The Trump administration announced Monday it was processing Kilmar Abrego Garcia for expulsion to Uganda, threatening to banish him to the United States’ growing network of deportee dumping grounds for the second time.
Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, was erroneously deported to his home country in March and held in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, becoming the face of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation regime. After the Trump administration spent months claiming falsely that Abrego Garcia could not be recovered from El Salvador’s custody, he was returned to the U.S. in June and jailed on federal human smuggling charges. A judge ruled that he should be released from detention ahead of a trial set for January.
Abrego Garcia was freed from pretrial detention last Friday. His attorneys were sent a court-required notice of his potential deportation to Uganda on Saturday. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X Monday morning that ICE had arrested Abrego Garcia, and DHS said in a statement that he was “being processed for removal to Uganda.”
DHS did not reply to The Intercept’s request for additional information prior to publication.
The United States is pursuing deals with around a third of the world’s nations to expel immigrants to places where they do not hold citizenship. Once exiled, these third-country nationals are sometimes detained, imprisoned, or in danger of being sent back to their countries of origin — which they may have fled to escape violence, torture, or political persecution.
The nations that the Trump administration is collaborating with to accept these expelled immigrants are some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet.
The Trump administration has expelled more than 8,100 people in this manner since January 20, and the U.S. has made arrangements to send people to at least 14 nations, so far, across the globe. Of them, 13 have previously been cited by the State Department for significant human rights abuses.
The State Department recently sanitized its annual human rights reports, whitewashing the records of some of the world’s most notorious nations. Even this year’s stripped-down report paints Uganda as a pariah state. “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; [and] arbitrary arrest or detention,” among many other abuses, according to the new report issued this month.
Uganda is a relatively new addition to the Trump administration’s global gulag for expelled immigrants: The country reached an agreement with the U.S. to accept some deportees last week. In total, the Trump administration has solicited 64 nations to participate. Fifty-eight of them — roughly 91 percent — were rebuked for human rights violations in the State Department’s past human rights reports.
The Trump administration has sought, or struck deals with, or deported third-country nationals to Angola, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Libya, Kosovo, Malawi, Mauritania, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Palau, Panama, Peru, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Togo, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Zambia, and Zimbabwe; these 58 were previously taken to task by the State Department for significant human rights abuses. Tuvalu and Santa Lucia were also cited in the report for having repressive laws on paper but were not found to enforce them in practice. Only four of the 64 total nations solicited by the Trump administration— Antigua and Barbuda, Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, and Saint Kitts and Nevis — received a clean bill of human rights health from the State Department in the past.
To justify Abrego Garcia’s second attempted expulsion, the Department of Homeland Security claims he is a member of MS-13, a gang that’s known for its prominence in El Salvador but originated in Los Angeles. His family denies the government’s allegations.
“President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer,” Noem said.
The White House did not reply to a request for comment.
If it were China or Russia, the imposition of sanctions and threats of harm to prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Court would be front page news in Australia- and in New Zealand.
The Australian’s headline writers and columnists, for example, would be apoplectic. Prime Minister Albanese, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland and Foreign Minister Penny Wong would issue the strongest possible warnings to those countries about consequences.
But, of course, that’s not happening because instead it is the US that is seeking to put the lives and well-being of the ICC’s staff in danger, the reasons the ICC has rightly issued arrest warrants against undoubted war criminals and genocide enablers such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, purely a slavish appendage of the worst US president on record, Donald Trump, announced sanctions on two judges and two prosecutors at the ICC.
Rubio issued a statement calling the ICC “a national security threat that has been an instrument for lawfare” against the US and Israel. A statement that, no doubt, war criminals around the world will be applauding.
These are not the first attacks on the ICC.
In February this year, Trump issued an order that said the US “will impose tangible and significant consequences on those responsible for the ICC’s transgressions, some of which may include the blocking of property and assets, as well as the suspension of entry into the US of ICC officials, employees, and agents, as well as their immediate family members, as their entry into our nation would be detrimental to the interests of the US”.
The ICC was established in 2002 to administer the Rome Statute, the international law that governs war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and other crimes.
Leading atrocity nations
Australia is a signatory, but the US and Israel have not signed up in the case of the former, and failed to ratify in the case of the latter, because they are, of course, leading nations when it comes to committing atrocities overseas and — in the case of Israel — within its own borders, through what many scholars say is a policy of apartheid inflicted on Arab Israelis.
So, despite the relatively muted interest in Australia today at the latest outrage against the international order by the corrupt thugs in the Trump Administration, what should the Albanese government do?
Trump’s shielding of Netanyahu and his advisers from criminal proceedings through sanctions and threats to members of the court is akin to both aiding and abetting crimes under the Rome Statute and clearly threatening judges, prosecutors and court officials.
This means Australia should make it very clear, in very public terms, that this nation will not stand for conduct by a so-called ally, which is clearly running a protection racket.
Australia has long joined with the US and other allies in imposing sanctions on regimes around the world.
When it comes to Washington, those days are over.
Sarah Dehm of UTS and Jessica Whyte of the University of New South Wales, writing in The Conversation in December last year, referenced Trump and Rubio’s thuggery towards the ICC among other sanctions outrages, and observed correctly that “Australian sanctions law and decision-making be reoriented towards recognising core principles of international law, including the right of all people to self-determination”.
A ‘trigger mechanism’
Dehm and Whyte argued this “could be done through ‘a trigger mechanism’ that automatically implements sanctions in accordance with decisions of the International Court of Justice concerning serious violations and abuses of human rights”.
What the Albanese government could do immediately is make it abundantly clear that any person subject to an ICC arrest warrant would be detained if they set foot in Australia. This would obviously include Netanyahu and Gallant.
And further, that Australia stands to contribute to protection for any ICC personnel.
Not only that, but given the Rome Statute is incorporated into domestic law in Australia via the Commonwealth Criminal Code, a warning should be given by Attorney-General Rowland that any person suspected of breaches of the Rome Statute could be prosecuted under Australian law if they visit this country.
What Australia could also do is make it mandatory, rather than discretionary, for the attorney-general to issue an arrest warrant if Netanyahu and others subject to ICC warrants came to this country.
As Oxford international law scholar, Australian Dane Luo, has observed, while Foreign Minister Wong has said in relation to the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants that “Australia will act consistently with our obligations under international law and our approach will be informed by international law, not by politics”, this should not be taken as an indication that Rowland would have them arrested.
The Trump administration must be told clearly Australia will not harbour international criminals. And while we are at it, tell Washington we are imposing economic, cultural, educational and other sanctions on Israel.
Greg Barns SC is a former national president of the Australian Lawyers Alliance. This article was first published byPearls and Irritations : John Menadue’s public poiicy journal.
Washington, D.C.’s large immigrant population is facing a reign of terror: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have flooded neighborhoods with large Latino populations, imposing checkpoints and hanging a threat over families’ heads as kids and parents prepare to go back to school next week.
Instead of worrying about having the right notebooks for the school year, many families are now afraid of getting detained by ICE on their way to school drop-off and pickup, three school staff members and local organizers told The Intercept. Teachers claim that the D.C. school system has been unhelpful, treating the situation as business as usual and even discouraging organizers from providing guidance to families on school grounds.
“Most parents’ biggest concern is that something will happen to them on the way to school in front of their children,” said Hillary, an elementary school teacher in the city who asked to be identified by her first name because she was concerned her activism might get her school targeted by ICE, “or it’s going to happen before they’ve been able to pick up their children from school, and there will be no one to come get their kids.”
The climate of fear is fueled by multiple levels of intensified federal policing. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to deploy the National Guard to the District of Columbia. The Trump administration subsequently federalized the local police force and ordered further co-operation between them and ICE officials. And upon entering office in January, Trump revoked the sensitive zones memo that once prevented ICE from operating within schools, hospitals, and churches.
In May, Hillary and a group of other teachers, parents, and community volunteers formed a rapid response team to counter increased ICE and homeland security presence in D.C. They alerted families of suspected immigration enforcement presence and offered services like walking children to their parents’ cars. They’re anticipating they’ll need to increase their efforts as school starts in the coming week.
“[We’re] trying to get walking groups. So if parents are maybe uncomfortable walking students to school by themselves or picking students up by themselves, we might have school staff, volunteers in the neighborhood, parents in the school who are providing a safe passage,” Hillary said, adding that she knows several other schools are pursuing similar efforts.
Amy Fischer, an organizer with the D.C. group Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, said she’s been working alongside volunteers like Hillary to protect immigrant families as they head back to school next week. She said undocumented parents weren’t the only immigrants who needed community protection.
“So many of the people are asylum-seekers who have pending asylum applications, they have a work permit, and under the law, should not be detained because they have a pending asylum claim,” Fischer said. “But many, many of those people are being picked up.”
Fischer said that this is all uncharted territory for D.C. residents. “We previously never had checkpoints in D.C., and the previous types of enforcement that we had were much more targeted, so they would be going after a specific individual, not just sort of random pickups on the street,” she said.
Despite the fear, Fischer said that residents have been largely stepping up to help find solutions for families, whether that’s offering to give students rides or walking them to school.
But even with added support, some families are still scared to return to school next week.
“I talked to a parent today who has been hiding in their apartment since there was a raid next to their building,” said an elementary school teacher who has been assisting with the emergency carpools. “They’ve not left their house since over a week ago. So they weren’t planning on sending their kids.”
The teacher, who requested anonymity because they were concerned about retaliation from the school district and ICE against their school, said they offered to arrange for someone else to take their child to and from school, which the parent is considering.
“A fear of being detained is kind of consistent across the board,” the teacher said. Some parents have even suggested that schools should offer remote learning, despite the evidence that it can bring worsening educational and mental health outcomes for children.
Both teachers who spoke to The Intercept said the District of Columbia Public Schools system, known as DCPS, has been slow to provide schools and teachers with guidance on how to protect their classrooms in the event of ICE activity and actively discouraged school staff from sharing information with families about their rights. “They’ve just been sitting on their hands,” said the elementary school teacher.
According to Hillary, the district is “almost acting like nothing has really changed, and that we do not have families who are in an increased amount of danger right now.”
In a statement to The Intercept, a DCPS spokesperson said, “Our leaders, educators, and staff care deeply about the safety of our students, and DCPS will continue to share safety guidance and reminders with students as they commute to and from their school campuses next week and beyond.”
Hillary added that the school district discouraged her and other teachers from providing families with information about their legal rights on school grounds. And the other elementary school teacher said that DCPS told principals “not to speak up” on the issue.
“We were doing a lot of that in May. Unfortunately, the district kind of let it be known that they were not super supportive of us doing that on school grounds,” she said. “It has had to kind of be in quieter ways that we’re getting that information out to parents, and it’s having to come a lot more through not official channels.”
The DCPS spokesperson did not comment on whether staff had been discouraged from organizing, but said the district “has not discouraged parents or caregivers from hosting information sessions or organizing carpools.”
“DCPS cooperates with law enforcement officers bearing lawful court orders,” the spokesperson said. “Our principals have been advised to alert the district’s legal team for immediate assistance and support.”
Hillary said she worried about the impact on children whose families ultimately felt they couldn’t risk sending their kids to school.
“We saw from Covid, even a couple weeks’ absence can have a really big effect on kids’ learning and on their mental health,” she said. “You’re not going to get a chance to build community with your classmates. And then we also know school is a place where a lot of kids get fed.”
She said she’s been encouraged by the outpouring of community support, but she worries about keeping up the momentum if the ICE presence remains as the year drags on.
“Right now people are really activated,” Hillary said, “but how long are we going to be able to keep that going?”
West Papuan journalist Victor Mambor has vowed not to be silenced despite years of threats, harassment and even a bomb attack on his home.
The 51-year-old founder and editor-in-chief of Jubi, West Papua’s leading media outlet, was in Fiji this week, where he spoke exclusively to The Fiji Times about his fight to expose human rights abuses.
“Despite them bombing my home and office with molotov bombs, I am still doing journalism today because my people are hurting — and I won’t stop,” Mambor said.
A newly established “drafting committee” held its inaugural meeting in Nouméa this week, aiming to translate the Bougival agreement — signed by New Caledonian political parties in Paris last month — into a legal and constitutional form.
However, the first sitting of the committee on Thursday took place without one of the main pro-independence parties, the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), which chose to stay out of the talks.
Visiting French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls, who was in New Caledonia until the weekend, met a delegation of the FLNKS on Wednesday for more than two hours to try and convince them to participate.
The FLNKS earlier announced a “block rejection” of the deal signed in Bougival because it regarded the text as “incompatible” with the party’s objectives and a “lure” in terms of self-determination and full sovereignty.
The deal outlines a roadmap for New Caledonia’s political future.
It is a compromise blueprint signed by New Caledonia’s parties from across the political spectrum and provides a vision for a “State” of New Caledonia, a dual French-New Caledonian citizenship, as well as a short-term transfer of such powers as foreign affairs from France to New Caledonia.
Even though FLNKS delegates initially signed the document in Bougival on July 12, their party later denounced the agreement and said its negotiators had no mandate to do so.
On Wednesday, as part of a round-up of talks with most political parties represented at the New Caledonian Congress, Valls held a separate meeting with a new delegation from FLNKS officials in Nouméa, in a last-ditch bid to convince them to take part in the “drafting committee” session.
The draft document for a “State of New Caledonia”. Image: Haut-commissariat de la République en Nouvelle-Calédonie
‘Serene but firm’, says FLNKS The FLNKS described the talks with Valls as “serene but firm”.
The FLNKS is demanding a “Kanaky Agreement” to be concluded before 24 September 2025 and a fully effective sovereignty process to be achieved before the next French Presidential elections in April 2027.
It also wants the provincial elections, initially scheduled to take place no later than November 30, to be maintained at this date, instead of being postponed once again to mid-2026 under the Bougival prescriptions.
But they were nowhere to be seen on Thursday, when the drafting group was installed.
Valls also spoke to New Caledonia’s chiefly (customary) Senate to dispel any misconception that the Bougival deal would be a setback in terms of recognition of the Indigenous Kanak identity and place in New Caledonia.
He said the Bougival pact was a “historic opportunity” for them to seize “because there is no other credible alternative”.
Indigenous recognition
The minister stressed that. even though this Indigenous recognition may be perceived as less emphatic in the Bougival document, the same text also clearly stipulated that all previous agreements and accords, including the 1998 Nouméa Accord which devoted significant chapters to the Kanak issue and recognition, were still fully in force.
And that if needed, amendments could still be made to the Bougival text to make this even more explicit.
The chiefs were present at the opening session of the committee on Thursday.
So was a delegation of mayors of New Caledonia, who expressed deep concerns about New Caledonia’s current situation, 15 months after the riots that broke out in New Caledonia mid-May 2024, causing 14 deaths, more than 2 billion euros (NZ$3.8 billion) in material damages and thousands of jobless due to the destruction of hundreds of businesses.
New Caledonia’s gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated to have dropped by 10 to 15 percent over the past 15 months.
As part of the post-riot ongoing trauma, New Caledonia is currently facing an acute shortage in the medical sector personnel — many of them have left following security issues related to the riots, gravely affecting the provision of essential and emergency services both in the capital Nouméa and in rural areas.
Participants at New Caledonia’s drafting committee launched at the French High Commission. Image: Haut-commissariat de la République en Nouvelle-Calédonie
Who turned up? Apart from the absent FLNKS, two other significant components of the pro-independence movement, former FLNKS moderate members Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance (UNI), consisting of PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) and UPM (Union Progressiste en Mélanésie) were also part of the new drafting committee participants.
UNI leaders said earlier they had signed the Bougival document because they believe even though it does not provide a short-term independence for New Caledonia, this could be gradually achieved in the middle run.
PALIKA and UPM, in a de facto split, distanced themselves from the FLNKS in August 2024 and have since abstained from taking part in the FLNKS political bureau.
On the side of those who wish New Caledonia to remain part of France (pro-France), all of its representative parties, who also signed the Bougival document, were present at the inaugural session of the drafting committee.
This includes Les Loyalistes, Le Rassemblement-LR, Calédonie Ensemble and Wallisian-based “kingmaker” party Eveil Océanien.
After the first session on Thursday, pro-France politicians described the talks as “constructive” on everyone’s part.
New Caledonia’s drafting committee launched at the French High Commission in Nouméa. Image: Haut-commissariat de la République en Nouvelle-Calédonie
‘My door remains wide open’ But there are also concerns as to whether such sessions (the next one is scheduled for Saturday) can viably and credibly carry on without the FLNKS taking part.
“We just can’t force this or try to achieve things without consensus,” Eveil Océanien leader Milakulo Tukumuli told local media on Thursday.
Since Valls arrived in New Caledonia (on his fifth trip since he took office late 2024) this week, he has mentioned the FLNKS issue, saying his door remained “wide open”.
“I am well aware of the FLNKS position. But we have to keep going”, he told the drafting committee on Thursday.
The “drafting” work set in motion will have to focus in formulating, with the help of a team of French officials (legalists and constitutionalists), a series of documents which all trickle down from the Bougival general agreement so as to translate it in relevant and appropriate terms.
Pro-France leaders Sonia Backès and Nicolas Metzdorf at New Caledonia’s drafting committee launch. Image: Haut-commissariat de la République en Nouvelle-Calédonie
Some of the most urgent steps to be taken include formalising the postponement of the provincial elections to mid-2026, in the form of an “organic law”.
Among other things, the “organic law” is supposed to define the way that key powers should be transferred from France to New Caledonia, including following a vote by the local Congress with a required majority of 36 MPs (over two thirds), the rules on the exercise of the power of foreign affairs “while respecting France’s international commitments and fundamental interests”
Tabled in French Parliament
The text would be tabled to the French Parliament for approval, first before the Senate’s Law Committee on 17 September 2025 and then for debate on 23 September 2025. It would also need to follow a similar process before the other Parliament chamber, the National Assembly, before it can be finally endorsed by December 2025.
And before that, the French State Council is also supposed to rule on the conformity of the Constitutional Amendment Bill and whether it can be tabled before a Cabinet meeting on 17 September 2025.
Another crucial text to be drafted is a Constitutional amendment Bill that would modify the description of New Caledonia, wherever it occurs in the French Constitution (mostly in its Title XIII), into the “State of New Caledonia”.
The modification would translate the concepts described in the Bougival Agreement but would not cancel any previous contents from the 1998 Nouméa Accord, especially in relation to its Preamble in terms of “founding principles related to the Kanak identity and (New Caledonia’s) economic and social development”.
In the same spirit, every paragraph of the Nouméa Accord which does not contradict the Bougival text would remain fully valid.
The new Constitutional amendment project is also making provisions for a referendum to be held in New Caledonia no later than 28 February 2026, when the local population will be asked to endorse the Bougival text.
Another relevant instrument to be formulated is the “Fundamental Law” for New Caledonia, to be later endorsed by New Caledonia’s local Congress.
The “Fundamental Law”, a de facto Constitution, is supposed to focus on such notions and definitions as New Caledonia “identity signs” (flag, anthem, motto), a “charter of New Caledonia values, as well as the rules of eligibility to acquire New Caledonia’s nationality and a “Code of Citizenship”.
Valls said he was aware the time frame for all these texts was “constrained”, but that it was a matter of “urgency”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Two New Zealand Palestinians, Rana Hamida and Youssef Sammour, left Auckland today to join the massive new Global Sumud Flotilla determined to break Israel’s starvation blockade of the besieged enclave. Here, two journalists report on the Asia-Pacific stake in the initiative.
Ellie Aben in Manila and Sheany Yasuko Lai in Jakarta
Asia-Pacific activists are preparing to set sail with the Global Sumud Flotilla, an international fleet from 44 countries aiming to reach Gaza by sea to break Israel’s blockade of food and medical aid.
They have banded together under the Sumud Nusantara initiative, a coalition of activists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan, to join the global flotilla movement that will begin launching convoys from August 31.
Sumud Nusantara is part of the GSF, a coordinated, nonviolent fleet comprising mostly small vessels carrying humanitarian aid, which will first leave Spanish ports for the Gaza Strip, followed by more convoys from Tunisia and other countries in early September.
The international coalition is set to become the largest coordinated civilian maritime mission ever undertaken to Gaza.
“This movement comes at a very crucial time, as we know how things are in Gaza with the lack of food entering the strip that they are not only suffering from the impacts of war but also from starvation,” Indonesian journalist Nurhadis said ahead of his trip.
“Israel is using starvation as a weapon to wipe out Palestinians in Gaza. This is why we continue to state that what Israel is doing is genocide.”
Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians and injured over 157,000 more.
Gaza famine declared
As Tel Aviv continued to systematically obstruct food and aid from entering the enclave, a UN-backed global hunger monitor — the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — declared famine in Gaza on Friday, estimating that more than 514,000 people are suffering from it.
Nurhadis is part of a group of activists from across Indonesia joining the GSF, which aims to “break Israel’s illegal blockade and draw attention to international complicity in the face of the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“We continue to try through this Global Sumud Flotilla action, hoping that the entire world, whether it’s governments or the people and other members of society, will pressure Israel to open its blockade in Palestine,” he said.
“This is just beyond the threshold of humanity. Israel is not treating Palestinians in Gaza as human beings and the world must not keep silent. This is what we are trying to highlight with this global convoy.”
The GSF is a people-powered movement that aims to help end the genocide in Gaza, said Rifa Berliana Arifin, Indonesia country director for the Sumud Nusantara initiative and executive committee member of the Jakarta-based Aqsa Working Group.
“Indonesia is participating because this is a huge movement. A movement that aspires to resolve and end the blockade through non-traditional means.
“We’ve seen how ineffective diplomatic, political approaches have been, because the genocide in Gaza has yet to end.
‘People power’ movement
“This people-power movement is aimed at putting an end to that,” Arifin said.
“This is a non-violent mission . . . Even though they are headed to Gaza, they are boarding boats that have no weapons . . . They are simply bringing themselves . . . for the world to see.”
As the Sumud Nusantara initiative is led by Malaysia, activists were gathering this weekend in Kuala Lumpur, where a ceremonial send-off for the regional convoy is scheduled to take place on Sunday, led by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.
One of them is Philippine activist Drieza Lininding, leader of civil society group Moro Consensus Group, who is hoping that the Global Sumud Flotilla will inspire others in the Catholic-majority nation to show their support for Palestine.
“We are appealing to all our Filipino brothers and sisters, Muslims or Christians, to support the Palestinian cause because this issue is not only about religion, but also about humanity. Gaza has now become the moral compass of the world,” he said.
“Everybody is seeing the genocide and the starvation happening in Gaza, and you don’t need to be a Muslim to side with the Palestinians.
“It is very clear: if you want to be on the right side of history, support all programmes and activities to free Palestine . . . It is very important that as Filipinos we show our solidarity.”
So here we are, 2025, and Israel has finally achieved what no terrorist group, no hostile neighbour, no antisemitic tyrant ever could: it has become the most dangerous country on earth — for its own people.
Not because of rockets or boycotts, but because its government has decided that the only way to secure the future is to annihilate everyone else’s.
The Zionist project — once sold as a miraculous refuge for a persecuted people — now stands revealed as a 70‑year experiment in ethnic cleansing, wrapped in biblical entitlement and armed with American money.
The current phase? Bulldozers in the West Bank, tanks in Gaza, and a prime minister whose personal survival depends on keeping his citizens permanently terrified and morally anesthetised.
Netanyahu and his coalition of zealots have at last clarified Israel’s mission statement: kill or expel two million Palestinians, and call it “security.”
Reduce Gaza to rubble, herd the survivors into tents, and then — here’s the punchline — offer them “resettlement packages” in Libya or South Sudan, as though genocide could be rebranded as humanitarian outsourcing.
And the world? Still dithering over whether to call this behaviour “problematic.” As if sanctions and isolation are reserved only for the unlucky states without lobbyists in Washington or friends in European parliaments.
Israel is begging to be treated as a pariah, but we keep dressing it up as a partner.
The most awkward truth of all: Jews in the diaspora now face a choice. Condemn this grotesque betrayal of Jewish history, or keep defending the indefensible until Israel itself becomes the nightmare prophecy it was meant to escape.
Richard David Hames is an American philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and mentor and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Three media spokespeople addressed the 98th week of New Zealand solidarity rallies for Palestine in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland today, criticising the quality of news reporting about the world’s biggest genocide crisis this century.
Speakers at other locations around the country also condemned what they said was biased media coverage.
The critics said they were affirming their humanity in solidarity with the people of Palestine as the United Nations this week officially declared a man-made famine in Gaza because of Israel’s weaponisation of starvation against the besieged enclave with 2 million population.
More than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 22 months of conflict – mostly women and children.
One of the major criticisms was that the New Zealand media has consistently framed the series of massacres as a “war” between Israel and Hamas instead of a military land grab based on ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The first speaker, Mick Hall, a former news agency journalist who is currently an independent political columnist, said the way news media had covered these crimes had “undoubtedly affected public opinion”.
“As Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza devolved into a full-blown genocide, our media continued to frame Israel’s attack on Gaza as a war against Hamas, while they uncritically recorded Western leaders’ claims that Israel was exercising a ‘right of self-defence’,” he said.
NZ media lacking context
New Zealand news outlets continued to “present an ahistorical account of what has transpired since October 7, shorn of context, ignoring Israel’s history of occupation, of colonial violence against the Palestinian people”.
“An implicit understanding that violence and ethnic cleansing forms part of the organisational DNA of Zionism should have shaped how news stories were framed and presented over the past 22 months.
Independent journalist Mick Hall speaking at today’s rally . . . newsrooms “failed to robustly document the type of evidence of genocide now before the International Court of Justice.”
“Instead, newsroom leaders took their lead from our politicians, from the foreign policy positions from those in Washington and other aligned centres of power.”
Hall said newsrooms had not taken a “neutral position” — “nor are they attempting to keep us informed in any meaningful sense”.
“They failed to robustly document the type of evidence of genocide now before the International Court of Justice.
“By wilfully declining to adjudicate between contested claims of Israel and its victims, they failed to meet the informational needs of democratic citizenship in a most profound way.
“They lowered the standard of news, instead of upholding it, as they so sanctimoniously tell us.”
Evans slams media ‘apologists’
Award-winning New Zealand cartoonist Malcolm Evans congratulated the crowd of about 300 protesters for “being on the right side of history”.
“As we remember more than 240 journalists, camera and media people, murdered, assassinated, by Zionist Israel — who they were and the principles they stood for we should not forget our own media,” he said.
Cartoonist and commentator Malcolm Evans . . . “It wasn’t our reporters living in a tent in Gaza whose lives, hopes and dreams were blasted into oblivion because they exposed Zionist Israel’s evil intent.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
“The media which, contrary to the principles they claim to stand for, tried to tell us Zionist Israeli genocide was justified.”
“Whatever your understanding of the conflict in Palestine, which has brought you here today and for these past many months, it won’t have come first from the mainstream media.
“It wasn’t our reporters living in a tent in Gaza whose lives, hopes and dreams were blasted into oblivion because they exposed Zionist Israel’s evil intent.
“The reporters whose witness to Zionist Israel’s war crimes sparked your outrage were not from the ranks of Western media apologists.”
Describing the mainstream media as “pimps for propaganda”, Evans said that in any “decent world” he would not be standing there — instead the New Zealand journalists organisation would be, “expressing solidarity with their murdered Middle Eastern colleagues”.
Palestinian journalists owed debt
David Robie, author and editor of Asia Pacific Report, said the world owed a huge debt to the Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
“Although global media freedom groups have conflicting death toll numbers, it is generally accepted that more than 270 journalists and media workers have been killed — many of them deliberately targeted by the IDF [Israeli Defence Force], even killing their families as well.”
Journalist and author Dr David Robie . . . condemned New Zealand media for republishing some of the Israeli “counter-narratives” without question. Image: Del Abcede/APR
Dr Robie stressed that the Palestinian journalist death toll had eclipsed that of the combined media deaths of the American Civil War, First and Second World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam War, Cambodian War, Yugoslavia Wars, Afghan War, and the ongoing Ukraine War.
“The Palestinian death toll of journalists is greater than the combined death toll of all these other wars,” he said. “This is shocking and shameful.”
He pointed out that when Palestinian reporter Anas al-Sharif was assassinated on August 10, his entire television crew was also wiped out ahead of the Israeli invasion of Gaza City — “eliminating the witnesses, that’s what Israel does”.
Six journalists died that day in an air strike, four of them from Al Jazeera, which is banned in Israel.
Dr Robie also referred to “disturbing reports” about the existence of an IDF military unit — the so-called “legitimisation cell” — tasked with smearing and targeting journalists in Gaza with fake information.
He condemned the New Zealand media for republishing some of these “counter-narratives” without question.
“This is shameful because news editors know that they are dealing with an Israeli government with a history of lying and disinformation; a government that is on trial with the International Court of Justice for ‘plausible genocide’; and a prime minister wanted on an International Criminal Court arrest warrant to answer charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he said.
“Why would you treat this government as a credible source without scrutiny?”
Mock media cemetery
The protest included a mock pavement cemetery with about 20 “bodies” of murdered journalists and blue “press” protective vests, and placards declaring “Killing journalists is killing the truth”, “Genocide: Zionism’s final solution” and “Zionism shames Jewish tradition”.
The demonstrators marched around Te Komititanga Square, pausing at strategic moments as Palestinians read out the names of the hundreds of killed Gazan journalists to pay tribute to their courage and sacrifice.
Author and journalist Saige England . . . “The truth is of a genocide carried out by bombs and snipers, and now there is another weapon.” Image: Claire Coveney/APR
In Ōtautahi Christchurch today, one of the speakers at the Palestine solidarity rally there was author and journalist Saige England, who called on journalists to “speak the truth on Gaza”.
“The truth of a genocide carried out by bombs and snipers, and now there is another weapon — slow starvation, mutilation by hunger,” she said.
“The truth is a statement by Israel that journalists are ‘the enemy’. Israel says journalists are the enemy, what does that tell you?
“Why? Because it has carried out invasions, apartheid and genocide for decades.”
Some of the mock bodies today representing the slaughtered Gazan journalists with Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif in the forefront. Image: APR
A prominent Indian journalist was notified by the Trump administration this week that his student visa to pursue a master’s program in the U.S. had been denied. The prospective student, Kaushik Raj, a journalist who has reported for international and Indian publications alike, was told in his rejection letter that the U.S. government felt he did not have enough ties to his home country.
Set to study data journalism at Columbia University’s graduate journalism school, Raj was incredulous. His entire family is in India, his reporting has been on India, and he had told the American consular officer during his interview that he intended to use the skills he learned at Columbia to report data-driven stories about rural India.
“I am being punished for my journalism, for my views,” he told The Intercept.
As the fall semester kicks off at universities across the U.S., students around the world are facing similar rejections, with many more stuck in visa application purgatory. The slow-rolling of applications and denials are leaving universities bracing for an unprecedented downturn in their international student intake.
Incoming students from diverse backgrounds, with plans for pursuing varied scholarship, spoke to The Intercept about a litany of problems under the Trump administration’s new student visa processes.
Many have had their applications rejected on grounds they can’t fathom; others have been waiting weeks for a decision on their applications. Foreign students granted admission by universities can’t get slots for visa interviews even as their academic programs get underway. Wait times for “administrative processing” of visa applications have stretched from days to weeks to more than a month.
For incoming students and their families, the situation is riddled with anxieties and uncertainties.
“The Trump administration has taken myriad actions since January that make it far more difficult for international students to come to the United States, and even if they’re here, for them to complete their studies,” said Elora Mukherjee, an expert on immigration law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
She cited the revocation of student visa statuses of more than 1,000 individuals in March and April, the social media vetting policy for visa applicants, and a travel ban imposed on citizens from several countries in June. For instance, she pointed out that due to Trump’s travel ban, Afghan women would find it virtually impossible to come to the U.S. for their higher education even if they were offered a full scholarship.
As a result, the U.S. could see 150,000 fewer international student arrivals this fall, according to an analysis published by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks international education. The study said that the drastic reduction in international students in the U.S. could result in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue.
While Raj believes his case was political, his story is among many examples of the Trump administration denying foreigners’ student visas as part of a wider crackdown on immigration.
“This administration has declared war on international students in a variety of ways: ranging from arresting people who’ve spoken out on behalf of Palestinians, to cracking down on universities by claiming that they bring in too many international students,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University. “Slowing down the visa process or issuing more visa denials are administrative ways of accomplishing that goal.”
Arbitrary Rejections
In early July, an international student admitted to a graduate engineering program at a highly ranked U.S. university flew 700 miles across India to attend an F-1 student visa interview. It was the second time they had made the trip, after the Trump administration postponed their earlier appointment in May at the last minute amid a global halt on U.S. visa interviews. At the end of the interview, the student was handed a slip, asking them to make all their social media accounts public within the next 24 hours. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the weeks that followed, the student’s visa status remained unchanged on the application portal. Then, in early August, two weeks before they were supposed to begin their program, a response came in saying the visa application had been denied.
Like Raj, the Indian journalist, the visa was rejected on the grounds that the student didn’t have enough ties to their home country, India.
“I can’t understand how they reached that conclusion,” said the student in an interview to The Intercept, requesting anonymity to avoid jeopardizing any of their future U.S. visa applications.
The Trump administration’s increased scrutiny on student visas is part of its broader immigration enforcement crackdown.
The Immigration and Nationality Act, under which Raj and the engineering student have been denied visas, mandates that nonimmigrant visa applicants prove their intent to return to their home country. The statute gives consular officers lots of discretion, said Yale-Loehr.
“This particular section of the immigration law has always been there, but, effectively, this administration is putting its thumb on the scale,” he said. “More toward ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’ in determining someone’s intent to return home after they finish their studies.”
There’s no means for applicants to contest or appeal a visa denial under the section about students’ intent to return home. One student who had been admitted to a renowned private university on the East Coast to study computer science said they were rejected on the spot at their visa interview, despite going out of their way to mention their goal of using their studies in the U.S. to secure better work opportunities at home.
They had already booked a flight to the U.S.
“It was devastating,” the computer science student said. “I couldn’t understand what had happened.”
Pretexts for Ideological Attacks
Two students whose visa applications were rejected under the return-home provision, Section 214(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, told The Intercept that their programs included studies of artificial intelligence, and wondered whether that had been the real reason for their applications being rejected.
In May, during the pause on visa processing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued a statement declaring that the U.S. would “aggressively revoke visas” for Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or “studying in critical fields.”
Rubio did not specify what these “critical fields” were, and experts said anything from semiconductor engineering to artificial intelligence or aerospace engineering could fit the bill, since China and the U.S. are competing for supremacy across a wide range of sectors.
“Maybe they don’t like the person for studying machine learning, but that’s not a ground of ineligibility,” said Yale-Loehr. “Whereas intent is, and so you can deny them on 214(b) even if the real reason they don’t want them to come to the United States is what they’re studying.”
Likewise, the attack on Raj and other journalists could be seen as part of a larger Trump administration war against the press.
“His visa denial more likely reflects that journalism is a disfavored profession in Trump’s America.”
“The claim that Kaushik Raj does not have strong ties to India seems like an obvious pretext, particularly given his publicly available reporting for Indian outlets and coverage of India,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told The Intercept. “His visa denial more likely reflects that journalism is a disfavored profession in Trump’s America.”
“An intrepid reporter who wants to use his time in America to become an even more effective watchdog against government corruption,” Stern said, “is an undesirable in the eyes of a corrupt government like ours.”
Earlier this month, the State Department said that it had revoked around 6,000 student visas for overstays and violations of the law. The State Department has also said between 200 and 300 of the revoked visas were over accusations that they engaged in “support for terrorism.” The Trump administration has used similar arguments in going after pro-Palestine students like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and others.
On August 19, the Trump administration released updated guidelines stating that immigration screenings for adjustment of visa status would seek to ensure that applicants aren’t associated with any “anti-American ideologies or activities, antisemitic terrorism and antisemitic terrorist organizations, or promote antisemitic ideologies” — all guises under which the university has cracked down on pro-Palestine activism on campuses.
Disruptions and Delays
Incoming students have struggled with the many twists, turns, and updates in the Trump administration’s visa application and approval process. Groups have sprung up on WhatsApp and Telegram where students seek to keep one another abreast of the latest developments and strategies. Some of the groups, including several reviewed by The Intercept, have more than 500 members looking for informal guidance.
In the chats, students share what questions they were asked in interviews, debate ideal answers, discuss which U.S. consulates have higher visa rejection rates, and alert one another as soon as new interview slots open up.
Sometimes, the celebration of someone having received their visa is quickly dampened by the news of someone else’s rejection, fueling the despondency of those left, for the meantime, in limbo.
In May, the Trump administration had announced a worldwide suspension of U.S. student visa interviews. The impact of the nearly monthlong suspension, coupled with a significant slowdown of the visa approval process, continues to be felt sharply in countries such as India and China, which send the largest number of international students to American universities.
After paying nonrefundable deposits to their universities and securing finances to be able to afford their programs, several students have been unable to find a visa interview slot.
A student admitted to a prestigious graduate program at a top U.S. university said they haven’t been able to find a single visa appointment in their home country, India. The euphoria of receiving an acceptance letter from the university has been replaced by the frustration of missing out on the opportunity to pursue their studies.
“It’s a very tough time to be an international student because none of the roads seem to be leading anywhere,” they told The Intercept.
Another Indian student who was set to begin a graduate program in journalism at a leading U.S. university in mid-August told The Intercept that, after two-and-a-half months of daily searches for interview slots, they had finally given up.
“I would be on the website which showed interview slots for a cumulative six to eight hours every day, sometimes even longer,” they said. In recent days, the prospective student’s family members also took turns in checking the site every day — to no avail.
“It’s a very tough time to be an international student because none of the roads seem to be leading anywhere.”
The crush for interview slots has created incredibly tight deadlines for would-be students. On one occasion, the would-be journalism student missed a fresh round of interview slots by a whisker: In early July, they sat down to have lunch and saw a message on one of the many WhatsApp and Telegram visa-related groups they were on saying that new interview slots had opened up.
“I stopped my lunch the minute I saw the update,” they said. “It had been one or two minutes since the message.”
Within seconds, they were on the portal, but the slots were already gone.
Pressure Campaign
The crackdown on international student visas is of a piece with the Trump administration’s attacks on universities — part of the right-wing assault on perceived liberal redoubts.
Along with revoking federal grant funding and launching investigations against several universities, the Trump administration also threatened to make it more difficult for them to take in international students. International students often pay full tuition and can therefore serve as valuable revenue streams for higher educational institutions across the country. As part of its war on Harvard, for instance, the Trump administration made explicit mention of the revenue garnered for the school by foreign students.
The administration also suspended Harvard’s access to a student visa registration system in June. Harvard had to seek a stay from the courts to continue to admit international students.
At Columbia, as part of a deal to restore federal funding to the school — viewed widely by critics as a capitulation to Trump administration demands — the university administration agreed to a clause that said it would “examine its business model and take steps to decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.”
By making the process of obtaining a student visa significantly more difficult, the federal government seems to have found another trump card in its negotiations with the universities. Many prospective students themselves, too, are turning away.
Since being a teenager, the unnamed Indian journalism student said they had dreamed of studying at a top U.S. university. Now, with all the uncertainty around immigration and student visas, they said, they were somewhat relieved to avoid the headaches and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s crackdown.
“I feel like I dodged a bullet,” they said. “I had never thought I’d be scared about ICE.”
“I feel like I dodged a bullet. I had never thought I’d be scared about ICE.”
Though they have sought a deferral from their studies at the American university, the incoming journalism student said they were no longer interested in coming to the U.S. for their education and are now looking toward European universities instead.
They said they would advise others to stay away from the U.S. too.
“It’s not worth the risk,” they said. “Wait this out, for the next three to four years, till the next administration.”
Dismayed at his own treatment during the visa process, Raj, the prominent Indian journalist seeking to study at Columbia, was also questioning his desire to study in the U.S.
“If they are rejecting me by watching my social media, then they don’t like me as a person,” he told The Intercept a day before receiving his formal rejection. “They will want to erase my voice. Then why should I go there? It’s very frustrating to try to go to a country that doesn’t want you.”
On August 9 and 10, a massive storm over southeastern Wisconsin dropped up to 13 inches of rain in just a few hours, sending floodwater gushing downriver and destroying more than 1,800 homes in Milwaukee. The disaster was the second-worst two-day rain event in the United States since 1871.
“For years, scientists have warned about what can happen when climate change supercharges extreme weather events. This is exactly what they meant,” the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported, describing the disaster as a 1,000-year flood.
Now, more than a dozen youth from Wisconsin, including Indigenous youth, are filing a lawsuit against the state’s utility regulator to force it to consider climate change when evaluating new fossil fuel projects.
Currently, Wisconsin law blocks the Public Service Commission from taking air pollution — including carbon dioxide emissions — into consideration during the permitting process. Fifteen children and teenagers, ages 8 to 17, filed a lawsuit Friday against the utility regulator alleging that the law violates their constitutional rights to life and liberty.
The case is part of a growing climate litigation movement led in part by Indigenous youth. Twelve-year-old Miahlin B., who goes by her tribal name Waazakone, and her three siblings joined the lawsuit because climate change is eroding their traditional ways of life.
The children harvest wild rice, which is sacred to their communities, but warming temperatures are making it harder to grow rice successfully. They tap sugar maple trees to make maple sugar, but last year came up dry in part because of a shorter winter season. They fish for walleye and sturgeon, but both fish populations are shrinking as waters warm.
Miahlin B., who goes by Waazakone, joined the lawsuit to protect her tribe’s traditional ways of life.
Nitumigaabow Champagne / Our Children’s Trust
Waazakone told Grist she wants to protect her community for future generations. She describes herself as a water protector, explaining that caring for water is part of her responsibility as a female member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians.
“We need the government to understand that clean water and air is a human right and our most valuable resource,” she said.
The youth plaintiffs are also challenging a Wisconsin law that prohibits the Public Service Commission from mandating more renewable energy from local utilities. Right now, about three-fourths of the state’s electricity generation comes from fossil fuels like oil and gas. That’s on par with the national average, but lags far behind states like South Dakota where more than 75 percent of its state energy production comes from renewables.
The plaintiffs are represented by Midwest Environmental Advocates, a Madison-based environmental nonprofit law center, and Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing youth-led climate litigation.
The latter is perhaps best known for its successful litigation against the state of Montana in Held v. Montana. In December, the state’s Supreme Court affirmed that Montana youth have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment,” and concluded that the state should take greenhouse gas emissions into account when considering new fossil fuel projects. The state hasn’t considered any new oil and gas projects since then, so it remains to be seen what that will look like in practice.
“Wisconsin doesnʻt have any fossil fuel extraction like Montana, but they do continue to have an electricity sector that’s dominated by fossil fuels. Itʻs the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state,” said Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger, who is representing the Wisconsin plaintiffs.
The nonprofit has filed dozens of lawsuits in the U.S. over the last decade and a half, including one against the Trump administrationʻs reversal of President Joe Bidenʻs climate policies. Last year, they helped secure a landmark settlement in Hawaiʻi with the case Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, where youth plaintiffs contended that the state’s commitment to expanding infrastructure to support gas-powered cars and disregard for cleaner options violated their constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.” There, the state agreed to develop a plan to zero out carbon emissions from its transportation sector by 2045.
In Wisconsin, the constitutional right to a clean environment isn’t as explicit as in Montana or Hawai’i, where there is language in the state constitution spelling out that right. Wisconsin Democrats tried unsuccessfully earlier this year to add that language to the state constitution. But the attorneys in this new case are arguing that a stable climate system is necessary to achieve the constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change at Columbia Law, said lawsuits like this take on new salience in light of the Trump administration’s rollback of climate action. “It’s even more important to bring these cases now given the current state of the United States’ stance on climate change in general,” she said.
A spokesman from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission declined to comment on pending litigation.
As state leaders grapple with mounting costs of flood recovery and plead for federal assistance, Waazakone hopes that her lawsuit forces them to take climate change seriously.
“I want the state of Wisconsin to realize that you cannot allow businesses and people to continue to erode our futures,” she said.
EGyptian government employees wielding a chain and stick detained and assaulted a 22-year-old man and his 15-year-old brother at the Egyptian Mission to the United Nations during a pro-Palestine protest in New York on Wednesday, the brothers’ parents told The Intercept. The New York City Police Department then arrested the two brothers on assault charges, and strangulation for the younger one, according to their parents and an NYPD spokesperson.
Yasin Elsamak, 22, and Ali Elsamak, 15, both U.S. citizens, were protesting the Egyptian government’s role in blockading the Rafah crossing into Gaza, cutting off essential food aid amid Israel’s ongoing genocide, their parents said.
Egyptian officials grabbed the teenager and dragged him and his older brother, who had attempted to intervene, inside the building, according to their parents and video of the incident published on social media. Their parents alleged that inside the building, Egyptian officials continued to beat Yasin in the legs with sticks before choking him with a chain and his own keffiyeh.
The Egyptian government did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
A video posted on X shows one man wrapping what appears to be a chain around the neck of one of the brothers, whom the family identified as Yasin, while another man beat him with a stick-like object. Another man is seen wrestling the other brother, identified by family as Ali, to the ground.
New York Police Department officers arrested the brothers on suspicion of assault but did not take any of the Egyptian government officials into custody, the family said.
Their father, Akram Elsamak, said NYPD officers had turned him away when he attempted to visit his sons who were in police custody. The brothers told their parents that they were both interrogated by officers, including the 15-year-old, without a guardian or attorney present. Ali was released from custody the following day at 1 p.m., and Yasin was released around 6 p.m.
Egyptian Mission to the UN dragged 2 U.S. citizens inside the the building and repeatedly assaulted them earlier this evening.
The two were protesting outside the building when they were grabbed by staff & dragged inside. NYPD arrived & arrested them. Jail support now underway. pic.twitter.com/ixlXkWAxuR
After his release, Yasin was hospitalized with injuries to his neck. He had difficulty swallowing and a 6-inch bruise on his right thigh, according to both parents.His teenage brother suffered minor injuries to his elbows.
“My oldest son said, ‘I had a fear that I would die there,’ and my younger one said, ‘I think if they didn’t have a glass door and were recording, they would kill us inside,’” their mother, Olga Elsamak, told The Intercept.
An NYPD spokesperson said police had received a call around 4:40 p.m. about an assault outside the Egyptian government building at 304 East 44th Street, where officers arrived and found “two male individuals with complaints of pain throughout their bodies.” They took the two into custody and charged Ali, the 15-year-old, with strangulation and assault, and Yasin with assault alone.
Akram Elsamak said he confronted NYPD officers, asking why his sons were charged when the video showed they were the ones being assaulted. He said an officer told him the video did not show the entire incident.
“‘Why did you arrest a minor and his brother without any evidence? And they were getting beat up by a foreign security, getting kidnapped from American soil inside an international building,’” he recalled asking the NYPD. “They couldn’t answer.”
The NYPD did not comment on why they turned Akram away, nor on whether they interrogated a minor without a lawyer or guardian present. They also did not comment on whether NYPD officers were considering arrests of Egyptian officials. Their mother said that when the two brothers were released, they were visibly emotional, and Ali was crying. She criticized the lack of accountability from the NYPD.
“I can expect it from the Egyptian security because this is a military-run country, but I wouldn’t expect it from a police force that’s supposed to protect American citizens,” Olga Elsamak said. Her husband Akram is originally from Egypt, where, in 2013, the Egyptian police and military killed hundreds of protesters in Cairo who had been protesting against the Egyptian government.
“For a father to see his both sons getting beat up with a chain, it is not something easy at all,” said their father, Akram Elsamak. “My sons went that day to stand and give their voice, that the Egyptian government has to open the border to pass a little bit of water and a piece of bread for the babies and children of Gaza before they get bombed and die — that was their only crime — and they were doing it in the American soil, on the sidewalk in the American soil, where we have right to protest and give our voice.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, decried the incident and their treatment by both Egyptian officials and the NYPD. DAWN was founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi prior to his 2018 murder at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.
“It appears that these Egyptian employees are used to policing protests in this manner in Egypt where basically you can beat and kill anybody criticizing the government and thought that that is the appropriate course of conduct here in the United States here in New York City,” Whitson told The Intercept. “I hope there will be justice and accountability to all these violent Egyptian employees accountable for viciously assaulting a child and his young brother in broad daylight, and it seems that they are so confident of their impunity that they thought nothing of it.”
Both of the brothers were protesting as a part of daily rallies organized by Palestinian liberation group Within Our Lifetime, which has protested outside government and U.N. buildings in New York of several nations including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza, said Nerdeen Kiswani, head of the group.
Olga Elsamak told The Intercept her sons “are still in shock, they are recovering. It’s going to take time for them to sort it out, but thank god they’re home, thank god they’re not in custody.”
Starving Palestinians flock to collect aid supplies dropped from airplanes in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Aug. 19, 2025.Photo: Mohammed Nassar/Anadolu via Getty Images
Help for Gaza is now supposed to fall from the sky. Planes from Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates drop parachuted bundles of food and supplies meant to save lives when all other options are lost. They then crash into streets, rooftops, and tents, turning hope into panic.
Every airdrop shows the cost of survival here, where daily life is threatened not by just hunger or lack of medicine, but also the very help meant to reach starving people.
This is the new reality of aid delivery in Gaza. As Israel’s siege approaches the two-year mark, on-the-ground access to food and other crucial supplies is mostly controlled by the Israel-backed and U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid sites have become shooting grounds where the Israeli army kills hungry civilians. On July 27, Israel announced the start of airdrops for humanitarian aid, promising “safe corridors” and relief from the crushing blockade.
The aid has itself become a weapon in the literal sense: At least 124 peoplehave been struck by falling aid packages since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, and 23 of them killed. The Intercept spoke to more than 10people who were injured by or witnessed injuries from falling aid packages for this story.
“When those packages fall, they sound like bombs,” said Mariam, a 21-year-old witness to one of the first drops, recalling her father’s trembling voice. “We don’t know if they will save us or crush us.”
Sometimes the crates land on fragile rooftops, shattering tin and wood, sending splinters flying into narrow alleyways. Other times, they slam into flimsy tents: those last fragile sanctuaries for families uprooted by relentless bombardment. The cries that follow are not always relief; often they are pain — sharp and sudden.
In the Zawayda area, a prominent Gaza nurse Adi Nahid Qaran condemned the aerial drops, calling them “humiliation disguised as aid.”
“This is not humanitarian help,” he said in a video posted shortly before his death. “If they can fly planes to drop aid, they could open the land crossings and let trucks bring real help.”
Just days later, on August 4, Qaran was killed after being hit by a falling aid crate during an airdrop operation in Zawayda.
On a suffocating Sunday afternoon in Zawayda, I watched as one of these supposed lifelines from the sky turned into a nightmare on the ground. International airdrops landed in my crowded neighborhood, not an organized distribution zone. The sky opened, parachutes drifted down, and within seconds our community became a battlefield.
From my window overlooking the street, I heard the cries, the chaos, the neighbors shouting.
My friend Maimouna, a third-year multimedia student at the Islamic University of Gaza, was taking her online university exam when the silence of her room shattered.
“I was solving my exam questions, and suddenly I heard screaming, shouting, and gunfire everywhere,” she told me. “I couldn’t focus, the page froze, the questions stopped loading. I was shouting at my family, asking what was happening.”
From her backyard, she saw two massive bundles of aid — known locally as mishtah — fall into her neighborhood. One landed right behind her room, another by her uncle’s house.
“Strangers suddenly appeared in our yard,” she said. “They came with knives, screaming. My uncle’s brother-in-law was stabbed in the shoulder. Thank God it wasn’t worse.”
Her family managed to keep one box and gave another to displaced neighbors, while others were taken by force.
“This is not aid. This is madness from the sky.”
“It was pure terror,” she said. “My grandmother and father were sitting by the fire when a package dropped behind my room. I screamed: ‘Yamma! Yaba! Come quickly!’ My mother didn’t believe me at first. And all the while the exam kept running on the computer screen as if nothing was happening. The timer was moving, but I wasn’t Maimouna anymore. I wasn’t a student. I was just terrified.”
From my window, I could hear neighbors shouting to each other in panic.
“Cover the kids! Don’t let them near!” cried one woman.
“The mishtah is ours, we saw it first!” shouted a young man before others pushed him aside.
Another neighbor whispered in disbelief: “This is not aid. This is madness from the sky.”
These aerial drops are only a symptom of the deeper crisis: the siege itself. They are but a patchwork fix for a blockade starving Gaza’s people of essentials: food, medicine, fuel.
While governments and militaries parade their “humanitarian gestures,” thousands remain trapped, waiting for permission to receive more than mere scraps from the sky. Six thousand aid trucks stand idle outside Gaza, blocked by checkpoints.
“If they can fly planes to drop aid, they could open the land crossings and let trucks bring real help.”
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has criticized the airdrops, with its commissioner-general noting that airborne aid delivery costs are “one hundred times higher” than land convoys. UNRWA has called to open land crossings immediately to prevent further loss of life and provide aid safely and effectively.
For Marah, a young woman in her 20s, the airdrop became a source of trauma when it struck her elderly father.
A man in his late 60s, fragile with age, sat quietly outside their home when the sky opened. A massive mishtah came tearing downward, its parachute tangled, its weight unstoppable.
“It fell right on my father,” Marah said, her voice shaking. “He’s an old man, he couldn’t run. He screamed and collapsed to the ground. For a moment, I thought I had lost him.”
Neighbors came rushing. Some tried to lift the heavy box off his back, while others lunged at it like wolves, clawing and pulling at the ropes to tear it open.
“I was screaming at them: ‘Please, help my father first!’” she recalled, tears in her eyes. “But many didn’t even look at him. They were ripping at the box while he was still pinned under it.”
The scene, she said, was not one of aid but of savagery. “Men were shoving each other, their eyes wild with hunger. Some had knives, some had sticks. They were like predators circling prey. And my father was under that box, gasping for breath, while they fought over rice and flour.”
Eventually, a few men managed to drag the box aside, pulling her father free. His body was bruised, his back and legs swollen, his spirit broken. Since then, he refuses to sit outside.
“He tells me every day, ‘The sky is not safe. The sky will fall on me again.’ He doesn’t believe this is aid. He says it is punishment. And honestly, I cannot disagree.”
Marah’s voice grew heavy as she finished her story. “We needed food, yes. But not like this. Not at the cost of my father’s life. Not at the cost of our dignity.”
My brother Mazen almost became a victim of the very aid that was supposed to save lives. Walking home on Sunday, he saw a massive aid bundle plummet at terrifying speed, smashing into a tree just meters away.
“It felt like death could fall on you at any moment,” he said. “I was walking, minding my own business, and suddenly this giant package exploded beside me. If it had landed differently, I wouldn’t be here.”
But what came after was just as frightening. Dozens rushed to the site, fighting with knives, fists, and even bullets.
These airdrops, far from easing hardship, have caused civilian casualties, injuries, and destruction of precious shelters, the Gaza Ministry of Interior said in a warning issued on August 6. Families already stripped of everything now face new dangers from the very aid meant to sustain them.
International humanitarian organizations voiced sharp concern. A Doctors Without Borders representative called the airdrops “a futile initiative that smacks of cynicism.” They insisted these aerial deliveries fail to meet Gaza’s urgent and growing needs.
As reported by Al Jazeera, a box of humanitarian supplies fell on a child, Muhannad Zakaria Eid, in the Nuseirat refugee camp located in central Gaza and killed him. If the airdrops continue unchanged, more deaths are sure to follow.
From my window, I heard a neighbor mutter bitterly: “You see your neighbors turning into enemies in front of you. The siege made people desperate, but now they’re stabbing each other over rice and flour. This is not aid — this is another weapon against us.”
Another man, his voice trembling, said, “I swear, this thing could crush a child any moment. Who will be responsible then?”
Exiled West Papuan media are calling for Fiji — in a reflection of Melanesian solidarity — to hold the greater Pacific region to account and stand against Indonesia’s ongoing media blackout in addition to its human rights abuses.
The leaders in their field which include two Papuans from Indonesia’s occupied provinces have visited the Pacific country to forge media partnerships, university collaboration and joint advocacy for West Papua self-determination.
They were speaking after the screening of a new documentary film, Pepera 1969: A Democratic Integration, was screened at The University of the South Pacific in Fiji.
The documentary is based on the controversial plebiscite 56 years ago when 1025 handpicked Papuan electors, which were directly chosen by the Indonesian military out of its 800,000 citizens, were claimed to have voted unanimously in favour of Indonesian control of Western New Guinea.
Victor Mambor — a co-founder of Jubi Media Papua — in West Papua; Yuliana Lantipo, one of its senior journalists and editor; and Dandhy Laksono, a Jakarta-based investigative filmmaker; shared their personal experiences of reporting from inside arguably the most heavily militarised and censored region in the Pacific.
“We are here to build bridges with our brothers and sisters in the Pacific,” Mambor told the USP media audience.
Their story of the Papuan territory comes after Dutch colonialists who had seized Western New Guinea, handed control of the East Indies back to the Indonesians in 1949 before The Netherlands eventually withdrew from Papuan territory in 1963.
‘Fraudulent’ UN vote
The unrepresentative plebiscite which followed a fraudulent United Nations-supervised “Act of Free Choice” in 1969 allowed the Indonesian Parliament to grant its legitimacy to reign sovereignty over the West Papuans.
That Indonesian authority has been heavily questioned and criticised over extinguishing independence movements and possible negotiations between both sides.
Indonesia has silenced Papuan voices in the formerly-named Irian Jaya province through control and restrictions of the media.
Mambor described the continued targeting of his Jubi Media staff, including attacks on its office and vehicles, as part of an escalating crackdown under Indonesia’s current President Prabowo Subianto, who took office less than 12 months ago.
“If you report on deforestation [of West Papua] or our culture, maybe it’s allowed,” he said.
“But if you report on human rights or the [Indonesian] military, there is no tolerance.”
An Indonesian MP, Oleh Soleh, warned publicly this month that the state would push for a “new wave of repression” targeting West Papuan activists while also calling the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) – the West Papuan territory’s peak independence movement – as a “political criminal group”.
‘Don’t just listen to Jakarta’
“Don’t just listen to what Jakarta says,” Mambor said.
“Speak to Papuans, listen to our stories, raise our voices.
“We want to bring West Papua back to the Pacific — not just geographically, but politically, culturally, and emotionally.”
Press freedom in West Papua has become most dire more over the past 25 years, West Papuan journalists have said.
Foreign journalists are barred entry into the territory and internet access for locals is often restricted, especially during periods of civil unrest.
Indigenous reporters also risk arrest and/or violence for filing politically sensitive stories.
Most trusted media
Founded in 2001 by West Papuan civil society, Jubi Media Papua’s English-language publication, the West Papua Daily, has become arguably the most trusted, independent source of news in the territory that has survived over its fearless approach to journalism.
“Our journalists are constantly intimidated,” Mambor said, “yet we continue to report the truth”.
The word Jubi in one of the most popular Indigenous Papuan languages means to speak the truth.
Mambor explained that the West Papua Daily remained a pillar of a vocal media movement to represent the wishes of the West Papuan people.
The stories published are without journalists’ bylines (names on articles) out of fear against retribution from the Indonesian military.
“We created a special section just to tell Pacific stories — to remind our people that we are not alone, and to reconnect West Papua with our Pacific identity,” Mambor said.
Lantipo spoke about the daily trauma faced by the Papuan communities which are caught in between the Indonesian military and the West Papua national liberation army who act on behalf of the ULMWP to defend its ancestral homeland.
‘Reports of killings, displacement’
“Every day, we receive reports: killings, displacement, families fleeing villages, children out of school, no access to healthcare,” Lantipo said.
“Women and children are the most affected.”
The journalists attending the seminar urged the Fijian, Melanesian and Pacific people to push for a greater awareness of the West Papuan conflict and its current situation, and to challenge dominant narratives propagated by the Indonesian government.
Laksono, who is ethnically Indonesian but entrenched in ongoing Papuan independence struggles, has long worked to expose injustices in the region.
“There is no hope from the Asian side,” Laksono said.
“That’s why we are here, to reach out to the Pacific.
“We need new audiences, new support, and new understanding.”
Arrested over tweets
Laksono was once arrested in September 2019 for publishing tweets about the violence from government forces against West Papua pro-independence activists.
Despite the personal risks, the “enemy of the state” remains committed to highlighting the stories of the West Papuan people.
“Much of Indonesia has been indoctrinated through school textbooks and [its] media into believing a false history,” he said.
“Our film tries to change that by offering the truth, especially about the so-called Act of Free Choice in 1969, which was neither free nor a genuine act of self-determination.”
Andrew Mathieson writes for the National Indigenous Times.
Melanesian supporters for West Papuan self-determination at The University of the South Pacific. Image: USP/NIT
A joint statement by the Media Freedom Coalition — signed by 27 countries, including New Zealand — urged Israel to offer protection for journalists in Gaza “in light of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe”.
“Journalists and media workers play an essential role in putting the spotlight on the devastating reality of war. Access to conflict zones is vital to carrying out this role effectively,” the statement said.
“We oppose all attempts to restrict press freedom and block entry to journalists during conflicts.
“We also strongly condemn all violence directed against journalists and media workers, especially the extremely high number of fatalities, arrests and detentions.
“We call on the Israeli authorities and all other parties to make every effort to ensure that media workers in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — local and foreign alike — can conduct their work freely and safely.
“Deliberate targeting of journalists is unacceptable. International humanitarian law offers protection to civilian journalists during armed conflict. We call for all attacks against media workers to be investigated and for those responsible to be prosecuted in compliance with national and international law.”
It reiterated calls for an immediate ceasefire, and the unconditional release of remaining hostages, unhindered flow of humanitarian aid.
The statement also called for “a path towards a two-state solution, long-term peace and security”.
Other countries to sign the statement included: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ukraine.
The Media Freedom Coalition is a partnership of countries that advocates for media freedom around the world. New Zealand joined the coalition in March 2021.
New Zealand was not among the signatories of this statement, which was signed by the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and 22 of its international partners — including Australia and Canada.
The statement called on Israel to reverse its decision.
“The decision by the Israeli Higher Planning Committee to approve plans for settlement construction in the E1 area, East of Jerusalem, is unacceptable and a violation of international law,” it said.
“Minister [Bezalel] Smotrich says this plan will make a two-state solution impossible by dividing any Palestinian state and restricting Palestinian access to Jerusalem. This brings no benefits to the Israeli people.
“Instead, it risks undermining security and fuels further violence and instability, taking us further away from peace.
“The government of Israel still has an opportunity to stop the E1 plan going any further. We encourage them to urgently retract this plan.”
The statement said “unilateral action” by the Israeli government undermined collective desire for security and prosperity in the Middle East.
“The Israeli government must stop settlement construction in line with UNSC Resolution 2334 and remove their restrictions on the finances of the Palestinian Authority.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Court records confirm what civil liberties advocates long warned would happen: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using sensitive data about wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico to track down immigrants for deportation.
Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, who is originally from Mexico, was not indicted for money laundering, human trafficking, or any of the grave offenses that law enforcement officials typically offer to justify financial surveillance of wire transfers.
Instead, he was indicted in early July on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico. This was the sole basis for the arrest warrant submitted by a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, which once marketed itself as hunting down war criminals and drug smugglers but under the current Trump administration has shifted resources toward tracking down undocumented people and criticsof Israel’s war on Gaza.
In a filing to a federal magistrate judge on June 25, HSI Special Agent Tabitha Hanson explained how she found Cordova Murrieta using financial surveillance data.
Using “information from a money remittance company,” Hanson identified 11 instances when Cordova Murrieta sent “individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico” October 2021 and May 2025. The financial data included an address in ‘Aiea, near Honolulu, where ICE agents surveilled Cordova Murrieta in mid-June and later arrested him on June 26.
“It is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions — like sending money to loved ones — into grounds for immigration enforcement.”
“It is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions — like sending money to loved ones — into grounds for immigration enforcement,” said Salmah Y. Rizvi, executive director of the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, in an emailed statement. “Hawaii’s large immigrant community relies on remittances to support families abroad, and this kind of government overreach creates a chilling effect, making people feel unsafe even doing everyday tasks.”
Jacquelyn Esser, a federal public defender representing Cordova Murrieta, said his was the only case she had seen in which ICE targeted an individual for deportation using remittance data.
Hanson’s affidavit did not identify the source of such detailed financial data, and ICE did not respond to questions about her investigation.
But ICE agents have access to detailed data about hundreds of millions of wire transfers to Mexico through a secretive database run by the Transaction Record Analysis Center, a nonprofit in Arizona.
The Arizona state attorney general’s office established TRAC in 2014 to house a database that, as of July 2024, contained records about nearly 340 million transfers sent via companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. Like her predecessors, the current attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, powers this data dragnet using administrative subpoenas served on the companies, which send data about their customers straight to TRAC.
“TRAC was, at least on paper, created to investigate money laundering,” said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, by email. “Sharing the information in TRAC with ICE is a prime example of function creep, when you gather all this information for one stated purpose but later use it for something else against a person’s set expectations.”
Hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country have access to TRAC’s data, but ICE has long played an outsized role in the nonprofit’s operations. ICE agents even used legally dubious subpoenas of their own to feed data about more than 6 million wire transfers into TRAC, until Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., exposed the arrangement in 2022.
The Intercept is currently suing the Arizona attorney general and TRAC under the state public records law, after both entities refused to release documents about the database earlier this year. Neither office responded to The Intercept’s questions for this article.
But both previously downplayed the possibility that ICE agents might use TRAC data to target immigrants for deportation.
“To our understanding there is nothing in the data TRAC collects that provides information on an individuals’ immigration status and TRAC data is used exclusively for money laundering investigations,” said Mayes’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, in an email in April.
“TRAC has a very clear data use policy that states that TRAC data is to be utilized for money laundering investigation purposes,” TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, wrote in a statement by email, also in April. “That data use policy has not changed during the current administration, nor has the routine monitoring of the system by TRAC personnel for any abuses.”
But Lebel was less categorical in a statement to Civil Beat, saying that money laundering constitutes “the majority of cases” for which agents use TRAC.
Before searching the TRAC database, agents must promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query, under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023.
Hanson did not respond to questions about what role, if any, TRAC data played in her surveillance of Cordova Murrieta, and, if so, what “predicate offense” she entered before accessing the data.
“The use of financial data in this way violates our assumed privacy and raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns,” said the ACLU’s Rizvi. “If this is what’s being done today, we must ask: what else are we surrendering to unchecked surveillance under the guise of enforcement?”
New Zealand’s police commissioner says he understands the potential impact the country’s criminal deportees have on smaller Pacific Island nations.
Commissioner Richard Chambers’ comments on RNZ Pacific Waves come as the region’s police bosses gathered for the annual Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police conference in Waitangi.
The meeting, which is closed to media, began yesterday.
Chambers said a range of issues were on the agenda, including transnational organised crime and the training of police forces.
Inspector Riki Whiu, of Northland police, leads (from right), Secretary-General of Interpol Valdecy Urquiza, Vanuatu Police Commissioner Kalshem Bongran and Northern Mariana Islands Police Commissioner Anthony Macaranas during the pōwhiri. Image: RNZ/Peter de Graaf
Across the Pacific, the prevalence of methamphetamine and its role in driving social, criminal and health crises have thrust the problem of organised crime into the spotlight.
Commissioner Chambers said New Zealand had offered support to its fellow Pacific nations to combat transnational organised crime, in particular around the narcotics trade.
Deportation policies
However, the country’s own transnational crime advisory group also identified the country’s deportation policies as a “significant contributor to the rise of organised crime in the Pacific”.
In 2022, a research report showed that New Zealand returned 400 criminal deportees to Pacific nations between 2013 and 2018.
The report from the Lowy Institute also said criminal deportees from New Zealand, as well as Australia and the US, were a significant contributor to transnational crime in the Pacific.
Te Waaka Popata-Henare, of the Treaty Grounds cultural group Te Pito Whenua, leads the Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police to Te Whare Rūnanga for a formal welcome. Image: RNZ/Peter de Graaf
When Chambers was asked about the issue and whether New Zealand’s criminal deportation policy undermined work against organised crime across the region, he said it had not been raised with him directly.
“The criminal networks that we are dealing with, in particular those such as the cartels out of South America, the CJNG [cartels] and Sinaloa cartels, who really do control a lot of the cocaine and also methamphetamine trades, also parts of Asia with the Triads,” Commissioner Chambers said.
“I know that the Pacific commissioners that I work with are very, very focused on what we can do to combat and disrupt a lot of that activity at source, in both Asia and South America.
“So that’s where our focus has been, and that’s what the commissioners have been asking me for in terms of support.”
Pacific nation difficulties
He said he understood the difficulties law enforcement in Pacific nations faced regarding criminal deportees, as New Zealand faced similar challenges under Australia’s deportation policy.
In New Zealand, the country’s returned nationals from Australia are known as 501 deportations, named after the section of the Australian Migration Act which permits their deportation due to criminal convictions.
These individuals have often spent the majority of their lives in Australia and have no family or ties to New Zealand but are forced to return due to Australia’s immigration laws.
New Zealand’s authorities have tracked how these deportees — who number in the hundreds — have contributed significantly to the country’s increasingly sophisticated and established organised crime networks over the past decade.
Chambers said that because police dealt with the real impacts of Australia’s 501 law, he could relate to what his Pacific counterparts faced.
“I understand from the New Zealand perspective [which is] the impact that New Zealand nationals returning to our country have on New Zealand, and the reality is, they’re offending, they’re re-offending.
“I suspect it’s no different from our Pacific colleagues in their own countries. And it may be something that we can talk about.”
This week’s conference was scheduled to finish tomorrow. Speakers due to appear included Interpol Secretary-General Valdecy Urquiza and Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Baron Waqa.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has condemned New Zealand’s “deliberate distraction” over sanctions against Israel and has vowed more protests against Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ “failed policy” on Gaza.
After the huge turnout of thousands in Palestine solidarity rallies across more than 20 locations in New Zealand last weekend, PSNA has announced it is joining an International Day of Action on September 6.
Rallies next weekend will have a focus on Israel’s targeted killing of journalists in Gaza.
PSNA co-chair John Minto said in a statement there was “an incredible show of marches and rallies throughout Aotearoa New Zealand for sanctions against Israel during the past weekend.”.
“But with [Foreign Minister] Peters obstinately running the Foreign Ministry, the government will ignore all expressions of public support for Palestinian rights.
“We’ll be back with even more people on the streets on the 6th.”
Shocking images
Minto said that number would have risen significantly in the past few weeks as people were seeing the shocking images of Israel’s widespread use of starvation as a weapon of war, especially against the children of Gaza.
“Around the world, governments are starting to respond to their people demanding sanctions on Israel to end the genocide.
A family rugged up against the rain and cold expressing their disappointment with New Zealand’s “weak” policy over the Gaza genocide last weekend. Image: Asia Pacific Report
“Yet, Winston Peters is most reluctant to even criticise Israel, let alone take any action.”
Minto said actions were vital otherwise Israel took no notice.
“We’ve seen Israel’s arrogant impunity in increasingly violent action and showing off its military capacity and intentions,” he said.
“Not a peep from our ministers over anything.
“Just on the Occupied West Bank, there are settlers freely shooting and lynching Palestinians.
New illegal settlement plans
“Israel’s Parliament has just voted to annex the West Bank, as plans are also announced for [an illegal] new settlement strategically designed to sever it irreparably into two parts.
“In Gaza, Israeli troops are reinvading Gaza City to ethnically cleanse a million people to the south and Israeli aircraft are still terror bombing a famine-devastated community.”
“That would mean an invasion of all of its neighbours and the extinction of at least Lebanon and Jordan, which in Israeli government eyes have no right to exist.”
The New Zealand government thought that it was “responding appropriately” by going through a process of considering recognition of a Palestinian state.
“That can only be seen as a deliberate distraction from a focus on sanctions,” Minto said.
“Back in 1947, New Zealand voted in the UN for a Palestinian state in part of Palestine.
“Recognition is token now, and it was token then, because the world stood aside and let Israel conquer all of Palestine, expel most of its people and impose an apartheid regime on those who managed to stay.”
Minto said the global movement in support of Palestinian rights would not be distracted.
Comprehensive sanctions were the only way to force an end to Israel’s genocide.
Australia slams Israeli PM
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that Australia has hit back at Netanyahu after the Israeli leader branded the country’s prime minister “weak”, with an Australian minister accusing the Israeli leader of conflating strength with killing people.
In an interview with Australia’s national broadcaster ABC, Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke said that strength was not measured “by how many people you can blow up or how many children you can leave hungry”.
Burke’s comments came after Netanyahu on Tuesday launched a blistering attack on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on social media, claiming he would be remembered by history as a “weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”.
Speaking on the ABC’s Radio National Breakfast programme, Burke characterised Netanyahu’s broadside as part of Israel’s “lashing out” at countries that have moved to recognise a Palestinian state.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
It’s now more than a week since Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced his government had begun to formally consider New Zealand’s position on the recognition of a Palestinian state.
That leaves two weeks until the UN General Assembly convenes on September 9, where it is expected several key allies will change position and recognise Palestinian statehood.
Already in a minority of UN member states which don’t recognise a Palestinian state, New Zealand risks becoming more of an outlier if and when Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom make good on their recent pledges.
Luxon has said the decision is “complex”, but opposition parties certainly don’t see it that way. Labour leader Chris Hipkins says it’s “the right thing to do”, and Greens co-leader Chloë Swarbrick has called on government MPs to “grow a spine” (for which she was controversially ejected from the debating chamber).
Former Labour prime minister Helen Clark has also criticised the government for trailing behind its allies, and for appearing to put trade relations with the United States ahead of taking a moral stand over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Certainly, those critics — including the many around the country who marched last weekend — are correct in implying New Zealand has missed several opportunities to show independent leadership on the issue.
The distraction factor While it has been open to New Zealand to recognise it as a state since Palestine declared its independence in 1988, there was an opportunity available in May last year when the Irish, Spanish and Norwegian governments took the step.
That month, New Zealand also joined 142 other states calling on the Security Council to admit Palestine as a full member of the UN. But in a subsequent statement, New Zealand said its vote should not be implied as recognising Palestinian statehood, a position I called “a kind of muddled, awkward fence-sitting”.
It is still not too late, however, for New Zealand to take a lead. In particular, the government could make a more straightforward statement on Palestinian statehood than its close allies.
The statements from Australia, Canada and the UK are filled with caveats, conditions and contingencies. None are straightforward expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian right of self-determination under international law.
As such, they present political and legal problems New Zealand could avoid.
Politically, this late wave of recognition by other countries risks becoming a distraction from the immediate starvation crisis in Gaza. As the independent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese have noted, these considered and careful diplomatic responses distract from the brutal truth on the ground.
This was also Chloë Swarbrick’s point during the snap debate in Parliament last week. Her private members bill, she noted, offers a more concrete alternative, by imposing sanctions and a trade embargo on Israel. (At present, it seems unlikely the government would support this.)
Beyond traditional allies Legally, the proposed recognitions of statehood are far from ideal because they place conditions on that recognition, including how a Palestinian state should be governed.
The UK has made recognition conditional on Israel not agreeing to a ceasefire and continuing to block humanitarian aid into Gaza. That is extremely problematic, given recognition could presumably be withdrawn if Israel agreed to those demands.
Such statements are not exercises in genuine solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, which is defined in UN Resolution 1514 (1960) as the right of peoples “to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development”.
Having taken more time to consider its position, New Zealand could now articulate a more genuine statement of recognition that fulfils the legal obligation to respect and promote self-determination under international law.
A starting point would be to look beyond the small group of “traditional allies” to countries such as Ireland that have already formally recognised the State of Palestine. Importantly, Ireland acknowledged Palestinian “peaceful self-determination” (along with Israel’s), but did not express any other conditions or caveats.
New Zealand could also show leadership by joining with that wider group of allies to shape the coming General Assembly debate. The aim would be to shift the language from conditional recognition of Palestine toward a politically and legally more tenable position.
That would also sit comfortably with the country’s track record in other areas of international diplomacy — most notably the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, where New Zealand has also taken a different approach to its traditional allies.
Content warning – this article discusses rape and other sexual offences. Reader discretion is advised.
In recent weeks, the right wing have staged protests outside asylum seeker hotels, under the guise of women and girls’ safety.
They’ve hijacked conversations around VAWG to fuel their anti-migrant agenda.
Now, more than 100 women’s rights groups have warned that this “impedes the real work of tackling the root causes of society-wide violence”.
Women and girls’ safety
In a statement, they said:
We have been alarmed in recent weeks by anincrease in unfounded claims made by people in power, and repeated in the media, that hold particular groups as primarily responsible for sexual violence. This not only undermines genuine concerns about women’s safety but also reinforces the damaging myth that the greatest risk of gender-based violence comes from strangers.
In the UK, almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse, while sexual offences are at the highest level ever recorded. Every four days, a man murders a current or previous partner. A partner or previous partner carries out one in two rapes against women.
More than 90% of the time, sexual offenders know their victims. When men rape, one in three of their victims is in their own home.
Women who cannot access public funds – such as welfare or housing – due to no recourse to public funds, are three times more likely to experience male violence
Gisela Valle, director of the Latin American Women’s Rights Service, said:
Gendered violence is committed in every economic group, ethnicity, age and social group, and overwhelmingly by the men who are in women and girls’ lives. Every single act of violence is an injustice, but when we focus on a few examples and ignore others, we allow dangerous myths to spread, particularly the myth that the greatest risk of sexual violence comes from strangers. This is a long-standing myth that makes it harder for survivors to seek justice and allows the people who harm the women and girls in their lives to hide behind racial stereotypes and scapegoating.
Tyrannising asylum seekers
Back in July, an asylum seeker was charged with a series of sexual offences against a teenage girl in Epping. He denied the charges, but was remanded in custody until the trial.
But as usual, the far-right has used it as an excuse to tyrannise all asylum seekers, with protests breaking out in Falkirk, London, Merseyside, the Midlands, and the south coast.
This is despite the fact that authorities do not accommodate most asylum seekers in hotels.
Faux moral outrage
How many white men have the police arrested, charged, or even convicted of violent offences against women or children in the last month?
It’s hard to get an exact figure, but in the last week alone:
In Scotland, police jailed a white man for sexual offences against a teenage girl.
The courts sentenced a white man in Wakefield to 20 years for a series of offences against two young girls.
In Skegness, another white man pleaded guilty to 12 separate offences against children.
In Rotherham, a jury found a white man guilty of raping a schoolgirl, and he will appear in court on August 21 for sentencing.
Five minutes and one Google search were all it took me to find those – and that’s just the start. All of the results on the first page of Google were white men – eight out of eight.
Where’s the outrage from the far right? Where are the protests in Scotland, Wakefield, Skegness and Rotherham? All it would take is one far-right gammon doing a quick Google search and seeing a sea of white faces in the results. They don’t exist – because the men most often convicted of violent sexual offences are white British men, and it was never about protecting women and girls.
The real data
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) holds some data on prosecutions for sexual offences by ethnicity in the UK. The most recent data is from 2023.
For charges that included a rape charge, the courts convicted 1,431 white people. In comparison, they only convicted 457 Black and brown people of the same crimes. Additionally, the ethnicities of 767 people were either not provided or not stated.
The data clearly shows that there were nearly three times as many white people convicted as non white people.
For sexual offences that excluded a rape charge, the gap in the numbers is even more drastic.
In the same time frame, the courts prosecuted 6,549 white people, compared to only 1,345 non whites. In 2,230 cases, the perpetrators did not disclose their ethnicities.
This is nearly five times as many convictions for violent sexual offences among white people.
Dr. Baljit Banga, CEO of Hibiscus, said:
Violence against women and girls is a social issue that requires urgent government action. The far right’s weaponisation of VAWG undermines efforts to safeguard victims and survivors. Moreover, targeting Black, minoritised, and migrant communities by distorting public debate and misinterpreting data only serves to exacerbate racial and social inequalities, to the detriment of women experiencing VAWG.
Media responsibility for hijacking women and girls’ safety
More recent figures are not available yet. However, a TikTokker revealed the stark difference in media coverage between white and Black and brown perpetrators of sexual violence. The one asylum seeker got more media coverage than all of the white men combined.
No wonder the right wing are enraged about asylum seekers committing sexual offences, when the media are giving them the majority of the airtime. The media has a lot to answer for when they seem to decide whether they want to cover a story based on the perpetrator’s skin colour.
But what’s clearer than ever is that if the far right were really committed to protecting women and girls, there would be protests every time a woman made an accusation against a white man. Tommy Robinson, Richard Tice, and Nigel Farage would all be taking to the streets if they really cared.
Instead, they are using ‘women and girls’ safety’ to hide their real motive – straight-up racism.
I unequivocally support Irish author Sally Rooney with all my heart and soul. The author risks imprisonment for donating funds from her books and the TV series based on Normal People to a Palestinian group.
Once again the United Kingdom tells Palestinians who they should support. Go figure.
In her opinion piece in The Irish Times last Saturday she said that:
“Activists who disrupt the flow of weapons to a genocidal regime may violate petty criminal statutes, but they uphold a far greater law and a more profound human imperative: to protect a people and culture from annihilation.”
Whenever the people resist or rebel they are deemed terrorists. That has been the case for indigenous people around the world from indigenous Americans to Indians in India to Aborigine and Māori, the Irish and the Scots, and the Welsh.
I went from being a “born-again” starry-eyed kibbutznik who believed in Zionism to a journalist who researched the facts and the hidden truths.
Those facts are revolting. Settler colonialism is revolting. Stealing homes is theft.
I kept in touch with some of my US-based Zionist kibbutznik mates. When I asked them to stop calling Palestinians animals, when I asked them not to say they had tails, when I asked them to stop the de-humanisation — the same de-humanisation that happened during the Nazi regime, they dumped me.
Zionism based on a myth
Jews who support genocide are antisemitic. They are also selfish and greedy. Zionists are the bully kids at school who take other kids toys and don’t want to share. They don’t play fair.
The notion of Zionism is based on a myth of the superiority of one group over another. It is religious nutterism and it is racism.
Empire is greed. Capitalism is greed. Settler colonialism involves extermination for those who resist giving up their land. Would you or I accept someone taking our homes, forcing us to leave our uneaten dinner on the table? Would you or I accept our kids being stolen, put in jail, raped, tortured.
Irish author Sally Rooney on why she supports Palestine Action and rejects the UK law banning this, and she argues that nation states have a duty not only to punish but also to prevent the commission of this “incomparably horrifying crime of genocide”. Image: Irish Times screenshot APR
The country was weird when I visited in 1982. It had just invaded Lebanon. Later that year it committed a genocide.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre was a mass murder of up to 3500 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s proxy militia, the Phalange, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The horrific slaughter prompted outrage and condemnation around the world, with the UN General Assembly condemning it as “an act of genocide”.
I had been primed for sunshine and olives, but the country gave me a chill. The toymaker I worked with was a socialist and he told me I should feel sorry for the Palestinians.
It isn’t normal for a country to be ruled by the militia. Gun-toting soldiers roamed the streets. But you need to defend yourself when you steal.
Paranoia from guilt
Paranoia is a consequence of a persecutor who fails to recognise their guilt. It happens when you steal. The paranoia happens when you close doors. When you don’t welcome the other — whose home you stole.
In 2014, soldiers of the IDF — a mercenary macho army — were charged with raping their own colleagues. Now footage of the rape of Palestinian men are celebrated on national television in Israel in front of live audiences. Any decent person would be disgusted by this.
The army under this Zionist madness has committed — and continues to commit — the crimes it lied about Palestinians committing. And yes, the big fat liar has even admitted its own lies. The bully in the playground really doesn’t care now, it does not have to persuade the world it is right, because it is supported, it has the power.
This isn’t the warped Wild West where puritans invented the scalping of women and children — the sins of colonisers are many — this is happening now. We can stand for the might of racism or we can stand against racist policies and regimes. We can stand against apartheid and genocide.
Indigenous people must have the right to live in their homeland. Casting them onto designated land then invading that land is wrong.
When Israelis are kidnapped they are called hostages. When Palestinians are kidnapped they are called prisoners. It’s racist. It’s cruel. It’s revolting that anyone would support this travesty.
Far far more Palestinians were killed in the year leading up to October 7, 2023, than Israelis killed that day (and we know now that some of those Israelis were killed by their own army, Israel has admitted it lied over and again about the murder of babies and rapes).
Ōtautahi author and journalist Saige England . . . “It isn’t normal for a country to be ruled by the militia. Gun-toting soldiers roamed the streets.” Image: Saige England
Mercenary macho army
So who does murder and rape? The IDF. The proud mercenary macho army.
Once upon a time, a Palestinian kid who threw a stone got a bullet between the eyes. Now they get a bullet for carrying water, for going back to the homeground that has been bombed to smithereens. Snipers enjoy taking them down.
Drones operated by human beings who have no conscience follow children, follow journalists, follow nurses, follow someone in a wheelchair, and blow them to dust.
This is a game for the IDF. I’m sure some feel bad about it but they have to go along with it because they lose privileges if they do not. This sick army run by a sick state includes soldiers who hold dual US and Israeli citizenship.
Earlier this year I met a couple of IDF soldiers on holidays from genocide, breezily ordering their lattes in a local cafe. I tried to engage with them, to garner some sense of compassion but they used “them” and “they” to talk about Palestinians.
They lumped all Palestinians into a de-humanised mass worth killing. They blamed indigenous people who lived under a regime of apartheid and who are now being exterminated, for the genocide.
The woman was even worse than the man. She loathed me the minute she saw my badge supporting the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aoteara. Hate spat from her eyes.
Madness.
De-brainwashing
I saw that the only prospect for them to change might be a de-brainwashing programme. Show them the real facts they were never given, show them real Palestinians instead of figments of their imagination.
It occurred to me that it really was very tempting to take them home and offer them a different narrative. I asked them if they would listen, and they said no. If I had forced them to come with me I would have been, you know, a hostage-taker.
Israel is evidence that the victim can become the persecutor when they scapegoat indigenous people as the villain, when they hound them for crime of a holocaust they did not commit.
And I get it, a little. My Irish and French Huguenot ancestors were persecuted. I have to face the sad horrid fact that those persecuted people took other people’s land in New Zealand. The victims became the persecutor.
Oh they can say they did not know but they did know. They just did not look too hard at the dispossession of indigenous people.
I wrote my book The Seasonwife at the ripe young age of 63 to reveal some of the suppressed truths about colonisation and about the greed of Empire — a system where the rich exploit the poor to help themselves. I will continue to write novels about suppressed truths.
And I call down my Jewish ancestors who hid their Jewishness to avoid persecution. I have experienced antisemitism.
Experienced cancelling
But I have experienced cancelling, not by my publisher I hasten to add, but I know agencies and publishers in my country who tell authors to shut up about this genocide, who call those who speak up anti-semitic.
I have been cancelled by Zionist authors. I don’t have a publisher like that but I know those who do, I know agencies who pressure authors to be silent.
I call on other authors to follow Rooney’s example and for pity’s sake stop referencing Hamas. Learn the truth.
Benjamin Netanyahu refused to deal with any other Palestinian representative. Palestinians have the right to choose their own representatives but they were denied that right.
What is a terrorist army? The IDF which has created killing field after killing field. Not just this genocide, but the genocide in Lebanon in 1982.
I have been protesting against the massacre of Palestinians since 2014 and I wish I had been more vocal earlier. I wish I had left the country when the Phalangists were killed. I did go back and report from the West Bank but I feel now, that I did not do enough. I was pressured — as Western writers are — to support the wrongdoer, the persecutor, not the victim.
I will never do that again.
Change with learning
I do believe that with learning we can change, we can work towards a different, fairer system — a system based on fairness not exploitation.
I stand alongside indigenous people everywhere.
So I say again, that I support Sally Rooney and any author who has the guts to stand up to the pressure of oppressive regimes that deny the rights of people to resist oppression.
I have spent a decade proudly standing with Palestinians and I will never stop. I believe they will be granted the right to return to their land. It is not anyone else’s right to grant that, really, the right of return for those who were forced out, and their descendants, is long overdue.
And their forced exile is recent. Biblical myths don’t stack up. Far too often they are stacked to make other people fall down.
Perhaps if we had all stood up more than 100,000 Palestinians would still be alive, a third of those children, would still be running around, their voices like bells instead of death calls.
I support Palestinians with all my heart and soul.
Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Starving Palestinian children line up for meals at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Aug. 18, 2025.Photo: Moiz Salhi/Anadolu via Getty Images
What killed Anne Frank?
The Nazis killed Anne Frank.
To suggest that any other cause was primary in her vastly premature death is tantamount to vile Holocaust denialism — which is why Holocaust denialists do indeed point out that Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
This is precisely the logic that Israel’s apologists in the media have deployed in recent days when it comes to the deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza. The right-wing Free Press published a story on Sunday, framed as an investigative exposé, revealing that at least 12 of the Palestinian children featured in viral images depicting the state of Israel-induced famine were not only starving, but … were also sick.
The supposed gotcha is that children with disabilities and preexisting health conditions, who cannot get the treatment and nutrition they need because of Israel’s genocidal siege, are not representative of the population. And — the horror! — photographs of these non-representative children are prompting global outrage.
The idea is we are supposed to be less horrified by the fact that children with disabilities like cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis are starving to death under the deliberate siege policies of a wealthy, occupying nation-state and its backers.
The Free Press is suggesting that in failing to either emphasize or mention the children’s health conditions as well as the Israel-induced malnutrition that is killing them, Western media sources using the images are unfairly maligning Israel — despite the fact that it is Israel’s genocidal actions that have brought the children to a condition of bare life. It is the very nature of genocide to involve the destruction of conditions necessary for sustaining life, such that sickness as well as direct slaughter destroys, in part or whole, the targeted population.
“This information does not change the fact that the children depicted in this story are suffering from malnutrition due to the difficulties they face accessing aid in Gaza, as reported,” a CNN spokesperson told the Free Press, after the publication informed the network that Hajjaj, a 6-year-old girl featured in a CNN story about starvation in Gaza, was not only starving but also had an “esophagus condition.”
Founded in 2021 by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, the Free Press pitches itself as home for “heterodox” thinking, but it has been a reliable platform for the anti-woke, anti-trans, and pro-Israel talking points of mainstream American conservatism. Weiss, who has dedicated her professional life to anti-Palestinian animus and unwavering support for Israel, is reportedly in talks with CBS’s new parent company Skydance about buying the online outlet for $250 million.
The Free Press is actively stoking genocide denial, but it’s not the first media organ to take this odious tack of minimization. In late July, the New York Times cravenly appended a lengthy editor’snote and update on a story featuring the image of emaciated 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq to include the fact that he had other health issues “affecting his brain and his muscle development.”
Even if Israel’s siege were only leading to the death of Palestinians with preexisting health issues and disabilities, we would still have on our hands a case of intolerable, eugenic slaughter — as if Palestinian sick children’s lives are worth less. Needless to say, Israel’s project of genocide and ethnic cleansing takes aim at all Palestinians.
The Free Press goes as far as to admit, “It’s not that there isn’t hunger in Gaza. There is.” It’s a gross understatement. As is well documented and widely recognized, Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza. This has been made clear in both intent — as expressed by Israeli government ministers — and effect, as evident in the mounting starvation-based death toll of a reported 266 people from malnutrition-related causes, likely a significant underestimate.
Reports from health care workers and international humanitarian groups, the desperate direct pleas of thousands and thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and the exorbitant prices of barely available basic ingredients all confirm the same. Israeli troops, and perhaps security contractors hired by an Israeli-backed aid group, have killed over 1,400 Palestinians attempting to get food at aid sites since May. Palestinians continue to try to access these death traps daily, simply because there is not enough food elsewhere — all by Israeli design.
As the historian Adam Tooze pointed out in a recent newsletter, the purposeful starvation of Gaza by Israel is exceptional. There are 11 places in the world currently where more people are at serious risk of hunger than in Gaza, including Yemen and Sudan, but Tooze pointed out that Gaza is unique: “Being the result of deliberate policy by a powerful state, commonly regarded as belonging to the exclusive club of ‘advanced economies’, the mass starvation in Gaza in the summer of 2025 is quite unlike that anywhere else in the world.”
Tooze added that, while around half of the populations of Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti are at risk of famine, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are. In Gaza, he writes, the “risk of famine is total.”
If a person can, after nearly two years of genocidal onslaught, witness the scenes and testimonies from Gaza — of which the images of these malnourished children are just a tiny slice — and find the main problem is that not enough people know that some of the most vulnerable in Israel’s genocide have preexisting health conditions, then we are not speaking from a framework of shared humanity.
I dare say there is nothing such a person could see of Palestinians suffering that would permit them to shift their worldview at this point, because the humanity of Palestinians has been a priori excluded from it.
The fact that the Free Press story’s authors and publishers do not see that their claim is the modern-day equivalent to suggesting that Frank primarily died of typhus makes all too clear that they do not see Palestinians as fully human. It is a supremacist, eugenicist lens that is beneath contempt, yes, but also beneath debate.
A worldview that holds Israel’s righteousness firmly at its center resists destabilization — even by images of systematically starved and slaughtered children and babies. After all, Zionist propaganda has for decades had to account for the fact that Israel maims, imprisons, and slaughters children. Images of dead Palestinian children and babies did not only start circulating in this genocidal phase of the ongoing Nakba.
A decade ago, the late Charles Krauthammer — a Zionist Washington Post columnist — wrote a column titled “Moral clarity in Gaza,” praising Israel’s actions during its 2014 Gaza assault, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians including over 500 children. Atrocity images circulated then, too, including photos of the mangled, limp frames of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach by Israeli missiles.
Krauthammer described the children as “telegenically killed” — a line that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself then picked up to blame Hamas for using the “telegenically dead.” Netanyahu admits that Israel’s victims are often telegenic — young children tend to be — but relies on dehumanization of Palestinians so inflexible that even the worst scenes of massacred and starved babies can be consumed without compelling immediate action against Israel as génocidaires.
The Free Press’s so-called corrections are a ghoulish reminder: It is not a problem of insufficient evidence, it is not a problem of knowledge, that continues to fuel, with support and funds, this genocide.
Why the recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia is an important development. Meanwhile, New Zealand still dithers. This article unpacks the hypocrisy in the debate.
ANALYSIS:By Paul Heywood-Smith
The recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia, leading, it is hoped, to full UN member state status, is an important development.
What has followed is a remarkable demonstration of ignorance and/or submission to the Zionist lobby.
Rewarding Hamas Let us consider aspects of the response. One aspect is that recognising Palestine is rewarding the resistance organisation Hamas.
There are a number of issues involved here. The first issue is that Hamas is branded as a “terrorist organisation”. So much is said, apparently, by eight nations compared to the overwhelming majority of UN recognised states which do not so regard it.
That was Hamas’s objective when it fought the election against Fatah in 2006.
As an aside, it now results in the lie that it is ridiculous that the Albanese government would recognise Palestine as part of a two-state solution when Hamas rejects a two-state solution. This is just yet another attempt to demonise Hamas.
Hamas leaders have repeatedly said they would accept a two-state solution. It has only recently done so again.
On 23 July last, when Hamas responded to a US draft ceasefire framework the Hamas official, Basem Naim, affirmed Hamas’s publicly stated pledge that it would give up power in Gaza and support a two-state solution on the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestine.
These are the very borders stipulated by international law — see hereunder.
The Palestinians constituting Hamas are residents of an illegally occupied territory. International law affords to them the right to resist: Geneva Conventions I-IV, 1949.
The hypocrisy associated with the demonisation of Hamas is massive. Much is made of hostages having been taken on 7 October 2023 — a war crime according to international law. Those militants who took the hostages might be forgiven for thinking that it was minimal compared with the seven years of non-compliance with Security Council Resolution (SCR) 2334 calling for the end of occupation and removal of settlements.
The events of October 7 are, in any event, shrouded in doubt. This follows from Israel’s suppression of evidence concerning what happened. What we do know is that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases on October 7.
In addition, the Hannibal Directive justified IDF slaughter of Israelis potentially being taken as hostages. It is also accepted that allegations of rape and beheading of babies by Hamas militants were false. The disinformation put out by Israel, and Israel’s refusal to allow journalists on site, or to interview participants, make it impossible to form any clear or credible understanding of what happened on October 7.
It is accepted that Hamas militants attacked three Israeli military bases, no doubt with the intention that those bases should withdraw from their positions relative to Gazan territory. Such action can be understood as consistent with an occupied citizenry resisting such illegal occupation.
Compounding the uncertainty over October 7 is the continuing conjecture, leakage, of information suggesting that the IDF had advance warning of the proposed Hamas attack but chose, for other purposes, to take no action. These uncertainties are never adverted to by our press which repeatedly attributes responsibility for all Israeli deaths on the day to the actions of Hamas militants, which actions are presented as an “abomination, barbarity”. Refer generally to P&I, November 5, 2023 (Stuart Rees) Expose and dismiss the domination Israeli narrative; P&I, January 4, 2024 Israeli general killed Israelis on 7 October and then lied about it.
The third issue, the major hypocrisy, is that Hamas is being rewarded. Consider the position of Israel. Israel is, and has been, illegally occupying Palestinian territory since 1967. This is undisputed according to international law as articulated in the following instruments:
1967 – SCR 242;
2004 – the ICJ decision concerning The Wall;
Dec. 2016 – SCR 2334, not vetoed by Obama, recognising the illegal occupation and calling for its end; and
2024 – the Advisory Opinion of the ICJ of 19 July.
Israel has done nothing to comply with any of these instruments. It is set on a programme of gradual acquisition.
The result is that now there are illegal settlements all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. When Israel is told: the West Bank and East Jerusalem are to be part of a Palestinian state, it will scream, “But large parts are occupied by Jewish Israelis!” These are “facts on the ground”.
Supporters of Israel ignore the fact that occupation by settlers occurred in the full knowledge that international law branded such occupation as illegal. If the settlements are considered as a “done deal”, that would be rewarding knowingly illegal conduct — some might say, Israeli terrorism.
So that there can be no doubt about the import of the position it is appropriate to specify the critical parts of SCR 2334:
The Security Council
Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace;
Reiterates its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard;
Underlines that it will not recognise any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations;
Stresses that the cessation of all Israeli settlement activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution, and calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the negative trends on the ground that are imperilling the two-State solution;.
Following the ICJ Advisory Opinion of July 19, the UN General Assembly in adopting the same set 17 September 2025 as the deadline for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory.
Negotiated settlement And when Israel now says, “Recognition now is going to prevent a negotiated settlement”, it is ignoring the fact that in the six, 12, 20 months, two, three, four years until such negotiated settlement occurs, many more settlements would have been commenced, which of course, are more “facts on the ground”.
Then we have the response of the Coalition, which demonstrates how irrelevant the Opposition is in today’s Australia. That response is that the recognition will inhibit a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.
The Coalition, however, says nothing about the fact that the Israeli government has repeatedly stated that there will never be a Palestinian State. Indeed, Israel has legislated to that effect and is moreover periodically purporting to annex Palestinian land.
So how does the Coalition believe that a negotiated settlement will come about? Well, one way, over which Israel may have no say, is for Palestine to become a full member State of the UN. One UN member state cannot occupy the land of another.
Failure of our press to ask any question of pro-Israel interviewees about the end of occupation is a disgrace.
Next challenge Now for the next challenge — to bring about the end of occupation. Israel will not accede readily. Sanctions must be the first step. Such sanctions must be immediate, concrete and crippling.
They must result in the immediate suspension of trade. That can be the first step.
Watch this space.
Paul Heywood-Smith is an Adelaide SC (senior counsel) of some 20 years. He was the initial chairperson of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association, an incorporated association registered in South Australia in 2004. He is the author of The Case for Palestine, The Perspective of an Australian Observer (Wakefield Press, 2014). This article was first published by Pearls & Irritations and is republished with permission.
In a rare win against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, a judge ordered that a detained 19-year-old asylum-seeker be released back to his family.
Oliver Mata Velasquez’s arrest outside a Buffalo, New York, court hearing on his asylum process was unlawful, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo wrote.
“Mata Velasquez followed all the rules,” Vilardo wrote, “On the other hand, the government changed the rules by fiat, applied them retroactively, and pulled the rug out from under Mata Velasquez and many like him who tried to do things the right way.”
In the weeks since, lawyers for Mata Velasquez said Vilardo’s order could influence similar cases and, they hope, lead to ICE releasing others arrested in immigration court.
Now, the New York Civil Liberties Union and other organizations have sued the Trump administration, seeking to end the practice of courthouse arrests nationwide.
“The court was rightfully outraged at the detention to begin with.”
Mata Velasquez was one of hundreds of people taken by ICE during its new practice of stationing agents outside of immigration courts around the country to make arrests when people show up for routine hearings. While judges have released several people arrested in the stakeouts on bond, few have ordered their outright release.
That’s what makes Mata Velasquez’s case so unique, said attorney Amy Belsher, who worked on the case and is the director of Immigrants’ Rights Litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“Outright release is really rare in an immigration case,” she said. “The court was rightfully outraged at the detention to begin with.”
The order could open the door for other defendants to find similar relief, said Sarah Gillman, director of strategic U.S. litigation with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and one of Mata Velasquez’s attorneys.
“We hope the decision sends a strong message about the actions of the government here,” she said. “I think that this ruling could definitely have an impact on these cases.”
“What’s going on with this administration is that they are testing the limits of everything,” Gillman added. “I think in Oliver’s case, the court sent a resounding message back, saying, ‘No.’ ”
The NYCLU, representing New York City-based immigrant advocacy organizations African Communities Together and The Door, is now asking a federal judge to overturn the Trump administration policies allowing for arrests in immigration court. They cite the cases of 10 people they allege were detained after showing up for otherwise routine immigration hearings.
“These policies are unlawful,” the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, argues. “Such arrests chill access to the courts and impede the fair administration of justice.”
The parties are due for an initial hearing on October 10. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)
New ICE Tactics
In the lawsuit, the NYCLU attorneys argue the Trump administration changed two key policies that have laid the groundwork for the arrests in immigration court.
First, they say, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection rescinded a Biden-era policy that formalized a long-standing practice, banning so-called courthouse arrests.
Second, the attorneys argue, the Executive Office for Immigration Review issued a new policy that empowered immigration judges to dismiss a broader category of cases than before.
Those two changes, the lawsuit alleges, have put in place a new practice where the government’s immigration lawyers move to dismiss cases verbally, a judge grants the dismissal, and then a migrant is detained shortly thereafter while still in the court building.
“ICE officers — in coordination with DHS attorneys — station themselves in immigration court, including in the hallways or even in courtrooms, so that they can immediately arrest and detain individuals upon conclusion of their court hearings,” the lawsuit says.
That’s exactly what happened to Mata Velasquez.
On the morning of May 21, Mata Velasquez showed up for a routine immigration hearing in downtown Buffalo. The courthouse, located at 130 Delaware Avenue, is in a nondescript office building located near Niagara Square and Buffalo City Hall.
Born in Venezuela, Mata Velasquez arrivedin the U.S. in September 2024 after waiting for an appointment via the CBPOne application, a process put in place by the Biden administration. Once in Buffalo, he lived with an uncle and, like other migrants in the city, found work in a local hotel as a housekeeper.
Following his court hearing, his lawyers later said, he took the elevator down from the third floor. Waiting for him in the small lobby were four ICE agents.
Mata Velasquez speaks only Spanish, but the agents had paperwork in English and demanded that he sign it, according to both Mata Velasquez’s lawyers and his uncle. His uncle described them as wearing civilian clothes, not ICE uniforms.
Mata Velasquez was then detained and sent to the ICE detention center located in Batavia, about 40 miles east of the courthouse.
“He was really scared when they pressured him to sign this form,” his uncle, who requested anonymity for fear of being targeted by ICE, said in an interview. “My nephew is a good person. He doesn’t have a criminal record or any tattoos. He’s a good person, he’s a kid.”
Mata Velasquez’s lawyers, in their successful petition to have him released, said he was afraid while in the Batavia facility and routinely harassed by others.
“Oliver is terrified and experiencing the harms of being in a carceral setting for the first time,” that petition said. “He has experienced harassment from at least 10 other detainees, many of whom are much older than him. Officers threatened to place him in solitary confinement and Oliver is very scared of being put in such isolating conditions.”
Mata Velasquez ultimately spent 26 days in the Batavia facility before Vilardo,the federal judge in Buffalo, ordered him released.
“Rarely do we ever get somebody’s outright relief granted,” said Jillian Nowak, managing attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York. “And I’m hoping we can use this as a foundational decision to pump the brakes on some of these detentions.”
Bid to End Court Arrests
Facing an uphill battle in getting all courthouse arrestees released, the legal advocacy organizations are shifting their strategy to challenge as a system what they argue are unlawful policies. Belsher, of the NYCLU, said doing so is necessary to combat the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants.
“This is a broader strategy of the government’s, right? Just flood the system,” Belsher said. “They are causing enormous harm by just doing unlawful things at scale.”
Every individual case requires intensive resources.
“They are doing this to hundreds of people,” she said, “and thousands of people are terrified to go to their hearings because of it.”
The lawsuit argues that allowing the courthouse arrests to continue will only enableICE to detain more people, putting more strain on detention centers that are already at or over capacity. Through June, data shows that ICE has doubled arrests compared to 2024. The majority of those arrested have no criminal record, despite the rhetoric published by ICE and the White House.
“Due to the increase in arrests and related overcrowding at many of its detention facilities, ICE has been detaining noncitizens swept up in immigration courthouse arrests in transitional holding facilities for prolonged periods — in some cases over a week — where they lack access to counsel and are in conditions wholly inadequate to safely and humanely detain people,” the suit alleges.
Statewide, four county sheriffs have newly agreed to allow ICE to detain migrants in their jails. In New York City, arrests and detentions in the federal building at 26 Federal Plaza have raised alarm among immigration advocates.
Gillman, one of Mata Velasquez’s lawyers, said she hopes the Vilardo ruling and subsequent NYCLU lawsuit shifts the tide.
“As the judge wrote in his decision, the government … can’t just kind of change the goalpost and say, ‘Now we’re just going to go out and arrest people without any type of process, without any type of due process,’” she said. “As a lawyer, the legal decision that the judge made is very, in my mind, impactful.”
Seeing video evidence this week of the physical and psychological mistreatment of the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti sickened me. I have written a number of articles about Marwan.
Researching and writing builds knowledge and empathy and I am one of those who believes, given the opportunity, he really could be the Palestinian Mandela. How should you and I respond to this criminality by the Israeli state?
Marwan’s wife and human rights activist Fadwa Barghouti, was shocked to see the heavy toll the Israelis had inflicted on a man legendary for his indomitable spirit.
“I didn’t recognise you or your features, and maybe part of me doesn’t want to admit everything your face and body express about what you and the prisoners have endured,” she wrote in a public message to her husband.
“They are still, Marwan, chasing you and pursuing you even after 23 years in prison and in the solitary cell you’ve been living in for two years.”
She added: “I know that the only thing that hurts you is the inability to protect Palestinian children.”
NEW: Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir filmed threatening Marwan Barghouti, the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, during a prison visit.
“Whoever murders our children… we will obliterate them.”
International protocols on prisoner treatment The mistreatment of prisoners like Marwan Barghouti is a crime under international law; the relevant international protocols include: Geneva Convention IV (1949) — Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War; Common Article 3 (minimum protections including bans on torture, cruel treatment, and “outrages upon personal dignity”); UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules).
These establish prohibitions against torture, degrading treatment, and requirements for humane conditions of detention. Look at Marwan Barghouti and weep that we support Israel, a state that has defecated on the Geneva Convention, the Genocide Convention and every memorial to the victims of the Shoah.
The Israelis, “our allies”, have committed rape-murders of prisoners (documented in their own posted videos), killed countless Palestinian leaders and hold thousands of hostages in gruesome captivity — even as they commit ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and forced starvation in Gaza.
Barghouti, who would win any free and fair elections in Palestine in a landslide, has since 2023, according to human rights organisations, been repeatedly assaulted and subjected to Abu Ghraib-style treatment, had joints dislocated and other forms of torture while our governments turn a blind eye and work day and night to provide the Israelis with the political cover needed to pursue the Greater Israel project.
Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti has now been in prison for 23 years so far . . . he would win any free and fair elections in Palestine in a landslide, but he has been repeatedly assaulted and subjected to Abu Ghraib-style treatment by the Israelis. Image: The New Arab
Terrible news from Yousef Aljamal I also received terrible news this week that my friend Yousef Aljamal had suffered yet another horror at the hands of the Israelis: his sister Somaiya, 35; her husband Anas, 35; and their daughters Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, had been killed in an Israeli missile attack earlier this month as they slept.
A third daughter, Noor, 14, was injured and is now the family’s sole survivor.
I interviewed Yousef in my home in Wellington a few weeks ago; it was a privilege and an education to spend time with the distinguished Palestinian writer. As I said in the subsequent article, the encounter made visceral for me that word genocide.
Sitting opposite me in my study in my serene Wellington coastal suburb, Yousef told me of the 40 members of his family who had been murdered by the Israelis. Now four more members of his family have been taken.
These are people like us, with feelings like us. They are not the Hated Others so long painted by our mainstream media as unworthy of naming, unworthy of human dignity.
The collective West is responsible under law The Israelis have turned Gaza into a hellscape that would shock Dante Alighieri. Over two million people are being tortured in the cruellest way every day and our governments refuse to intervene in powerful and meaningful ways.
According to whistleblower US Green Beret Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Anthony Aguilar, the Israelis and the American GHF contractors use pepper spray and gunfire instead of signs to direct the human traffic. Waves of suffering humanity are tossed hither and thither on a sea of diabolical inhumanity. Nearly 2000 starving innocents have been gunned down while seeking food.
To be blunt: If the Israelis don’t want to be likened to the Nazis, they should stop acting like Nazis.
The responsibility to prevent and punish This evil is supported to astonishing lengths by the morally empty governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, of course, the great arsenals of genocide the US, UK and Germany. The leaders of the powerful Western countries are fully aware of what is being done and allow it to continue — and therefore represent the moral nadir of our species.
Leaders like Anthony Albanese, Christopher Luxon and Keir Starmer make corporeal the term Banality of Evil. They calculate, they mumble and equivocate, then they comply with the Americans. “Genocide enabler” should be their sole epitaph.
Our countries are signatories to the Genocide Convention, the first Article of which states: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”
Prevent and punish. Legal scholars and the ICJ’s opinions affirm that states providing military, financial, or political support with knowledge of likely genocidal acts risk being found complicit.
Our governments have failed to reach the lowest bar of human decency or fulfil this fundamental duty. It is up to us to act. If it was right to oppose Nazism in the Second World War it is most certainly a moral imperative to oppose the brand of Nazism the Jewish State of Israel has created today. We must find the courage to oppose them.
The International Court of Justice ruled in 2007 in the ICJ Bosnia Genocide case that Serbia was guilty of breaching its duty to prevent the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica. Countries like the UK, Germany, New Zealand and Australia would likely, if international law was applied evenly, be found similarly culpable for failing to prevent genocide by Israel and the US.
This is the legal concept of erga omnes partes, the collective responsibility that signatory states share.
On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel faces credible allegations of genocide in Gaza and imposed urgent, legally binding measures, including an obligation to allow humanitarian access and prevent genocidal acts. All our states are fully aware Israel has defied this ruling.
War crimes tribunals on the Palestine Genocide will be essential to restore international law. War criminals whether in Tel Aviv, London, Canberra or Wellington must one day face justice.
In a recent article I described Stéphane Hessel, a leading member of the French Resistance, who survived time in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald. After the war he was one of the co-authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a pillar of international law to this day. The Declaration affirms the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans.
In later years Hessel (d. 2013), who was Jewish, saw the treatment of the Palestinians as an affront to this and repeatedly called Israel out for crimes against humanity.
Hessel argued people needed to be outraged just as he and his fellow fighters had been during the war. In 2010, he said: “Today, my strongest feeling of indignation is over Palestine, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The starting point of my outrage was the appeal launched by courageous Israelis to the Diaspora: you, our older siblings, come and see where our leaders are taking this country and how they are forgetting the fundamental human values of Judaism.”
Imagine what action he would call for today.
Aaron Bushnell’s challenge to us So, back to the core challenge I posed at the beginning. Are we willing to do what it takes to save Marwan Barghouti, to save our brothers and sisters in Palestine?
As Aaron Bushnell, the active duty US serviceman said the day he self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington last year to protest the genocide against the Palestinian people:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or Apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
The case of a 7-year-old detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents sparked indignation across New York City. The child, however, is not the first New York youth caught up in President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant dragnet.
The Intercept has confirmed the identity of a 15-year-old Manhattan high school student deported to Ecuador after a secretive detention that involved days trapped inside hotels hundreds of miles away, while unable to contact the outside world.
The teen, Roger Iza, and his father, Edison Iza, were arrested by ICE at a check-in in New York on August 9 and, after being whisked to hotels in Louisiana then Texas, deported to Ecuador on August 14, the pair said by phone from Quito.
“We couldn’t call or go on the web to ask for help,” Roger said. “Without our phones, we didn’t know any names or phone numbers.”
“We couldn’t call or go on the web to ask for help.”
ICE’s latest published data, from June and July, indicates that 48 minors were arrested in New York City, some counties north of the city, and parts of Long Island during those months, and 32 of them had been deported by last week. But who those children are is frequently shrouded in mystery. Roger Iza’s is the first account from a minor deportee to emerge from the Trump administration’s crackdown on New York City.
Detention centers operated by ICE allow unlimited phone calls to anyone with the money to pay for them or make collect calls; they also allow for attorney calls. The case of the 7-year-old and her mother has been highly publicized and garnered efforts by immigration activists, political leaders, and school administrators to keep her in the U.S.
Roger, however, was not in a detention center where it would have been relatively easy to communicate with the outside world. He was locked up with his father in a private hotel, with no ability to use the internet or phone to get attention to his case before it was too late. (ICE did not respond to questions for this story.)
As the immigration detention system is becoming more overcrowded, authorities are turning to hotels to house detainees. Earlier this month, The Intercept and Injustice Watch reported on the case of a mother and her infant son, a U.S. citizen, being locked incommunicado inside a Chicago Sonesta hotel for five days by ICE contractors. Roger, an immigrant minor himself, is the latest child known to have been detained by ICE in private hotels.
There may be many other such children.
Roger Iza, 15.Courtesy of Iza’s friend.
Snatched at ICE Check-in
Two years ago, Edison and Roger Iza traveled to the Mexican border and presented themselves to border agents in El Paso, Texas, to apply for asylum. They soon ended up in New York City, in a hotel near Times Square that was repurposed as a shelter for asylum seekers. The New York Department of Education enrolled Roger, who was 13 at the time, in a public middle school near Union Square, where he quickly made an impression.
“Most of the immigrant kids kept to themselves, but Roger wasn’t insular,” said a native-born classmate who grew close to Roger there and requested anonymity for privacy because he is a minor. “He was fascinated with America and really into being an American. For instance, if people pronounced his name like in Spanish, ‘Ro-hair,’ he would say ‘No!’ and demand that they pronounce it like in English.”
Despite a language barrier, the two became good friends. They rented Citi Bikes and rode to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. While Roger’s dad worked in construction, Roger spent time at his classmate’s apartment after school.
“He was giggly, shy, and joyous,” the classmate’s mother recalled. “And so sweet and polite.”
After Roger completed middle school, he enrolled in the Manhattan Academy for Arts and Language, near the Empire State Building.
In October of last year, an immigration judge in Manhattan denied a joint petition for asylum submitted by the Izas. They had filed it without a lawyer’s assistance because they could not afford counsel. Edison Iza said in an interview that he applied for asylum due to his inability to make a living in his home country because his business was constantly threatened by extortionists. Their attempt to appeal also failed.
In July, the Izas said, they were ordered to report to ICE for a check-in — a monitoring program requiring in-person attendance. The first meeting concluded without incident. Meanwhile, Roger attended a summer class at his high school, to raise a poor grade he’d gotten in math during the regular academic year.
According to a document examined by The Intercept, however, he and his father were ordered to appear at another check-in on August 9 — and this time they were arrested.
Edison, by phone from Quito, said, “It was so unexpected.”
“They Monitored Us”
Edison said that he and his son were taken to a holding area in a federal building in Manhattan, where their phones were seized. Roger recalled that within hours they were driven to LaGuardia Airport and put on a plane bound for Louisiana.
The Izas were taken to a Sheraton hotel in Alexandria, Louisiana, according to location information from Roger’s phone shared with The Intercept. The hotel is near a major ICE holding facility that serves as a deportation hub for Central and South America. (Neither the hotel nor Marriott International, Sheraton’s parent company, immediately responded to requests for comment.)
The father and son were told by security officers that they could make one call a day that could last for at most two minutes. They were ordered to speak in loud voices when they made the call, and not to disclose their location.
“They monitored us,” Roger said.
They made calls to Roger’s grandmother in New York. She said that Roger’s math teacher had called to ask why he wasn’t in class.
“When my grandmother told her I was being deported,” Roger said, “the teacher said that I could get a lawyer, but I would have to be in New York for that.”
The teacher may have been talking about the possibility of an attorney filing a habeas motion in a New York federal district court to free Roger. But he was no longer in New York, and he couldn’t contact his teacher.
After four days in the hotel, the Izas said they were flown to McAllen, Texas, and put into another hotel under the same conditions of isolation. Roger said they had no privacy.
“The guards were with us day and night, and they wrote down everything we did, even when I went to the bathroom. We couldn’t leave the room. We couldn’t even look out the window.”
The Izas were put on an ICE deportation flight to Guayaquil, Ecuador, on August 14.
When the father and son landed in Guayaquil and were given back their phones, the first person Roger called was his American friend, who was shocked to hear what had happened.
“It’s hard for me to comprehend that I might never see him again,” the friend said.
In a major victory, on Friday 15 August a US federal court struck down the US federal government’s – via Donald Trump – latest bid to attack migrant children’s rights.
The court win centred round a foundational legal safeguard called the Flores Settlement Agreement that ensures the government respects their basic rights and dignity. Notably, it requires the federal government to treat children in immigration custody humanely, hold them in the least restrictive settings, prioritise release to family, and provide access to basic necessities such as clean water, food, medical care, and safe, sanitary living conditions.
US court reaffirms migrant children’s rights – despite what Trump wants
Friday’s ruling reaffirmed that children – whether accompanied by their families or arriving alone – remain entitled to these basic human rights. The court’s decision preserves critical court oversight. It blocks the government from detaining children indefinitely in inhumane, unlicensed, or dangerous facilities.
US district judge Dolly Gee issued her ruling, finding that:
The Court remains unconvinced. There is nothing new under the sun regarding the facts or the law.
Thus, it is the government that continues to bind itself to the Flores Settlement Agreement by failing to fulfill its side of the Parties’ bargain. In light of the foregoing, the Court again DENIES Defendants’ MTT.
Executive director of the CHRCL Sergio Perez said:
The court’s vindication of Flores is a victory that belongs to each and every immigrant child currently detained by our government.
Children should be free and, barring that, they should be cared for in environments that respect their basic human rights and essential needs. So long as that is not the case, Flores provides an essential avenue for transparency and accountability.
No to indefinite detention and violation of migrant children’s right
This decision comes at a critical moment. Trump and the US are increasingly subjecting migrant children and families to prolonged detention in isolated, prison-like conditions. The government’s attempt to dismantle the Flores Agreement – which it has repeatedly violated – would have thrown the door open to mass, indefinite detention of children without any enforceable standards for their care.
Directing Attorney at the NCYL Mishan Wroe said:
I will never forget meeting with a mother and her two young daughters who described being detained in a cell with over 40 people that was littered with trash and an overflowing toilet. They could not use the bathroom privately, and the girls were struggling to sleep in a crowded cell on the floor with nothing more than a mat and a mylar blanket. These young girls, like all children, deserve safety and dignity.
We are pleased the court understands the value of the Settlement in protecting the rights of children and refuses to allow the government to shirk its basic responsibilities.
Friday’s ruling sends a clear message: migrant children are not invisible. They deserve care, dignity, and full recognition of their human rights.. Strong, enforceable protections under the Flores Agreement remain essential to shield children from the deprivation and distress of immigration detention. These are harms that children themselves have made heartbreakingly clear.
A 16-year-old child ICE detained in a family detention center confided how:
Some things here are really bad – really scary. This place is full of little kids . . . I don’t want any more kids to come here. I don’t like seeing all the kids crying.
Trump cannot be allowed free rein to rip children from their communities
Deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights Leecia Welch said:
At a time when the government seeks free rein to rip children from their communities and detain them for as long as it wishes, I am grateful for the court’s well-reasoned decision to protect the Flores Settlement Agreement from the Trump Administration’s most recent attack.
My colleagues and I have seen the looks of desperation and fear on the faces of children as they describe their captivity in brutal, prison-like settings. Flores is the only thing standing between them and their indefinite detention in ever harsher conditions.
For nearly 30 years, the Flores Settlement Agreement has stood as a cornerstone of legal protections for migrant children. It has ensured state authorities treat them with basic care and dignity.
However, repeated violations underscore the continued need for Flores court oversight. Violations included unlicensed family detention, forced medication of children, and the use of open-air detention sites at the border. Now more than ever, these protections must be defended and strengthened. Without Flores, children would be left entirely at the mercy of a system that has consistently failed them.
As long immigration detention continues to mete out profound harms, Flores co-counsel has said it will remain steadfast in defending their rights. It will continue to hold the government accountable for how it treats children in its custody. It argued that:
this fight to preserve the Flores Agreement is not only about legal protections – it’s about the kind of country we choose to be for the most vulnerable in our care.
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.
The main problem in for Fiji retirement is that there is no law to protect the Fiji National Provident Fund, claims a leading trade unionist.
Fiji Trades Union Congress national executive board member and National Union of Hospitality Catering and Tourism Industries Employees general secretary Daniel Urai has told the FNPF 2011 Act review committee in Lautoka that a law needed to be put in place to ensure that the FNPF and its members are protected.
“Whenever something happens, a new government comes in — they will tell FNPF to remove all their investments abroad,” Urai said at the hearing on Friday.
“And that has an effect on the FNPF investment. So, I hope you will find a way to put in a law that no one just comes and directs FNPF to remove all its investments, and that has happened in the past.
“And I hope you can look at ways to ensure that it does not happen.
“Because every time that happens, FNPF loses, and the returns are not what is expected.”
Fiji Trades Union Congress national secretary and FNPF 2011 Act review committee member Felix Anthony claimed the government had interfered with FNPF’s overseas investments in 2007.
Withdrew investments abroad
“Soon after the coup, the government, actually through the Reserve Bank of Fiji (RBF), suggested that FNPF withdraw all its investments abroad,” Anthony said.
“Just so that they keep the Fijian dollar afloat, and that actually affected FNPF income and had some financial ratification on the FNPF bottom line.
“There was some consideration given whether the RBF itself should compensate FNPF for that directive, and nothing eventuated, of course, because the government had a stronghold at that time.”
The Fiji National Provident Fund is conducting a comprehensive review of the FNPF Act 2011 to ensure the law is modern, effective, and continues to meet the retirement needs of Fijians.
The public consultation continued at the Labasa Civic Centre today and will be in Suva tomorrow.
On Sunday 17 August, campaign group Defend Our Juries levelled a contempt of court complaint against the home secretary Yvette Cooper over an article in the Observer. Notably, this was after she made repeated insinuations that the government proscribed Palestine Action because of violence against people.
Yvette Cooper’s Observer article: more lies from the home secretary
Defend Our Juries addressed the complaint to attorney general Richard Hermer KC MP.
In the Observer on Sunday, Cooper penned a piece titled Yvette Cooper: Palestine Action’s violent criminality is not lawful protest. In this, she said:
Demonstrating is vital to free speech but this right does not extend to violence, intimidation and inflicting injuries
However, as the documentary record disclosed in the legal proceedings before the High Court makes clear, the basis for the proscription was damage to property, specifically damage to the weapons Elbit Systems UK supplies to the Israeli military.
The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) actually advised that:
In support of its aims and objectives, the group primarily uses direct action tactics, the majority of which would not constitute an act of terrorism as defined under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000, on the basis that any damage to property is typically more minor. Common tactics include graffiti, petty vandalism, occupation and lock-ons.
It also noted that Palestine Action:
media channels highly likely will only share footage, or encourage, instances of property damage. PA branded media will highly unlikely explicitly advocate for violence against persons.
Moreover, the Proscription Review Group (PRG) advised that a ban on Palestine Action would be “novel and unprecedented”, because:
there was no known precedent of an organisation being proscribed… mainly due to its use or threat of action involving serious damage to property.
Out of nearly 500 Palestine Action actions since 2020, there is an allegation before the courts that in one of those actions, which took place over a year ago, the arrest process became violent, resulting in an injury to a police officer. However, Defend Our Juries highlighted that these are in fact “contested allegations”. Crucially, these have yet to be tested in a court of law. Yet Yvette Cooper alleged them in her Observer column, regardless.
Constituting contempt of court: prejudicing the jury
In its letter to Attorney General, Defend Our Juries said of Yvette Cooper and her Observer column:
It is not only disingenuous to present this isolated case as characteristic of Palestine Action, it is a contempt of court that prevents fair trials of those who stand accused. Yvette Cooper’s comments have been widely publicised, such that it would be impossible to find a jury unaffected by them.
We are not naïve regarding the political obstacles to commencing contempt of court proceedings against the Home Secretary.
But if the rule of law means anything, it is that no-one is above the law, most particularly the rich and powerful, such as Elbit Systems UK and Yvette Cooper. It is particularly egregious for a Home Secretary to abuse their office in this way, to present a false and misleading picture of those who face serious criminal charges.
Cooper referred to Israel’s starvation and slaughter of the Palestinian people as “crimes against humanity” in her Observer article. She wrote that:
So anyone who wants to protest against the catastrophic humanitarian situation and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to oppose Israel’s military offensive, or to criticise the actions of any and every government, including our own, has the freedom to do so.
So far as Defend Our Juries are aware, this is the first time the government has formally recognised that Israel is committing crimes against humanity.
This recognition comes with profound consequences in terms of the legal obligations that ensue.
In closing, Defend Our Juries said they will draw their letter to the attention of the legal representatives of those facing trial – known as the Filton 24. They told the attorney general that they would be grateful for an early response to their letter “given the implications”.
Ultimately, the group argued that:
Palestine Action were not proscribed for their own violence, but for exposing the Government’s complicity, when they spray-painted those planes at Brize Norton, drawing attention to the daily RAF flights to Gaza, in support of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
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 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.
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.
(@taliaotg) 
NEW: Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir filmed threatening Marwan Barghouti, the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, during a prison visit.
First time Barghouti seen publicly in years — frail, gaunt, unrecognisable.… 
