due to malnutrition and starvation, is leading Palestinians – especially children – to face extremely high risks of severe, and sometimes fatal infections and diseases.

    Gaza’s water infrastructure has purposely been targeted by the occupation. That includes desalination plants, pipelines and sewage systems. Effectively, contaminated water has become a critical humanitarian crisis. Water-borne diseases have increased by almost 150%, with diseases such as polio making a comeback after an absence from the Strip of 25 years. Thousands of cases of Hepatitis A are emerging this year, and there is a surge in meningitis cases among children, amid the total health system collapse.

    Severe ‘environmental and public health consequences’

    Malnutrition and severely polluted drinking water is also spreading a rare neurological condition, called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which results in paralysis of the legs, followed by respiratory failure. GBS is treatable, but the destruction of the healthcare system and blockade on medicines means it can now prove fatal. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 30% of GBS patients require Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission, so their only hope in Gaza would be medical treatment abroad.

    Maher Salem, director general of planning, water and sanitation in the Gaza municipality, said much of the population is now suffering from limited or no access to clean water, and this is having a devastating impact. Wells, reservoirs, and pumping stations have all been damaged or destroyed.

    Salem said:

    In Gaza City there are eight main sewage pumping stations but all have been destroyed since the beginning of the ongoing aggression. As a result, the entire wastewater system in Gaza City has been non functional, leading to severe environmental and public health consequences. Across the Strip, 175,000 metres of sewage network, out of 500,000 metres has been destroyed, and only a limited number of the 66 sewage pumping stations remain partially functional, mostly in the Southern areas- but even those are operating under extreme limitations due to fuel shortages, damage and access restrictions.

    Surviving Israel’s famine: Gaza’s struggle for dignity

    Wells are used to extract water from the coastal aquifer, the sole groundwater source in the Gaza Strip, but this groundwater is heavily contaminated by untreated sewage and saltwater, making it unfit for direct human consumption without treatment. This is carried out using small desalination units and brackish water desalination plants. But the occupation’s blockade has led to a severe shortage of electricity and fuel, which complicate the pumping and distribution of water from the wells. Only 14 wells remain undamaged, while 49 are totally destroyed, and 20 severely damaged. Before October 2023, Salem said the total production from wells in summer was 80,000m3 daily but is now only 12,000m3, with 60% lost due to leakage.

    Ibrahim Al Khalili, a freelance journalist, born, raised, and based in Gaza City, said that due to this destruction, the majority of families are now completely dependent on water tankers. He said:

    People wait in long lines with containers, sometimes for hours, and they have been targeted previously, such as in al-Nuseirat refugee camp when the Israeli military targeted the water distribution point where many children were lining up, just to get a gallon of water for their families. They ended up being brutally killed.

    The water is often slightly salty tasting, not ideal for drinking, but people have no other choice. Some families survive on as little as two litres of water per person per day, for everything- drinking, cooking, washing and hygiene, and this lack of water, as well as the contaminated supplies, can really impact people’s health. It’s very horrific and heartbreaking, to witness all this.

    Al Khalili, who told the Canary it is more than ten hours since his last meal, said he will eat in the next two hours:

    I will prepare bread, with nothing – that is my dinner.

    Working for a month to make two days worth of food

    Once looters and gangs have taken over the humanitarian aid, they sell it in the markets for sky high prices. So even people with money in Gaza have been left struggling.

    Al Khalili said:

    When you find flour, it is very expensive, around $25-$30 a kilo, and this is a problem even if you have the money in your bank account. I get paid electronically, but they don’t deal with electronic payments here – they just receive cash. So when we need to withdraw the cash, we lose 52% of our money just to get the cash in hand, or to buy something to eat. The average monthly income per person ranges between $120-$180 USD. That means if someone is lucky enough to find a job, and works all month, he can just secure 4-5kg of flour to feed his kids – which is not sufficient for two days! For me, I work just to survive. The money that comes in goes straight back out.

    Mahmoud Basal, the Palestinian civil defence spokesman in Gaza has, so far, been on hunger strike for 27 consecutive days, and has said on his social media posts:

    This hunger is not pain. It is protest, it is mourning, it is love turned into resistance…My body is withering but it has not collapsed—because within it I carry the cry of two million souls, besieged by famine and hunted by death in every alley…Do not speak of human rights while you watch an entire people being starved deliberately. Do not praise “international justice” while you allow us to die slowly under siege. You may not live in Gaza but you are complicit in its suffering through your silence…To the officials of this world, I say: Save Gaza.

    Airdrops: a dehumanising distraction from real action

    Basal has also spoken out about airdrops. He said aid is not entering Gaza in a humane way, and:

    the world still accepts that we receive scraps through the path of humiliation and blood.

    Airdrops are expensive, inefficient, dangerous, and undignified. They do nothing to address the real problem of aid entry being blocked at the border. However, multiple countries continue with them, including the UK – which is supporting air drops in co-operation with Jordan.

    Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of UNRWA, said on X:

    Airdrops are at least 100 times more costly than trucks. Trucks carry twice as much aid as planes. If there is political will to allow airdrops – which are highly costly, insufficient & inefficient, there should be similar political will to open the road crossings. As the people of Gaza are starving to death, the only way to respond to the famine is to flood Gaza with assistance.

    Israeli occupation forces are now deployed over 88% of the Gaza Strip, with these ‘Red Zones’ out of bounds to Palestinians, so much of the aid airdropped by parachute becomes inaccessible to the starving population. Additionally, airdrops are especially dangerous in one of the most crowded places on Earth. Multiple deaths have resulted from airdrop accidents, as each pallet of food plus a parachute weigh more than 540kg, while ones carrying water bottles weigh more than a tonne.

    Al Shawa, PNGOs director, summed up the situation:

    People are suffocated in a very limited space of land, with the total Palestinian population crowded into just 12 percent of the land. It’s extremely risky to drop the aid over the heads of the people, over the tents. There are now about 47,000 people over a square kilometre of the Gaza Strip, and there is no space for air drops.

    Violations of international law, and the need for accountability

    As the occupying power, Israel has obligations under international law to ensure the unhindered entry of essential supplies but it has, instead, carried out a systematic policy of starvation, weaponising aid and using it as a silent tool of genocide, to target those Palestinians who have managed to survive the bombing and bloodshed.

    Dr Al-Hout said that:

    This is an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, a deliberate systematic killing of two million people in Gaza. What is happening is unlike anything in modern human history-a combination of mass killing and starvation.

    Women, children and the elderly are being exterminated by hunger, and the areas they were instructed to flee to are being targeted and bombed. What we are witnessing is not just a famine, but deliberate starvation, systematically imposed by the occupation forces who are preventing aid from reaching the area. The silence of the international community only emboldens the occupation to continue its crimes.

    Gaza’s destruction is not an accident, but a calculated assault: a campaign waged through hunger, displacement, and the breaking of bodies and spirits, which is a culmination of decades of dehumanisation.

    As life inside Gaza edges ever closer to collapse, and as the world watches – silent, complicit, and distracted – history will remember not only the scale of suffering inflicted but also the choices made by those with the power to stop it.

    The demand for action remains as urgent as ever: the immediate opening of all crossings into Gaza, the safe and unhindered delivery of aid throughout the Strip, a permanent ceasefire, investment in local food production, and accountability for the occupation’s many atrocities towards Palestinian people.

    Please donate to Maryam’s Go Fund Me page here.

    Featured image and additional images via the Canary

    By Charlie Jaay

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Human rights ignored as UK endorses Moroccan control of Western Sahara

    In June, just weeks before home secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group, the UK government reversed longstanding policy by recognising Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that has been under illegal occupation for 50 years.

    UK backs agreement maintaining Morocco’s colonial occupation in West Sahara

    In a joint communique signed by foreign secretary David Lammy and his Moroccan counterpart, Nasser Bourita, the UK said the 2007 autonomy plan – which gives the indigenous Sahrawis self-governance under Moroccan sovereignty – was “the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis” to end the years-long conflict between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the political-military movement representing the Sahrawi people.

    The UK had previously said the status of the territory remains “undetermined” and supported UN-led efforts for a referendum for self-determination for the Sahrawi people.

    Sahrawi Minister of Foreign Affairs and African Affairs Mohamed Yeslem Beisat told the Canary during his visit to the UK last week that:

    We are shocked to see them supporting an illegal, unilateral, baseless proposal [from] Morocco.

    But we know this autonomy plan is a passage brocatoire. It’s an old proposal … They [Morocco] just took it from the fridge, warmed it up in the microwave and tried to resell it again into the world.

    Beisat, who was invited to London by Middle East minister Hamish Falconer, insisted that though he was “disappointed” by the UK’s recognition of the plan, he believes these are just “empty words” and that the UK is still committed to a “mutually acceptable political solution”. Falconer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

    A ‘calculated’ move to secure economic opportunities

    Still, the sudden shift in UK policy is a victory for Morocco, which Beisat says has been “aggressively lobbying” African and European governments to recognize its autonomy plan.

    Since US president Donald Trump first endorsed the plan in 2020, countries including Spain, France, Germany, Kenya and the UK have followed suit, joining over 100 other UN member states that have already done so. Forty countries recognize the Polisario’s state in exile, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) near Tindouf, southwest Algeria, which is also a member of the African Union.

    Riccardo Fabiani, the North Africa director at the International Crisis Group says there is a national interest component as well as a diplomatic calculation to the UK’s decision.

    He told the Canary via email that:

    The UK calculated that by shifting its position in favour of Morocco’s autonomy plan, it could secure economic opportunities in a country that is quickly developing and that is investing considerably in infrastructure, energy etc.

    London’s new position has earned Morocco’s goodwill without alienating the Polisario and its main backer, Algeria. This means that right now the UK is one of the few international actors that still has channels of communication with both sides, unlike France or Spain.

    Fabiani believes the UK is trying to use its new position to push both sides towards a compromise, but that “it’s not going to be easy”.

    Violating the Sahrawis’ right to self-determination

    Pro-Sahrawi activists in the UK have their doubts too. Danielle Smith, the founder of UK-based charity Sandblast which advocates for Sahrawi self-determination, says the autonomy plan serves to “legitimise Morocco’s illegal occupation in Western Sahara”.

    The UN and various international human rights bodies agree that Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara is a violation of the Sahrawi right to self-determination and independence, and that all states have an obligation to assist the people of Western Sahara in their struggle for self-determination.

    Smith said:

    It is hard to have confidence and trust in British diplomacy given its glaring history of providing appeasement to victims of injustice on one hand while carrying on to support groups and governments that perpetuate human rights violations and atrocities [on the other].

    She added that she “doubts the sincerity” of the UK’s respect for international law.

    For the past six weeks, Smith has hosted a group of Sahrawi refugee teachers and students from the Sahrawi refugee camps in southwest Algeria as part of a cultural exchange programme in the UK. She said their plight “continues to be one of the most invisible stories of the day”.

    Promise for a referendum for self-determination: ignored

    After years of conflict between Morocco and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991 promised a referendum for self-determination for the Sahrawi people. But that referendum never happened, and the ceasefire was broken in mid-November 2020, triggering the return to war that Morocco refuses to acknowledge and to which the world pays little attention.

    For decades, Rabat has argued that Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara is the best way to end the 50-year dispute over the former colony. They see the Polisario Front as a threat to their regional influence and security. But in recent years, the narrative has notably shifted focus to one of economic development, trade and investment which, according to former Moroccan diplomat Mohammed Loulichki has:

    played a pivotal role in Morocco’s autonomy campaign.

    Still, the Polisario Front has secured its own victories when it comes to trade in Western Sahara. In 2024, after a 12-year legal battle, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU-Morocco trade and fisheries agreements cannot be applied in Western Sahara because the territory is “separate and distinct” from Morocco.

    Trade in Western Sahara without Sahrawi consent

    The ECJ also explicitly stated that no trade agreement could take place in Western Sahara without obtaining consent from the people of the territory – something foreign governments and businesses have continuously sought to avoid.

    “British businesses [will] score big on football’s biggest stage,” Lammy said in reference to Morocco’s preparations to co-host the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal.

    The two countries have also signed cooperation deals on healthcare, innovation, ports, water infrastructure and procurement, and British investments in Western Sahara are “under discussion”. Last month, Morocco announced plans to build a 500-megawatt hyperscale data centre in Dakhla, a coastal city Western Sahara that would reportedly be powered entirely by renewable energy and would rank among the largest data centers on the African continent.

    Other plans include a $1.2bn megaproject including a trade port, a fishing port and a shipyard, which is due to be completed in 2028.

    Egregious human rights abuses in Western Sahara

    Yet, conveniently missing from the sudden political interest in Western Sahara are the egregious human rights abuses Morocco continues to carry out in the territory on a near-daily basis. Journalists are denied entry to Western Sahara, unless it is on invitation from the Moroccan government to push a pro-government narrative of economic development. In 2020, Moroccan authorities prevented at least nine lawyers, activists, politicians, and journalists from accessing the territory.

    It is well documented that Sahrawis in occupied Western Sahara are routinely and disproportionately subjected to violence, arrests, and detainment for their activism for self-determination. In a recent high profile case, the activist Sultana Khaya was placed under house arrest for more than 500 days in Morocco where she and her sister and mother were subjected to horrific violence, including sexual assault.

    Morocco continues to refuse to allow the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to observe humanitarian conditions in the country for the tenth year running. The UN peacekeeping mission MINURSO, which is tasked with maintaining the ceasefire and carrying out the self-determination referendum, is also one of the only modern UN peacekeeping missions that does not incorporate human rights monitoring into its mandate.

    Economic interests trump human rights, but Sahrawi identity is ‘not for sale’

    As we’ve seen when it comes to the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in Gaza, British economic interests appear to always trump human rights.

    But for the hundreds of thousands of Sahrawis who continue to live in limbo, self-determination remains their sole purpose.

    Speaking at the UN General Assembly in June, Mouhidine Souvi, a Sahrawi petitioner said:

    We are not Moroccan, and we will never be Moroccans. Our identity is not for sale.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Maxine Betteridge-Moes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Gordon Campbell: The lack of spine in New Zealand’s foreign policy on Gaza

    ANALYSIS: By Gordon Campbell

    The word “Gaza” is taking on similar connotations to what the word “Auschwitz” meant to a previous generation. It signifies a deliberate and systematic attempt to erase an entire people from history on the basis of their ethnic identity.

    As a result, Israel is isolating itself as a pariah state on the world stage. This week alone has seen Israel target and kill four Al Jazeera journalists, just as it had executed eight Red Crescent medical staff and seven other first responders back in March, and then dumped their bodies in a mass grave.

    Overall 186 journalists have died at the hands of the IDF since October 7, 2023, and at least 1400 medical staff as of May 2025.

    On Monday night a five-year-old disabled child starved to death. Reportedly, he weighed only three kilograms when he died. Muhammad Zakaria Khudr was the 101st child among the 227 Palestinians now reported to have died from starvation.

    Meanwhile, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters keep on saying that with regard to New Zealand recognising a Palestinian state, it is a matter of “Not if, but when.” Yet why is “ but not now” still their default position?

    At this rate, a country that used to pride itself on its human rights record — New Zealand has never stopped bragging that this is where women won the right to vote, before they did anywhere else — will be among the last countries on earth to recognise Palestine’s right to exist.

    What can we do? Some options:

    1. Boycott all Israeli goods and services;
    2. Engage with the local Palestinian community, and support their businesses, and cultural events;
    3. Donate financial support to Gaza. Here’s a reliable link to directy support pregnant Gaza women and their babies;
    4. Lobby your local MP, and Immigration Minister Erika Stanford — to prioritise the inclusion of hundreds of Gazans in our refugee programme, just as we did in the wake of the civil war in Syria, and earlier, in Sudan;
    5. Write and phone your local MP, and urge them to support economic sanctions against Israel. These sanctions should include a sporting and cultural boycott along the lines we pursued so successfully against apartheid South Africa
    6. Contact your KiwiSaver provider and let it be known that you will change providers if they invest in Israeli firms, or in the US, German and UK firms that supply the IDF with weapons and targeting systems. Contact the NZ Super Fund and urge them to divest along similar lines;
    7. Identify and picket any NZ firms that supply the US/Israeli war machines directly, or indirectly;
    8. Contact your local MP and urge him or her to support Chloe Swarbrick’s private member’s bill that would impose economic sanctions on the state of Israel for its unlawful occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Swarbrick’s Bill is modelled on the existing Russian sanctions framework.If 61 MPs pledged support for Swarbrick’s Bill, it would not have to win a private members ballot before being debated in Parliament. Currently 21 MPs (the Greens and TPM) formally support it. If and when Labour’s 34 MPs come on board, this will still require another six MPs (from across the three coalition parties) to do the right thing. Goading MPs into doing the right thing got Swarbrick into a world of  trouble this week. (Those wacky Greens. They’re such idealists.);
    9. We should all be lobbying our local MPs for a firm commitment that they will back the Swarbrick Bill. Portray it to them as being in the spirit of bi-partisanship, and as them supporting the several UN resolutions on the status of the occupied territories. And if they still baulk ask them flatly: if not, why not?
    10. Email/phone/write to the PM’s office, and ask him to call in the Israeli ambassador and personally express New Zealand’s repugnance at Israel’s inhumane actions in Gaza and on the West Bank. The PM should also be communicating in person New Zealand’s opposition to the recently announced Israeli plans for the annexation of Gaza City, and expansion of the war in Gaza.
    11. Write to your MP, to the PM, and to Foreign Minister Winston Peters urging them to recognise Palestinian statehood right now. Inquire as to what further information they may need before making that decision, and offer to supply it. We need to learn how to share our outrage; and
    12. Learn about the history of this issue, so that you convince friends and family to take similar actions.

    Here’s a bare bones timeline of the main historical events.

    This map showing (in white) the countries that are yet to recognise Palestinian statehood speaks volumes:

    Those holdout nations in white tend to have been the chief enablers of Israel’s founding in 1948, a gesture of atonement driven by European guilt over the Holocaust.

    This “homeland” for the Jews already had residents known to have had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Yet since 1948 the people of Palestine have been made to bear all of the bad consequences of the West’s purging of its collective guilt.

    Conditional justice
    The same indifference to the lives of Palestinians is evident in the belated steps towards supporting the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Even the recognition promised by the UK, Canada, France and Australia next month is decked out with further conditions that the Palestinians are being told they need to meet. No equivalent demands are being made of Israel, despite the atrocities it is committing in Gaza.

    There’s nothing new about this. Historically, all of the concessions have been made by the Palestinians, starting with their original displacement. Some 30 years ago, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) formally recognised Israel’s right to exist. In response, Israel immediately expanded its settlements on Palestinian land, a flagrant breach of the commitments it made in the Oslo Accords, and in the Gaza-Jericho Agreement.

    The West did nothing, said little.  As the New York Times recently pointed out:

    In a 1993 exchange of letters, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s chairman, Yasir Arafat, recognized the “right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and committed the PLO to peaceful negotiations, renouncing terrorism and amending the Palestinian charter to reflect these commitments. In return, Israel would merely recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people — and only “in light of” Mr Arafat’s commitments. Palestinian sovereignty remained remote; Israeli occupation continued apace.

    This double standard persists:

    This fundamental unfairness has informed every diplomatic effort since. The rump Palestinian government built the limited institutions it was permitted under the Oslo Accords, co-operated with Israeli security forces and voiced support for a peace process that had long been undermined by Israel. Led by then-Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority’s statehood campaign in the 2000s was entirely based on playing the game according to rules set by Israel and the Western-dominated international community. Yet recognition remained stalled, the United States blocked Palestine’s full membership in the United Nations — and still, no conditions were placed on the occupying power.

    That’s where we’re still at. Luxon, Peters and David Seymour are demanding more concessions from the Palestinians. They keep strongly denouncing the Hamas October 7 atrocities — which is valid — while weakly urging Israel to abide by the international laws and conventions that Israel repeatedly breaches.

    When a state deploys famine as a strategic weapon, doesn’t it deserve to be condemned, up front and personal?

    Instead, the language that New Zealand uses to address Israel’s crimes  is almost invariably, and selectively, passive. Terrible things are “happening” in Gaza and they must “stop.” Children, mysteriously, are “starving.” This is “intolerable.”

    It is as if there is no human agent, and no state power responsible for these outcomes. Things are just somehow “happening” and they must somehow “cease.” Enough is enough, cries Peters, while carefully choosing not to name names, beyond Hamas.

    Meanwhile, Israel has announced its plans to expand the war, even though 600 Israeli ex-officials (some of them from Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent to the SIS) have publicly said that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.

    As mentioned, Israel is publicly discussing its plans for Gaza’s “voluntary emigration” and for the permanent annexation of the West Bank. Even when urged to do so by Christopher Luxon, it seems that Israel is not actually complying with international law, and is not fulfilling its legal obligations as an occupying power. Has anyone told Luxon about this yet?

    Two state fantasy, one state reality
    At one level, continuing to call for a “two state” solution is absurd, given that the Knesset formally rejected the proposal a year ago. More than once, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly denounced it while also laying Israel’s claim to all of the land west of Jordan, which would include the West Bank and Gaza.

    Evidently, the slogan “ from the river to sea” is only a terrorist slogan when Hamas uses it. Yet the phrase originated as a Likud slogan.Moreover, the West evidently thinks it is quite OK for Netanyahu to publicly call for Israeli hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

    Basic rule of diplomacy: bad is what they do, good is what we do, and we have always been on Team Israel.

    Over the course of the three decades since the Oslo Accords were signed, the West has kept on advocating for a two state solution, while acting as if only one of those states has a right to exist. On what land do Luxon and Peters think that a viable Palestinian state can be built?

    One pre-condition for Palestinian statehood that Luxon cited to RNZ last week required Israel to be “not undermining the territorial integrity that would then undermine the two state solution.” Really? Does Luxon not realise that this is exactly what Israel has been doing for the past 30 years?

    Talking of which . . .  are Luxon and Peters genuinely expecting Israel to retreat to the 1967 borders? That land was agreed at Oslo and mandated by the UN as the territory needed for a viable Palestinian state. Yet on the relatively small area of the West Bank alone, 3.4 million Palestinians currently subsist on disconnected patches of land under occupation amid extreme settler violence, while contending with 614 Israeli checkpoints and other administrative obstacles impeding their free movement.

    Here’s what the land left to the Palestinians looks like today:

    A brief backgrounder on Areas A, B and C and how they operate can be found here.  Obviously, this situation cannot be the template for a viable Palestinian state.

    What is the point?
    You might well ask . . . in the light of the above, what is the point of recognising Palestine as a state? Given the realities on the ground, it can only be a symbolic gesture. The reversion to the 1967 borders (a necessary step towards a Palestinian state) can happen only if the US agreed to push Israel in that direction by withholding funds and weaponry.

    That’s very hard to imagine. The hypocrisy of the Western nations on this issue is breath-taking. The US and Germany continue to be Israel’s main foreign suppliers of weapons and targeting systems. Under Keir Starmer’s leadership as well, the UK sales of military equipment to Israel have sharply increased.

    New export licensing figures show that the UK approved licenses for £127.6 million worth of military equipment to Israel in single issue licenses between October to December 2024. This is a massive increase, with the figure in this three-month period totaling more than 2020-2023 combined.

    Thanks to an explicitly enacted legal exemption, the UK also continues to supply parts for Israel’s F-35 jets.

    UK industry makes 15% of every F-35 in contracts [estimated] to be worth at least £500 million since 2016, and [this] is the most significant part of the UK arms industry [relationship]with Israel . . . at least 79 companies [are] involved in manufacturing components.

    These are the same F-35 war planes that the IDF has used to drop 2000 pound bombs on densely populated residential neighbourhoods in Gaza. Starmer cannot credibly pose as a man of peace.

    So again . . . what exactly is the point of recognising Palestine as a state? No doubt, it would boost Palestinian morale if some major Western powers finally conceded that Palestine has a right to exist. In that narrow sense, recognition would correct a historical injustice.

    There is also optimistic talk that formal Palestinian statehood would isolate the US on the Security Council (Trump would probably wear that as a badge of honour) and would make Israel more accountable under humanitarian law. As if.

    Theoretically, a recognition of statehood would also enable people in New Zealand and elsewhere to apply pressure to their governments to forthrightly condemn and sanction Israel for its crimes against a fellow UN member state. None of this, however, is likely to change the reality on the ground, or prevent the calls for Israel’s “accountability” and for its “compliance with international law” from ringing hollow.

    As the NYT also says:

    After almost two years of severe access restrictions and the dismantling of the UN-led aid system in favour of a militarised food distribution that has left more than 1300 Palestinians dead, [now 1838 dead at these “aid centres”  since late May, as of yesterday] . . . The 15 nations [at a UN meeting in late July that signed a declaration on Gaza] still would not collectively say “Israel is responsible for starvation in Gaza”. If they cannot name the problem, they can hardly hope to resolve it.

    In sum . . . the world may talk the talk of Palestinian statehood being a matter of “not if, but when” and witter on about the “irreversible steps” being taken toward statehood, and finally — somewhere over the rainbow — towards a two state solution.  Faint chance:

    “For those who are starving today, the only irreversible step is death. Until statehood recognition brings action — arms embargoes, sanctions, enforcement of international law — it will remain a largely empty promise that serves primarily to distract from Western complicity in Gaza’s destruction.

    Exactly. Behind the words of concern are the actions of complicity. The people of Gaza do not have time to wait for symbolic actions, or for sanctions to weaken Israel’s appetite for genocide. Consider this option: would New Zealand support an intervention in Gaza by a UN-led international force to save Gaza’s dwindling population, and to ensure that international humanitarian law is respected, however belatedly?

    Would we be willing to commit troops to such a force if asked to do so by the UN Secretary-General? That is what is now needed.

    Footnote One: On Gaza, the Luxon government has a high tolerance for double standards and Catch 22 conditions. We are insisting that the Palestinians must release the remaining hostages unconditionally, lay down their arms and de-militarise the occupied territories. Yet we are applying no similar pre-conditions on Israel to withdraw, de-militarise the same space, release all their Palestinian prisoners, allow the unrestricted distribution of food and medical supplies, and negotiate a sustainable peace.

    Understandably, Hamas has tied the release of the remaining hostages to the Israeli cessation of their onslaught, to unfettered aid distribution, and to a long-term commitment to Palestinian self-rule.  Otherwise, once the Israeli hostages are home, there would be nothing to stop Israel from renewing the genocide.

    We are also demanding that Hamas be excluded from any future governing arrangement in Gaza, but – simultaneously – Peters told the House recently that this governing arrangement must also be “representative.” Catch 22. “Representative” democracy it seems, means voting for the people pre-selected by the West. Again, no matching demands have been made of Israel with respect to its role in the future governance of Gaza, or about its obligation to rebuild what it has criminally destroyed.

    Footnote Two: There is only one rational explanation for why New Zealand is currently holding back from joining the UK, Canada, France and Australia in voting next month to recognise Palestine as a full UN member state. It seems we are cravenly hoping that Australia’s stance will be viewed with such disfavour by Donald Trump that he will punish Canberra by lifting its tariff rate from 10%, thereby erasing the 5% advantage that Australia currently enjoys oven us in the US market.

    At least this tells us what the selling price is for our “independent” foreign policy. We’re prepared to sell it out to the Americans – and sell out the Palestinians in the process – if, by sitting on the fence for now, we can engineer parity for our exports with Australia in US markets. ANZAC mates, forever.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘I believe I can’: Elizabeth Palin runs for Bougainville North women’s seat

    By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

    Elizabeth Tako Palin is one of five women contesting the Bougainville North women’s reserved seat next month.

    It was previously held by Amanda Masono, who has chosen to contest the open Atolls seat, which was once held by her father.

    The autonomous Papua New Guinea region is holding a single-day poll on 4 September to elect a new 46-member House.

    A record 34 women are standing, including 14 in the three seats reserved for women.

    Former teacher Palin ran in 2020 and has wide political experience at the local level.

    She spoke with RNZ Pacific.

    (This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

    Elizabeth Palin: I was a former chair lady in the local level government, community government, and I just resigned to contest the seat. I served in the community government and at the ward assembly system for 10 years. But prior to that I was a teacher by profession,

    Don Wiseman: Being in the local level government. Is that a full time activity, is it for you?

    EP: It is, yes.

    DW: What does it involve?

    EP: It involves chairing the local level government at the community base level, and also taking care of the five wards within the respective community government that I’m heading.

    And, formally, in the first establishment of the first House of Assembly, I was the vice-chair lady. So as one of the ward members in the five wards under the urban council, urban community government. I contested the fourth House and I came second. I came back to be with the community, and then I worked with the people.

    I went contested [a second election] and I became the ward member and also lobbied for the chair position, and I became the chairperson.

    DW: So you want to be in the ABG [Autonomous Bougainville Government]. What is it you want to achieve there?

    EP: Being in the local level government, I have experienced a lot where we do not see the link. We do not really see that link from the top level of leadership down to the local level. We do not really feel it in some sense.

    Therefore, I decided that maybe I can be able to contest and get that leadership, and in experiencing my leadership at the ward level and community government level, I believe that I can be able to take that leadership and build that link from the top down to the ward assembly level, which includes the community government and vice versa, from the community government up to the top.

    This is what I experienced, and that is the main reason why I am contesting the seat. Also, I believe in my leadership because I have been with the local level government, and I believe I can perform at a much higher level as well.

    DW: Yes, well, you will have been campaigning now for weeks, because it’s such a long period of campaigning, isn’t it? How are people reacting to you?

    EP: Oh, I have been receiving positive responses from the people, from the voters, in terms of the way I present my campaign strategy, my platform, especially.

    I have so far received very positive response from the general public and the voters in the region, and from all the locations that I have conducted my campaign.

    DW: Yes, I wouldn’t expect a politician to say anything else going into an election. Independence for Bougainville is, it would seem, very close. How important is it to you that it’s sorted sooner rather than later?

    EP: Being a leader, a woman leader in having gone through my people’s experience in terms of fighting for their rights and for their independence, this coming independence, and what we we have been standing for as our political agenda is very, very crucial to me as with the general population of Bougainville.

    I cannot say no to that. I do understand a lot of work to do in terms of getting us prepared, in terms of demonstrating the indications and so forth, that we are able to get independence and we are independently ready. But based on the fights of our forefathers and our people and having lost the 20,000 lives, I stand for that.

    I believe that such a person like me, a woman with a strong voice at the political scene, in the political scene and level, I can be able to work as a team with the other leaders of Bougainville to get that independence.

    But having said that, it does not really mean that that is it. We are ready. As leaders, on the ground and at the different levels of governance, we need to work, and we have this how many years that have been given within the time frame for us to work in order to show that we’re able to be an independent, sovereign state, and that is what I believe in.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • UK rights watchdog warns against ‘heavy-handed’ policing of Gaza protests

    EHRC calls for clearer guidance for officers to avoid a ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of expression

    The UK’s official human rights watchdog has written to ministers and police expressing concern at a potentially “heavy-handed” approach to protests about Gaza and urging clearer guidance for officers in enforcing the law.

    In the letter to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, and Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said the perception that peaceful protest could attract disproportionate police attention “undermines confidence in our human rights protections”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Palestine Action prosecutions should be suspended, say UK rights groups

    Campaigners tell attorney general that proceeding with trials before judicial review raises legal and moral questions

    Protesters arrested for supporting Palestine Action should not be prosecuted until a legal challenge to a ban on the group has been heard, organisations including Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch have told the attorney general for England and Wales.

    In a letter to Richard Hermer KC, also signed by Friends of the Earth, Global Witness and the Quakers, they say proceeding with charges or trials before the judicial review, which is expected to be heard in November, would raise significant legal and moral questions.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Five key points on how a long-respected US human rights report became a ‘cudgel’ under Trump

    The state departments ‘human rights’ report under Trump differs hugely from those of previous administrations

    In May, Donald Trump took to the stage at a business conference in Saudi Arabia’s capital, promising that the US would no longer chastise other governments over human rights issues or lecture them on “how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.

    With the release this week of the US government’s annual report on human rights worldwide, the president has – in part – followed though on that pledge.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘We need to be involved’: Pasifika candidates running in Auckland local election

    By Grace Tinetali-Fiavaai, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Former Pacific candidates and new faces are putting their names forward for this year’s Auckland local government election in Aotearoa.

    The final confirmed list of candidates is out.

    In the Manukau ward, Councillor Lotu Fuli, one of three current Auckland councillors of Pacific descent, has also served on the local board and is seeking re-election.

    “Currently, we only have three Pasifika councillors at the governing body table — the mayor and 20 councillors. Out of 21, only myself, Councillor Bartley and Councillor Filipaina, who Is half Samoan, sit around that very important decision-making table,” Fuli said.

    She said she feels the weight of responsibility of her role.

    “I know that I’m here in this space to speak up and advocate for them, because with all due respect to the mayor and to our other councillors from other areas, they don’t know what it’s like for a Pasifika person growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand — in Manukau, in Otara, in Papatoetoe, in Magele [Māngere], or Otahuhu or Maungakiekie, Glen Innes.

    “They don’t know because they haven’t lived that experience.

    “They haven’t lived that struggle, and so they can’t really, truly relate to it.”

    One Pasifika mayoral candidate
    Twelve individuals have put their names forward for the mayoralty, including current mayor Wayne Brown. Ted Johnston is the only mayoral candidate with Pasifika links.

    Each Auckland ward has a set number of council seats. For example, in Manukau, there are only two seats, currently held by incumbents Alf Filipaina and Lotu Fuli.

    In the Manurewa-Papakura ward, there are two seats, and in Maungakiekie-Tāmaki there is one, held by Josephine Bartley. For local board nominations, the number of seats varies.

    Those elected make decisions about things like community funding, sports events, water quality, and even dog walking regulations.

    Vi Hausia, one of the youngest Pacific candidates this year, is running for the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board (Papatoetoe subdivision). He said he was born and raised in south Auckland.

    “Growing up I’ve always had the sense of, ‘oh, it is what it is. It’s always been like that’. And then you get a bit older and you realise that actually things isn’t ‘is what it is’.

    “It’s been as a result of people who make decisions in important forums, like local board.”

    Strengthening youth engagement
    Safety and strengthening youth engagement are issues for him.

    “Ensuring that when kids come out of high school there’s a strong pathway for them to get into work or into training, whether that’s a vocational training like builder apprenticeship or university, because that’s the link to ensure that our people, particularly our Pacific people, are engaged within our society, and are able to to find who they are and to be able to contribute back to society.”

    He said Māori and Pasifika youth were overrepresented in the statistics of high school leavers who come out of high school and there’s quite a high number of people who go straight onto welfare.

    “So we’ve got a responsibility on the local board as well as central government, to be able to understand what the issues are, and to ensure that young people are having the opportunity to be able to be the best versions of themselves.”

    Another current Auckland councillor, Josephine Bartley, said it was vital that Pasifika were at the table.

    “It’s important because if you look at the make-up of the city, we have a large percentage of Pasifika, and we need to be active. We need to be involved in the decision-making that affects us, so at a local board level and at a city council, at a governing body level.”

    She said she was hopeful voter registrations would go up.

    “It’s always difficult for people to prioritise voting because they have a lot on their plate.

    “But hopefully people can see the relevance of local government to their daily lives and make sure they’re enrolled to vote and then actually vote.”

    ‘Stop blaming’ Pasifika
    Reflecting on Pacific representation in mayoral races, Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board chairperson Apulu Reece said the 2022 race, where Fa’anana Efeso Collins came second to now-mayor Wayne Brown, could have had a different outcome.

    Apulu said it was time to stop blaming communities for low turnout and instead question the structure.

    “There’s probably some value or truth in the fact that we needed to get more people out voting for Efeso and Māori and Pacific people often too busy to worry about the voting paper that they’ve left on the fridge.

    “But I want to twist that and and ask: why didn’t the white people vote for Efeso? Why is it always put on us Pacific people and say, ‘oh, it’s your fault?’ when, actually, he was one of the best candidates out there.

    “In fact, one of the candidates, the palagi [Pākeha] lady, dropped out so that her supporters could vote for Wayne Brown.

    “So no one talks about the tactics that the palagis (Pākeha) did to not get Efeso in.

    “That’s his legacy is us actually looking at the processes, looking at how voting works and and actually dissecting it, and not always blaming the brown people, but saying, ‘hey, this system was built by Pākeha for Pākeha’.”

    There is a total of 12 mayoral candidates, 80 council ward candidates, 386 local board candidates and 80 licensing trust candidates.

    Voting papers will be posted in early September.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Masked ICE Agents Kidnap Teenager Who Was Walking His Dog

    On August 8, masked immigration agents abducted a Los Angeles high school student while he was walking his dog. The teenager, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero Cruz, had just turned 18 and was about to start his senior year when officers kidnapped him off the street. “He is more than just a student — he is a devoted son, a caring brother, a loyal friend, and a valued member of our community…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Advocates Warn of Mass Arrests of DC’s Unhoused Residents

    Advocates warn that mass arrests of Washington, D.C.’s unhoused residents are expected to occur this evening. Crews have already begun destroying encampments and throwing out people’s belongings. “We believe at 6:30 p.m. federal law enforcement will begin systematically rounding up and arresting unhoused people on the street in D.C.,” Amber W. Harding, the executive director of the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘Stop killing journalists’ in Gaza plea by media alliance advocates

    Pacific Media Watch

    Union members of Australia’s Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) have made a video honouring the 242 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed by the Israeli military since October 2023 — many of them targeted.

    The death toll has been reported by the Gaza Media Office since the latest killing of six media workers last Sunday, four of them from the Qatar-based global television channel Al Jazeera.

    This figure is higher than the 180 deaths recorded by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and other media freedom agencies.

    “While international media remains locked out of Gaza, Palestinian journalists work under fire, starvation and sickness to report the reality on the ground,” says the MEAA.

    “Targeting journalists is a war crime.

    “As colleagues, we remember them.”

    In this video, MEAA members say the names of many Gazan journalists who have been killed by the Israeli military.

    • Music in the MEAA “Stop Killing Journalists” video is composed by Connor D’Netto and performed by Jayson Gillham. The video is edited by Jack Fisher and (A)manda Parkinson for MEAA and was released on YouTube yesterday.


    Stop Killing Journalists              Video: MEAA


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Judi Aldalati is a Syrian human rights defender

    Judi Aldalati is a Syrian journalist, a researcher and human rights defender. She told ISHR how seeing the early days of the Arab Spring led her to pursue the defence of human rights and shared her aspirations for the future of Syria amidst the uncertainty that has followed the collapse of the Assad regime.

    https://ishr.ch/defender-stories/human-rights-defenders-story-judi-aldalati-from-syria

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • The West is in panic as Israel’s plan for ‘full control’ of Gaza heralds a new Nakba

    Netanyahu’s mass ethnic cleansing strategy pulls the rug out from under the West’s cherished pretext for supporting Israeli criminality: the fabled two-state solution.

    ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

    If you thought Western capitals were finally losing patience with Israel’s engineering of a famine in Gaza nearly two years into the genocide, you may be disappointed.

    As ever, events have moved on — even if the extreme hunger and malnourishment of the two million people of Gaza have not abated.

    Western leaders are now expressing “outrage”, as the media call it, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to “take full control” of Gaza and “occupy” it.

    At some point in the future, Israel is apparently ready to hand the enclave over to outside forces unconnected to the Palestinian people.

    The Israeli cabinet agreed last Friday on the first step: a takeover of Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are huddled in the ruins, being starved to death. The city will be encircled, systematically depopulated and destroyed, with survivors presumably herded southwards to a “humanitarian city” — Israel’s new term for a concentration camp — where they will be penned up, awaiting death or expulsion.

    At the weekend, foreign ministers from the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia and other Western nations issued a joint statement decrying the move, warning it would “aggravate the catastrophic humanitarian situation, endanger the lives of the hostages, and further risk the mass displacement of civilians”.

    Germany, Israel’s most fervent backer in Europe and its second-biggest arms supplier, is apparently so dismayed that it has vowed to “suspend” — that is, delay — weapons shipments that have helped Israel to murder and maim hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the past 22 months.

    Netanyahu is not likely to be too perturbed. Doubtless, Washington will step in and pick up any slack for its main client state in the oil-rich Middle East.

    Meanwhile, Netanyahu has once again shifted the West’s all-too-belated focus on the indisputable proof of Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions — evidenced by Gaza’s skeletal children — to an entirely different story.

    Now, the front pages are all about the Israeli prime minister’s strategy in launching another “ground operation”, how much pushback he is getting from his military commanders, what the implications will be for the Israelis still held captive in the enclave, whether the Israeli army is now overstretched, and whether Hamas can ever be “defeated” and the enclave “demilitarised”.

    We are returning once again to logistical analyses of the genocide — analyses whose premises ignore the genocide itself. Might that not be integral to Netanyahu’s strategy?

    Life and death
    It ought to be shocking that Germany has been provoked into stopping its arming of Israel — assuming it follows through — not because of months of images of Gaza’s skin-and-bones children that echo those from Auschwitz, but only because Israel has declared that it wants to “take control” of Gaza.

    It should be noted, of course, that Israel never stopped controlling Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories — in contravention of the fundamentals of international law, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled last year. Israel has had absolute control over the lives and deaths of Gaza’s people every day — bar one — since its occupation of the tiny coastal enclave many decades ago.

    On 7 October 2023, thousands of Palestinian fighters briefly broke out of the besieged prison camp they and their families had endured after Israel momentarily dropped its guard.

    Gaza has long been a prison that the Israeli military illegally controlled by land, sea and air, determining who could enter and leave. It kept Gaza’s economy throttled, and put the enclave’s population “on a diet” that saw rocketing malnourishment among its children long before the current starvation campaign.

    Trapped behind a highly militarised fence since the early 1990s, unable to access their own coastal waters, and with Israeli drones constantly surveilling them and raining down death from the air, the people of Gaza viewed it more as a modernised concentration camp.

    But Germany and the rest of the West were fine supporting all that. They have continued selling Israel arms, providing it with special trading status, and offering diplomatic cover.

    Only as Israel carries through to a logical conclusion its settler-colonial agenda of replacing the native Palestinian people with Jews, is it apparently time for the West to vent its rhetorical “outrage”.

    Two-state trickery
    Why the pushback now? In part, it is because Netanyahu is pulling the rug out from under their cherished, decades-long pretext for supporting Israel’s ever-greater criminality: the fabled two-state solution.

    Israel conspired in that trickery with the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s.

    The goal was never the realisation of a two-state solution. Rather, Oslo created a “diplomatic horizon” for “final status issues” — which, like the physical horizon, always remained equally distant, however much ostensible movement there was on the ground.

    Lisa Nandy, Britain’s Culture Secretary, peddled precisely this same deceit last week as she extolled the virtues of the two-state solution. She told Sky News: “Our message to the Palestinian people is very, very clear: There is hope on the horizon.”

    Every Palestinian understood her real message, which could be paraphrased as: “We’ve lied to you about a Palestinian state for decades, and we’ve allowed a genocide to unfold before the world’s eyes for the past two years. But hey, trust us this time. We’re on your side.”

    In truth, the promise of Palestinian statehood was always treated by the West as little more than a threat — and one directed at Palestinian leaders. Palestinian officials must be more obedient, quieter. They had to first prove their willingness to police Israel’s occupation on Israel’s behalf by repressing their own people.

    Hamas, of course, failed that test in Gaza. But Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, bent over backwards to reassure his examiners, casting as “sacred” his lightly armed security forces’ so-called “cooperation” with Israel. In reality, they are there to do its dirty work.

    Nonetheless, despite the PA’s endless good behaviour, Israel has continued to expel ordinary Palestinians from their land, then steal that land — which was supposed to form the basis of a Palestinian state — and hand it over to extremist Jewish settlers backed by the Israeli army.

    Former US President Barack Obama briefly and feebly tried to halt what the West misleadingly calls Jewish “settlement expansion” — in reality, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — but rolled over at the first sign of intransigence from Netanyahu.

    Israel has stepped up the process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank even more aggressively over the past two years, while global attention has been on Gaza — with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz warning this week that settlers have been given “free rein”.

    A small window into the impunity granted to settlers as they wage their campaign of violence to depopulate Palestinian communities was highlighted at the weekend, when B’Tselem released footage of a Palestinian activist, Awdah Hathaleen, inadvertently filming his own killing.

    Extremist settler Yinon Levi was released on grounds of self-defence, even though the video shows him singling out Hathaleen from afar, taking aim and shooting.

    Alibi gone
    It is noticeable that, having stopped making reference to Palestinian statehood for many years, Western leaders have revived their interest only now — as Israel is making a two-state solution unrealisable.

    That was graphically illustrated by footage broadcast this month by ITV. Shot from an aid plane, it showed the wholesale destruction of Gaza — its homes, schools, hospitals, universities, bakeries, shops, mosques and churches gone.


    Apocalyptic scenes in Gaza               Video: ITV News

    Gaza is in ruins. Its reconstruction will take decades. Occupied East Jerusalem and its holy sites were long ago seized and Judaised by Israel, with Western assent.

    Suddenly, Western capitals are noticing that the last remnants of the proposed Palestinian state are about to be swallowed whole by Israel, too. Germany recently warned Israel that it must not take “any further steps toward annexing the West Bank”.

    US President Donald Trump is on his own path. But this is the moment when other major Western powers — led by France, Britain and Canada — have started threatening to recognise a Palestinian state, even as the possibility of such a state has been obliterated by Israel.

    Australia announced it would join them this week after its foreign minister, a few days earlier, said the quiet part out loud, warning: “There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise if the international community don’t move to create that pathway to a two-state solution.”

    That is something they dare not countenance, because with it goes their alibi for supporting all these years the apartheid state of Israel, now deep into the final stages of a genocide in Gaza.

    That was why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer desperately switched tack recently. Instead of dangling recognition of Palestinian statehood as a carrot encouraging Palestinians to be more obedient — British policy for decades — he wielded it as a threat, and a largely hollow one, against Israel.

    He would recognise a Palestinian state if Israel refused to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and proceeded with the West Bank’s annexation. In other words, Starmer backed recognising a state of Palestine – after Israel has gone ahead with its complete erasure.

    Extracting concessions
    Still, France and Britain’s recognition threat is not simply too late. It serves two other purposes.

    Firstly, it provides a new alibi for inaction. There are plenty of far more effective ways for the West to halt Israel’s genocide. Western capitals could embargo arms sales, stop intelligence sharing, impose economic sanctions, sever ties with Israeli institutions, expel Israeli ambassadors, and downgrade diplomatic relations. They are choosing to do none of those things.

    And secondly, recognition is designed to extract from the Palestinians “concessions” that will make them even more vulnerable to Israeli violence.

    According to France’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot: “Recognising a State of Palestine today means standing with the Palestinians who have chosen non-violence, who have renounced terrorism, and are prepared to recognise Israel.”

    In other words, in the West’s view, the “good Palestinians” are those who recognise and lay down before the state committing genocide against them.

    Western leaders have long envisioned a Palestinian state only on condition that it is demilitarised. Recognition this time is premised on Hamas agreeing to disarm and its departure from Gaza, leaving Abbas to take on the enclave and presumably continue the “sacred” mission of “cooperating” with a genocidal Israeli army.

    As part of the price for recognition, all 22 members of the Arab League publicly condemned Hamas and demanded its removal from Gaza.

    Boot on Gaza’s neck
    How does all of this fit with Netanyahu’s “ground offensive”? Israel isn’t “taking over” Gaza, as he claims. Its boot has been on the enclave’s neck for decades.

    While Western capitals contemplate a two-state solution, Israel is preparing a final mass ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

    Starmer’s government, for one, knew this was coming. Flight data shows that the UK has been constantly operating surveillance missions over Gaza on Israel’s behalf from the Royal Air Force base Akrotiri on Cyprus. Downing Street has been following the enclave’s erasure step by step.

    Netanyahu’s plan is to encircle, besiege and bomb the last remaining populated areas in northern and central Gaza, and drive Palestinians towards a giant holding pen — misnamed a “humanitarian city” — alongside the enclave’s short border with Egypt. Israel will then probably employ the same contractors it has been using elsewhere in Gaza to go street to street to bulldoze or blow up any surviving buildings.

    The next stage, given the trajectory of the last two years, is not difficult to predict. Locked up in their dystopian “humanitarian city”, the people of Gaza will continue to be starved and bombed whenever Israel claims it has identified a Hamas fighter in their midst, until Egypt or other Arab states can be persuaded to take them in, as a further “humanitarian” gesture.

    Then, the only matter to be settled will be what happens to the real estate: build some version of Trump’s gleaming “Riviera” scheme, or construct another tawdry patchwork of Jewish settlements of the kind envisioned by Netanyahu’s openly fascist allies, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.

    There is a well-established template to be drawn on, one that was used in 1948 during Israel’s violent creation. Palestinians were driven from their cities and villages, in what was then called Palestine, across the borders into neighbouring states. The new state of Israel, backed by Western powers, then set about methodically destroying every home in those hundreds of villages.

    Over subsequent years, they were landscaped either with forests or exclusive Jewish communities, often engaged in farming, to make Palestinian return impossible and stifle any memory of Israel’s crimes. Generations of Western politicians, intellectuals and cultural figures have celebrated all of this.

    Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Austrian President Heinz Fischer are among those who went to Israel in their youth to work on these farming communities. Most came back as emissaries for a Jewish state built on the ruins of a Palestinian homeland.

    An emptied Gaza can be similarly re-landscaped. But it is much harder to imagine that this time the world will forget or forgive the crimes committed by Israel — or those who enabled them.

    Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published Middle East Eye and republished from the author’s blog with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘Full sovereignty and independence’: FLNKS rejects France’s Bougival project

    By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk

    New Caledonia’s pro-independence front, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), has formally confirmed its “block rejection” of the French-sponsored Bougival project, signed last month.

    The pact has been presented as an agreement between all parties to serve as a guide for the French Pacific territory’s political future.

    This follows the FLNKS’s extraordinary congress held at the weekend in Mont-Dore, near Nouméa.

    Statements made yesterday confirmed the pro-independence umbrella’s unanimous rejection of the document.

    At the weekend congress, FLNKS president Christian Téin (speaking via telephone from mainland France), had called on FLNKS to “clearly and unequivocally” reject the Bougival document.

    He said the document demonstrated “the administrating power’s [France] contempt towards our struggle for recognition as the colonised people”.

    However, he called on the FLNKS to “remain open to dialogue”, but only focusing on ways to obtain “full sovereignty” after bilateral talks only with the French State, and no longer with the opposing local political parties (who want New Caledonia to remain a part of France).

    He mentioned deadlines such as 24 September 2025 and eventually before the end of President Macron’s mandate in April 2027, when French presidential elections are scheduled to take place.

    Téin was also part of the August 13 media conference, joining via videoconference, to confirm the FLNKS resolutions made at the weekend.

    Apart from reiterating its calendar of events, the FLNKS, in its final document, endorsed the “total and unambiguous rejection” of the French-sponsored document because it was “incompatible” with the right to self-determination and bore a “logic of recolonisation” on the part of France.

    The document, labelled “motion of general policy”, also demands that as a result of the rejection of the Bougival document, and since the previous 1998 Nouméa Accord remains in force, provincial elections previously scheduled for no later than November 2025 should now be maintained.

    Under the Bougival format, the provincial elections were to be postponed once again to mid-2026.

    “This will be a good opportunity to verify the legitimacy of those people who want to discuss the future of the country,” FLNKS member Sylvain Pabouty (head of Dynamique Unitaire Sud-DUS) told reporters.

    Signatures on the last page of New Caledonia's new agreement
    Signatures on the last page of the now rejected Bougival project for New Caledonia’s political future. Image: Philippe Dunoyer/RNZ

    Five FLNKS negotiators demoted
    As for the five negotiators who initially put their signatures on the document on behalf of FLNKS (including chief negotiator and Union Calédonienne chair Emmanuel Tjibaou), they have been de-missioned and their mandate withdrawn.

    “Let this be clear to everyone. This is a block rejection of all that is related to the Bougival project,” FLNKS political bureau member and leader of the Labour party Marie-Pierre Goyetche told local reporters.

    “Bougival is behind us, end of the story. The fundamental aim is for our country to access full sovereignty and independence through a decolonisation process within the framework of international law, including the right of the peoples for self-determination.”

    She said that the FLNKS would refuse to engage in any aspect of the Bougival document.

    Part of this further Bougival engagement is a “drafting committee” suggested by French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls aimed at coordinating all documents (including necessary bills, legal and constitutional texts) related to the general agreement signed in July.

    Anticipating the FLNKS decision, Minister Valls has already announced he will travel to New Caledonia next week to pursue talks and further “clarify” the spirit of the negotiations that led to the signing.

    He said he would not give up and that a failure to go along with the agreed document would be “everyone’s failure”.

    The Bougival document envisages a path to more autonomy for New Caledonia, including transferring more powers (such as foreign affairs) from France.

    It also proposes to augment its status by creating a “state” of New Caledonia and creating dual French/New Caledonia citizenship.

    Still want to talk, but with France only
    The FLNKS stressed it still wanted to talk to Valls, albeit on their own terms, especially when Valls visits New Caledonia next week.

    However, according to the FLNKS motion, this would mean only on one-to-one format (no longer inclusively with the local pro-France parties), with United Nations “technical assistance” and “under the supervision” of the FLNKS president.

    The only discussion subjects would then be related to a path to “full sovereignty” and further talks would only take place in New Caledonia.

    As for the timeline, the FLNKS motion states that a “Kanaky Agreement” should be signed before September 24, which would open a transitional period to full sovereignty not later than April 2027, in other words “before [French] presidential elections”.

    Goyetche also stressed that the FLNKS motion was warning France against “any new attempt to force its way”, as was the case in the days preceding 13 May 2024.

    This is when a vote in Parliament to amend the French constitution and change the rules of eligibility for voters at New Caledonia’s local provincial elections triggered deadly and destructive riots that killed 14 people and caused damage worth more than 2 billion euros (NZ$3.8 billion) due to arson and looting.

    “It seems as if the French government wants to go through the same hardships again”, Téin was heard saying through his telephone call at the Wednesday conference.

    “Don’t make the same mistake again,” Pabouty warned Valls.

    In his message posted on social networks on Sunday (August 10), the French minister had blamed those who “refuse the agreement” and who “choose confrontation and let the situation rot”.

    Reactivate the mobilisation
    At the same media conference yesterday, FLNKS officials also called on “all of pro-independence forces to do all in their power to peacefully stop the [French] state’s agenda as agreed in Bougival”.

    The FLNKS text, as released yesterday, also “reaffirms that FLNKS remains the only legitimate representative of the Kanak people, to carry its inalienable right to self-determination”.

    FLNKS recent changes
    Téin is the leader of the CCAT (field action coordinating cell), a group set up by Union Calédonienne late in 2023 to protest against the proposed French constitutional amendment to alter voters’ rules of eligibility at local elections.

    The protests mainly stemmed from the perception that if the new rules were to come into force, the indigenous Kanaks would find themselves a minority in their own country.

    Téin was arrested in June 2024 and was charged for a number of crime-related offences, as well as his alleged involvement in the May 2024 riots.

    He was released from jail mid-June 2025 pending his trial and under the condition that he does not return to New Caledonia for the time being.

    However, from his prison cell in Mulhouse (northeastern France), Téin was elected president of the FLNKS in absentia in late August 2024.

    At the same time, CCAT was admitted as one of the new components of FLNKS, just like a number of other organisations such as the trade union USTKE, the Labour party, and other smaller pro-independence movement groups.

    Some groups have joined, others have left
    Also late August 2024, in a de facto split, the two main moderate pillars of FLNKS — UPM and PALIKA — distanced themselves from the pro-independence UC-dominated platform.

    They asked their supporters to stay away from the riot-related violence, which destroyed hundreds of local businesses and cost thousands of jobs.

    UPM and PALIKA did not take part in the latest FLNKS meeting at the weekend.

    The two moderate pro-independence parties are part of the political groups who also signed the Bougival document and pledged to uphold it, as it is formulated, and keep the “Bougival spirit” in further talks.

    The other groups, apart from UPM and PALIKA, are pro-France (Les Loyalistes, Rassemblement-LR, Calédonie Ensemble, and the Wallisian-based Eveil Océanien.

    The FLNKS, even though five of their negotiators had also signed the document, has since denounced them and said their representatives had “no mandate” to do sign up.

    Reaction from two main pro-France parties
    Pro-France parties had carefully chosen not to comment on the latest FLNKS moves until they were made public. However, the formal rejection was met by a joint communiqué from Les Loyalistes and Rassemblement-LR.

    In a long-winded text, the two outspoken pro-France parties “deplored” what they termed “yet another betrayal”.

    They confirmed they would meet Valls along Bougival lines when he visits next week and are now calling on a “bipartisan” committee of those supporting the Bougival text, including parties from all sides, as well as members of the civil society and “experts”.

    They maintain that the Bougival document is “the only viable way to pull New Caledonia out of the critical situation in which it finds itself” and the “political balances” it contains “cannot be put into question”.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • John Hobbs: New Zealand’s shameful stance on Israel

    ANALYSIS: By John Hobbs

    Aotearoa New Zealand once earned praise for its “principled” and “independent” foreign policy. Think nuclear-free Pacific, for example.

    Yet that reputation doesn’t hold true when it comes to Gaza and the Palestinian desire and right to self-determination.

    Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, states must take positive steps to prevent genocide. The New Zealand government appears to be failing in this obligation.

    Researcher John Hobbs
    Researcher John Hobbs . . . “So far, our ministers have chosen carefully crafted diplomatic language buried under joint country statements to influence the situation in Gaza.” Image: John Hobbs

    So far, our ministers have chosen carefully crafted diplomatic language buried under joint country statements to influence the situation in Gaza, while at the same time protecting relationships with allies, particularly the US.

    An example of these was a statement issued last month, in which New Zealand joined a group of 28 “concerned” countries to express horror at the “suffering of civilians in Gaza”, which, it says, “has reached new depths”. The statement calls for the lifting of restrictions on the “flow of aid” and demands “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire.”

    Just to be clear, the “flow of aid” is the life-saving food and water that’s needed to prevent the mass starvation of Palestinians as famine driven by Israel deepens.

    Demands for a ceasefire have been made on numerous occasions in the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council, to no effect.

    Failure to sanction Israel
    Yet countries like New Zealand fail to sanction Israel for its non-compliance. Indeed, they do worse. These same countries continue to trade with Israel, and a number of them continue to provide weapons and arms.

    According to trade data, New Zealand in 2023 imported goods and services of US$191 million from Israel and exported US$16.4 million the other way.

    Most recently, New Zealand joined 14 other countries to “express the willingness or the positive consideration of our countries to recognise the State of Palestine, as an essential step towards the two-State solution.”

    The statement is heavily caveated by saying that “positive consideration” is one option — so it’s not clear if all, or indeed any, of the countries will end up recognising Palestinian statehood.

    By contrast, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has issued a separate statement, saying the UK would recognise the state of Palestine in September if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire.

    Starmer’s concern for the starvation of civilians in Gaza hasn’t stopped the UK from sending military arms to Israel. But this is at least a clearer stance than New Zealand has been able to muster.

    More than 147 UN member states out of 193 formally recognise Palestinian statehood now.

    Level of solidarity
    And while recognition of statehood is largely symbolic, it does signal a level of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Inexplicably, New Zealand has been unwilling to take that step, while calling it a future option under “two-state” diplomacy.

    New Zealand has trundled out its support of the two-state solution since at least 1993, reinforced by its co-sponsorship, in 2015-16, of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion.

    That resolution declared settlements in occupied territories illegal under international law and urged member states to distinguish in its dealings between Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.

    Since then, Israel has continued to transfer its citizens to the West Bank and Gaza. More than 750,000 Israeli settlers are now living illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — areas where a future Palestinian state would be located.

    Meanwhile, New Zealand has failed to take any meaningful action — sanctions or suspension of trade, for example — to implement the requirements of the Security Council resolution. That the government consistently frames its response as supporting a two-state solution beggars belief in light of such inaction.

    New Zealand’s refusal to sanction Israel is nothing but shameful.

    When foreign affairs minister Winston Peters expressed shock about the “intolerable situation” in Gaza, RNZ asked him whether New Zealand would entertain placing sanctions on Israel. He responded by saying that we are a “long, long way off doing that.”

    The genocide in Gaza is happening with the support of countries like New Zealand, through inaction and failure to implement sanctions.

    And statements about recognising statehood provide the appearance of supporting an end to the genocide, but change nothing in reality.

    John Hobbs has been a career public servant, working in a number of government departments (most recently the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet). He also worked for a number of ministers on secondment from government agencies. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies, Otago University. This article was first published by E-Tangata and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Peru enacts amnesty for military and police accused of human rights abuses

    Families of victims and advocacy groups condemn law that covers internal armed conflict from 1980 to 2000

    Human rights groups and families of victims of Peru’s two-decade internal armed conflict have expressed outrage after the country’s government granted a blanket amnesty for all military and police officers accused of human rights crimes from 1980 to 2000.

    The Peruvian president, Dina Boluarte, signed the amnesty – which was approved by the country’s congress last month – into law on Wednesday, to the applause of military top brass and ministers at Lima’s government palace.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.