Israeli authorities report 370 missiles fired by Iran in total, 30 reaching their targets. Iranian military report they have carried out 550 drone operations.
In response, Iran has issued a warning to evacuate the central offices of Israeli television channels 12 and 14.
An Israeli attack on a Red Crescent ambulance in Tehran resulted in the deaths of two relief workers.
Israel’s Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich, who is accused of being a war criminal and the target of sanctions by five countries including New Zealand, claims they have hit 800 targets in Iran, with aircraft flying freely in the nation’s airspace.
In the West Bank, the tension continues, with business continuing at a subdued level, everyone waiting to see how the situation will unfold.
Israel’s illegal siege continues, cutting off cities and villages from one another, while blocking ambulances and urgent medical access in several locations today.
Israeli and Iranian strikes are expected to continue, and potentially escalate, over the coming days.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Iranian missiles raining down on Tel Aviv as seen from the occupied West Bank. Image: CM screenshot APR
Israel targeted one of the buildings of the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) in Tehran on the fourth day of attacks on Iran, interrupting a live news broadcast, reports Press TV.
The attack, involving at least four bombs, struck the central building housing IRIB’s news department, while a live news broadcast was underway.
The transmission was briefly interrupted before Hassan Abedini, IRIB’s news director and deputy for political affairs, appeared on air to condemn the “terrorist crime”.
At the time of the attack, news anchor Sahar Emami was presenting the news. Despite the building trembling under the first strike, she stood her ground and continued the broadcast.
“Allah o Akbar” (God is Great), she proclaimed, drawing global attention to the war crime committed by Israel against Iran’s national broadcaster.
Moments later, another blast filled the studio with smoke and dust, forcing her to evacuate. She returned shortly after to join Abedini and share her harrowing experience.
“If I die, others will take my place and expose your crimes to the world,” she declared, looking straight into the camera with courage and composure.
Casualties unconfirmed While the number of casualties remains unconfirmed, insiders reported that several journalists inside the building had been injured in the bombing.
Israel’s war ministry promptly claimed responsibility for the attack.
Iran’s foreign ministry condemned the aggression on the state broadcaster as a “war crime” and called on the United Nations to take immediate action against the regime.
. . . But after a brief interruption on screen as debris fell from a bomb strike, Sahar Emami was back courageously presenting the news and denouncing the attack. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei denounced the attack and urged the international community to hold the regime accountable for its assault on the media.
“The world is watching: targeting Iran’s news agency #IRIB’s office during a live broadcast is a wicked act of war crime,” Baghaei wrote on X.
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) also condemned the bombing of the IRIB news building, labeling it an “inhuman, criminal, and a terrorist act.”
CPJ ‘appalled’ by Israeli attack The Committee to Protect Journalists said it was “appalled by Israel’s bombing of Iran’s state TV channel while live on air.”
“Israel’s killing, with impunity, of almost 200 journalists in Gaza has emboldened it to target media elsewhere in the region,” Sara Qudah, the West Asia representative for CPJ, said in a statement after the attack on an IRIB building.
The Israeli regime has a documented history of targeting journalists globally. Since October 2023, it has killed more than 250 Palestinian journalists in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The regime launched its aggression against the Islamic Republic, including Tehran, early on Friday, leading to the assassination of several high-ranking military officials, nuclear scientists, and civilians, including women and children.
In response, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones late Friday night, followed by more retaliatory operations on Saturday and Sunday as part of Operation True Promise III.
In Israel, 24 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since hostilities began. In Iran, 224 people have been killed.
Plumes of black smoke billowing after an Israeli attack against Iran’s state broadcaster yesterday. Image: PressTV
Iran and Israel are at war, with the US already intimately involved and likely to become more so. Which of course means we’ll be spending the foreseeable future getting bashed in the face with lies from the most powerful people in the world.
The most immediately obvious of these is the Netanyahu-promoted narrative that Israel initiated this conflict because Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon.
With absolutely no self-consciousness or sense of irony, the Israeli prime minister followed the attacks with a statement accusing Iran of “genocidal rhetoric” which it has backed up “with a programme to develop nuclear weapons.”
We are, of course, being lied to about Iran Video: Caitlin Johnstone
“And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu claimed. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months — less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”
The Western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “pre-emptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true.
Benjamin Netanyahu has spent literally decades falsely claiming that Iran was a year or two away from developing a nuke, only to have the calendar prove him wrong with the passage of time over and over again.
Iran and Israel (and the US) at war. Video: Anti-war News
US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified just weeks ago that “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”
As journalist Séamus Malekafzali recently noted on Twitter, one of the strongest arguments that Iran had not reversed its decision to refrain from obtaining nuclear weapons is that Iranian nuclear scientists have been publicly expressing frustration about the fact that their government won’t allow them to construct a nuke.
They want to do it, but Tehran won’t let them.
Hegseth: Iran is “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon”
2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community: “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” pic.twitter.com/fPPcF2IKQk
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth helped pave the way for Netanyahu’s claims this past Wednesday when he told the Senate that “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.”
This claim by Hegseth was swiftly scooped up and promoted by warmongers like Tom Cotton who said that Hegseth had “confirmed that Iran’s terrorist regime is actively working towards a nuclear weapon”.
Cotton’s claim was then picked up by war pundit Mark Levin, who has been personally lobbying Trump to green light an attack on Iran, sarcastically quipping on Twitter, “So, SecDef Hegseth must by lying, too. Everyone’s lying except the isolationists, Koch-heads, Islamists, Chatsworth Qatarlson and their media propagandists.”
But let’s back up and look at what Hegseth actually said. He did not say “Iran is building a nuclear weapon.” He said “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon”.
If the US had intelligence that Iran was building a nuke, Hegseth would have just said so. But instead he performed this freakish verbal gymnastics stunt muttering about indications of something that might kinda sorta look like a nuclear weapon, which his fellow Iran hawks then falsely took and ran with as a positive assertion that Iran was building a nuke.
There are other lies being circulated to help market this war as well. As Moon of Alabama notes, the Washington Post’s odious war propagandist David Ignatius is pushing the narrative that Iran has been cultivating a relationship with de-facto al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel. The lie that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda was used two decades ago to sell the invasion of Iraq.
At the same time, Trumpian pundits are currently circulating the narrative that the United States is full of Iranian “sleeper cells” who could activate at any moment and begin attacking Americans.
The most egregious of these is Laura Loomer’s repeatedclaims that there are “millions” of such cells awaiting Iran’s orders to strike — possibly the single most bat shit insane claim I have ever seen anyone with any major platform make, since it would mean a very sizable percentage of the US population is actually a secret Iranian proxy army.
The fountain of lies is just getting started. There will be more. Believe nothing unless it is substantiated by mountains of evidence. These freaks have been caught lying to sell wars to the public far too many times for any of their claims to be taken on faith.
Iran and Israel are at war, with the US already intimately involved and likely to become more so. Which of course means we’ll be spending the foreseeable future getting bashed in the face with lies from the most powerful people in the world.
The most immediately obvious of these is the Netanyahu-promoted narrative that Israel initiated this conflict because Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon.
With absolutely no self-consciousness or sense of irony, the Israeli prime minister followed the attacks with a statement accusing Iran of “genocidal rhetoric” which it has backed up “with a programme to develop nuclear weapons.”
We are, of course, being lied to about Iran Video: Caitlin Johnstone
“And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu claimed. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months — less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”
The Western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “pre-emptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true.
Benjamin Netanyahu has spent literally decades falsely claiming that Iran was a year or two away from developing a nuke, only to have the calendar prove him wrong with the passage of time over and over again.
Iran and Israel (and the US) at war. Video: Anti-war News
US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified just weeks ago that “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”
As journalist Séamus Malekafzali recently noted on Twitter, one of the strongest arguments that Iran had not reversed its decision to refrain from obtaining nuclear weapons is that Iranian nuclear scientists have been publicly expressing frustration about the fact that their government won’t allow them to construct a nuke.
They want to do it, but Tehran won’t let them.
Hegseth: Iran is “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon”
2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community: “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” pic.twitter.com/fPPcF2IKQk
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth helped pave the way for Netanyahu’s claims this past Wednesday when he told the Senate that “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.”
This claim by Hegseth was swiftly scooped up and promoted by warmongers like Tom Cotton who said that Hegseth had “confirmed that Iran’s terrorist regime is actively working towards a nuclear weapon”.
Cotton’s claim was then picked up by war pundit Mark Levin, who has been personally lobbying Trump to green light an attack on Iran, sarcastically quipping on Twitter, “So, SecDef Hegseth must by lying, too. Everyone’s lying except the isolationists, Koch-heads, Islamists, Chatsworth Qatarlson and their media propagandists.”
But let’s back up and look at what Hegseth actually said. He did not say “Iran is building a nuclear weapon.” He said “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon”.
If the US had intelligence that Iran was building a nuke, Hegseth would have just said so. But instead he performed this freakish verbal gymnastics stunt muttering about indications of something that might kinda sorta look like a nuclear weapon, which his fellow Iran hawks then falsely took and ran with as a positive assertion that Iran was building a nuke.
There are other lies being circulated to help market this war as well. As Moon of Alabama notes, the Washington Post’s odious war propagandist David Ignatius is pushing the narrative that Iran has been cultivating a relationship with de-facto al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel. The lie that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda was used two decades ago to sell the invasion of Iraq.
At the same time, Trumpian pundits are currently circulating the narrative that the United States is full of Iranian “sleeper cells” who could activate at any moment and begin attacking Americans.
The most egregious of these is Laura Loomer’s repeatedclaims that there are “millions” of such cells awaiting Iran’s orders to strike — possibly the single most bat shit insane claim I have ever seen anyone with any major platform make, since it would mean a very sizable percentage of the US population is actually a secret Iranian proxy army.
The fountain of lies is just getting started. There will be more. Believe nothing unless it is substantiated by mountains of evidence. These freaks have been caught lying to sell wars to the public far too many times for any of their claims to be taken on faith.
Unlike the Palestinian message, the Israeli message is not global, but very much a localised cry for help — get us out of Gaza.
This is not your typical video. The event itself might be similar to numerous other events in Gaza — a fighter emerging from a tunnel, placing a bomb under an Israeli Merkava tank, and returning to his tunnel before a massive explosion takes place.
This is what is called an operation from zero distance. But the video, this time, is different, as it was not released by the Al-Qassam Brigades or any other group.
There is no foreboding music in the background, no slick edits, no red triangles. The reason? The video was released by the Israeli army itself.
This raises many questions, including why the Israeli army would report the bravery of a Palestinian fighter and the successful blowing up of the pride and joy of the Israeli military — the Merkava.
The answer might lie in the sense of despair in the Israeli military, an army that knows well that it has lost the war or, at best, is unable to clinch victory, even after it laid Gaza to waste and exterminated nearly 10 percent of its 2.3 million population (between the killed, wounded, and missing).
This sentiment is now very well-known among Israelis, as Israeli media, which initially touted the idea of “total victory”, is now the one promoting a version of Israel’s own total defeat.
On verge of ‘collective suicide’ Writing in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, retired Major-General Itzhak Brik said that Israel was on the verge of “collective suicide” and that the army has effectively been defeated by Hamas in Gaza.
“With a political and military echelon of this type, there is no need for external enemies; they will bring disaster upon us in their stupidity,” he warned, adding:
“We may soon reach a point of no return, and the only thing left for us to do is pray to our God to come to our aid, and then we will all become messiahs who pray for miracles.”
General Brik can no longer be accused of being the detached former soldier who is horribly misreading the situation on the ground. Even those on the ground are expressing the exact same sentiment.
مقاوم فلسطيني خرج فجأة من بين الأنقاض، وثبّت عبوة ناسفة على دبابة إسرائيلية من مسافة صفر، ثم عاد إلى مخبئه قبل أن تنفجر .
On Tuesday, June 4, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted an Israeli infantry soldier who expressed a feeling of brokenness after returning to fighting in Gaza, stating that “everyone is exhausted and uncertain”.
The Israeli soldier reportedly added that he feelt there was no appreciation for the lives of soldiers fighting in Gaza and that they had moved from offence to defence, noting that the soldiers “doubt the objectives of the war”.
Dominant global narrative Many in the pro-Palestine circle, which now represents the dominant global narrative on the war, are celebrating the bravery of the young men in the video and, by extension, the bravery of Gaza, deeply wounded but still fighting — in fact, winning.
But there is more to the story than this. The fact that a tank belonging to the 401st Brigade would be blown up in such a way, under the watchful eye of Israeli drones, which could only report the event without being able to change it, is telling us something.
But unlike the Palestinian message, the Israeli message is not global, but very much a localised cry for help — get us out of Gaza.
Whether Israeli politicians, lead among them the master of political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will listen or not, that is a completely different question.
Republished with permission from The Palestine Chronicle.
I have visited Iran twice. Once in June 1980 to witness an unprecedented event: the world’s first Islamic Revolution. It was the very start of my writing career.
The second time was in 2018 and part of my interest was to get a sense of how disenchanted the population was — or was not — with life under the Ayatollahs decades after the creation of the Islamic Republic.
I loved my time in Iran and found ordinary Iranians to be such wonderful, cultured and kind people.
When I heard the news today of Israel’s attack on Iran I had the kind of emotional response that should never be seen in public. I was apoplectic with rage and disgust, I vented bitterly and emotively.
Then I calmed down. And here is what I would like to say:
Just last week former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who wrote daily intelligence briefings for the US President during his 27-year career, reminded me when I interviewed him that the assessment of the US intelligence community has been for years that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and had not recommenced since.
The departing CIA director William Burns confirmed this assessment recently. Propaganda aside, there is nothing new other than a US-Israeli campaign that has shredded any concept of international laws or norms.
I won’t mince words: what we are witnessing is the racist, genocidal Israeli regime, armed and encouraged by the US, Germany, UK and other Western regimes, launching a war that has no justification other than the expansion of Israeli power and the advancement of its Greater Israel project.
This year, using American, German and British armaments, supported by underlings like Australia and New Zealand, the Israelis have pursued their genocide against the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, and attacked various neighbours, including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.
They represent a clear and present danger to peace and stability in the region.
Iran has operated with considerable restraint but has also shown its willingness to use its military to keep the US-Israeli menace at bay. What most people forget is that the project to secure Iran’s borders and keep the likes of the British, Israelis and Americans out is a multi-generational project that long predates the Islamic Revolution.
I would recommend Iran: A modern history by the US-based scholar Abbas Amanat that provides a long-view of the evolution of the Iranian state and how it has survived centuries of pressure and multiple occupations from imperial powers, including Russia, Britain, the US and others.
Hard-fought independence The country was raped by the Brits and the Americans and has won a hard-fought independence that is being seriously challenged, not from within, but by the Israelis and the Western warlords who have wrecked so many countries and killed millions of men, women and children in the region over recent decades.
I spoke and messaged with Iranian friends today both in Iran and in New Zealand and the response was consistent. They felt, one of them said, 10 times more hurt and emotional than I did.
Understandable.
A New Zealand-based Iranian friend had to leave work as soon as he heard the news. He scanned Iranian social media and found people were upset, angry and overwhelmingly supportive of the government.
“They destroyed entire apartment buildings! Why?”, “People will be very supportive of the regime now because they have attacked civilians.”
“My parents are in the capital. I was so scared for them.”
Just a couple of years ago scholars like Professor Amanat estimated that core support for the regime was probably only around 20 percent. That was my impression too when I visited in 2018.
Nationalism, existential menace Israel and the US have changed that. Nationalism and an existential menace will see Iranians rally around the flag.
Something I learnt in Iran, in between visiting the magnificent ruins of the capital of the Achaemenid Empire at Persepolis, exploring a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence, chowing down on insanely good food in Yazd, talking with a scholar and then a dissident in Isfahan, and exploring an ancient Sassanian fort and a caravanserai in the eastern desert, was that the Iranians are the most politically astute people in the region.
Many I spoke to were quite open about their disdain for the regime but none of them sought a counter-revolution.
They knew what that would bring: the wolves (the Americans, the Israelis, the Saudis, and other bad actors) would slip in and tear the country apart. Slow change is the smarter option when you live in this neighbourhood.
Iranians are overwhelmingly well-educated, profoundly courteous and kind, and have a deep sense of history. They know more than enough about what happened to them and to so many other countries once a great power sees an opening.
War is a truly horrific thing that always brings terrible suffering to ordinary people. It is very rarely justified.
Iran was actively negotiating with the Americans who, we now know, were briefed on the attack in advance and will possibly join the attack in the near future.
US senators are baying for Judeo-Christian jihad. Democrat Senator John Fetterman was typical: “Keep wiping out Iranian leadership and the nuclear personnel. We must provide whatever is necessary — military, intelligence, weaponry — to fully back Israel in striking Iran.”
We should have the moral and intellectual honesty to see the truth: Our team, Team Genocide, are the enemies of peace and justice. I wish the Iranian people peace and prosperity.
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.
We should have suspected something when the cloud strike shut down occurred.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to continue war so that he is never held to account.
This madness is the last straw.
NZ must immediately expel the Israeli Ambassador for this unprovoked attack on Iran.
As moral and ethical people, we must turn away from Israel’s new war crime, they have started a war, we must as righteous people condemn Israel and their enabler America.
This is the beginning of madness.
We cannot be party to it.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, Jordan, said the Israeli army radio was reporting that in addition to the air strikes, Israel’s external intelligence service Mossad had carried out some sabotage activities and attacks inside Iran.
“There are also several reports and leaks in the Israeli media talking not only about the assassination of the top chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but rather a very large number of senior military commanders in addition to prominent academics and nuclear scientists,” she said.
“This is a very large-scale attack, not just on military installations, but also on the people who could potentially be making decisions about what Iran can do next, how Iran can respond to this attack that continues as we speak.”
The genocide is almost complete. When it is concluded it will have exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western civilisation, writes Chris Hedges.
ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges
This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide.
It will be over soon. Weeks. At most.
Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets.
They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.
In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponising starvation.
It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.
What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and US private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution.
We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s armingISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.
I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.
We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programmes of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter.
The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.
There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyse us. Who is not traumatised? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenceless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.
I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.
This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.
Palestinians under the rubble in 2023 after Israeli airstrike of homes in the Gaza Strip. Image: Ashraf Amra /United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East/ Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 4.0
And how will we remember? By not remembering.
Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended.
A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.
“Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist?
“What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathisers, ostracised, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them.
“For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.”
You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback.
The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.
Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.
“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went.
“I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”
The Sobibor extermination camp gate in the spring of 1943. The pine branches, braided into the fence to make it difficult to see in from the outside. Image: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilisation, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?
What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?
It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.
“To preserve the values of the civilised world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:
“To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures.
“To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones.
“To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. “Otherwise, the uncivilised world might win.”
There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardising their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs.
They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols.
They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.
At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.This article was first published in Scheerpost.
Greenpeace activists on board the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior disrupted an industrial longlining fishing operation in the South Pacific, seizing almost 20 km of fishing gear and freeing nine sharks — including an endangered mako — near Australia and New Zealand.
Crew retrieved the entire longline and more than 210 baited hooks from a European Union-flagged industrial fishing vessel, including an endangered longfin mako shark, eight near-threatened blue sharks and four swordfish.
The crew also documented the vessel catching endangered sharks during its longlining operation.
Latest fisheries data showed that almost 70 percent of EU vessels’ catch was blue shark in 2023 alone.
The operation came ahead of this week’s UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, where world leaders are discussing ocean protection and the Global Ocean Treaty.
On board the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace Australia Pacific campaigner Georgia Whitaker said: “These longliners are industrial killing machines. Greenpeace Australia Pacific took peaceful and direct action to disrupt this attack on marine life.
“We saved important species that would otherwise have been killed or left to die on hooks.
“The scale of industrial fishing — still legal on the high seas — is astronomical. These vessels claim to be targeting swordfish or tuna, but we witnessed shark after shark being hauled up by these industrial fleets, including three endangered sharks in just half an hour.
Rainbow Warrior crew disrupt longline fishing in the Pacific. Video: Greenpeace
“Greenpeace is calling on world leaders at the UN Ocean Conference to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030 from this wanton destruction.”
Stingray caught as bycatch is hauled onboard the Lu Rong Yuan Lu 212 longliner vessel in the Tasman Sea.
The Rainbow Warrior is in the South Pacific ocean to expose longline fishing and call on governments to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty and create a network of protected areas in the high seas.
A Greenpeace activist frees a blue shark caught on a longline in the Pacific . . . the blue shark is currently listed as “Near Threatened” globally by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). Image: Greenpeace Pacific
Greenpeace Aotearoa is calling on the New Zealand government to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty and help create global ocean sanctuaries, including in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.
New Zealand signed the agreement in 2023.
More than two-thirds of sharks worldwide are endangered, and a third of those are at risk of extinction from overfishing.
Over the last three weeks, the Rainbow Warrior has been documenting longlining vessels and practices off Australia’s east coast, including from Spain and China.
Emma Page is Greenpeace Aotearoa’s communications lead, oceans and fisheries. Republished with permission.
Well it looks like the US is on the precipice of war with Iran again.
US officials are telling the press that they anticipate a potential impending Israeli attack on Iran while the family members of US military personnel are being assisted with evacuation from bases in the region.
This comes as Tehran issues a warning that it will strike all US military bases within range of its missiles if it comes under attack. There are reportedly some 50,000 US troops in 10 bases which could come under fire should this occur.
The US is also evacuating its embassy in Iraq, and has authorised the departure of non-essential personnel from its embassies in Kuwait and Bahrain.
Asked by the press about the evacuations, President Trump said, “They are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place, and we’ll see what happens. We’ve given notice to move out.”
Trump is openly declaring a willingness to strike Iran if nuclear negotiations fall through, while saying he is now “much less confident” that any deal will be made.
Staring down the barrel of war with Iran. Video: Caitlin Johnstone
“If they don’t make a deal, they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon; if they do make a deal they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon too,” the president said in an interview published on Wednesday, adding that “it would be nicer to do it without warfare, without people dying.”
If the US backs an Israeli attack on Iran and then Iran retaliates by killing a bunch of US military personnel, we could be looking at a full-scale direct war between the US and Iran.
As I’ve said in this space many times before, this would be the absolute worst-case nightmare scenario for the Middle East, unleashing horrors that dwarf all the other terrible abuses currently happening in the region.
As Trump’s now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in 2019 (back when she publicly opposed Trump’s warmongering), “What is important that the American people know is a war with Iran would make the war in Iraq look like a cakewalk.”
It’s so stupid that this keeps happening. This could all be avoided by the US simply ceasing to support the genocidal apartheid state of Israel no matter what it does.
The fact that Washington has continued to pour weapons into Israel despite all its warmongering and genocide since 2023 means the US supports everything that Israel has been doing.
If a war with Iran does occur, you will doubtless hear Western pundits and politicians trying to spin this as America getting “drawn into” another war in the Middle East, or Trump being tricked or manipulated into war.
But make no mistake: the US could have turned away from this path at any time, and still can.
If this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be because the US empire knowingly chose to open it.
Opposition parties say Aotearoa New Zealand’s government should be going much further, much faster in sanctioning Israel.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters overnight revealed New Zealand had joined Australia, Canada, the UK and Norway in imposing travel bans on Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Some of the partner countries went further, adding asset freezes and business restrictions on the far-right ministers.
Peters said the pair had used their leadership positions to actively undermine peace and security and remove prospects for a two-state solution.
Israel and the United States criticised the sanctions, with the US saying it undermined progress towards a ceasefire.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, attending Fieldays in Waikato, told reporters New Zealand still enjoyed a good relationship with the US administration, but would not be backing down.
“We have a view that this is the right course of action for us,” he said.
Behind the scenes job “We have differences in approach but the Americans are doing an excellent job of behind the scenes trying to get Israel and the Palestinians to the table to talk about a ceasefire.”
Asked if there could be further sanctions, Luxon said the government was “monitoring the situation all the time”.
Peters has been busy travelling in Europe and was unavailable to be interviewed. ACT — probably the most vocally pro-Israel party in Parliament — refused to comment on the situation.
The opposition parties also backed the move, but argued the government should have gone much further.
Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has since December been urging the coalition to back her bill imposing economic sanctions on Israel. With support from Labour and Te Pāti Māori it would need just six MPs to cross the floor to pass.
Calling the Israeli actions in Gaza “genocide”, she told RNZ the government’s sanctions fell far short of those imposed on Russia.
“This is symbolic, and it’s unfortunate that it’s taken so long to get to this point, nearly two years . . . the Minister of Foreign Affairs also invoked the similarities with Russia in his statement this morning, yet we have seen far less harsh sanctions applied to Israel.
“We’re well past the time for first steps.”
‘Cowardice’ by government The pushback from the US was “probably precisely part of the reason that our government has been so scared of doing the right thing”, she said, calling it “cowardice” on the government’s part.
“What else are you supposed to call it at the end of the day?,” she said, saying at a bare minimum the Israeli ambassador should be expelled, Palestinian statehood should be recognised, and a special category of visas for Palestinians should be introduced.
She rejected categorisation of her stance as anti-semitic, saying that made no sense.
“If we are critiquing a government of a certain country, that is not the same thing as critiquing the people of that country. I think it’s actually far more anti-semitic to conflate the actions of the Israeli government with the entire Jewish peoples.”
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer . . . “It’s not a war, it’s an annihilation”. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the sanctions were political hypocrisy.
“When it comes to war, human rights and the extent of violence and genocide that we’re seeing, Palestine is its own independent nation . . . why is this government sanctioning only two ministers? They should be sanctioning the whole of Israel,” she said.
“These two Israel far right ministers don’t act alone. They belong to an entire Israel government which has used its military might and everything it can possibly do to bombard, to murder and to commit genocide and occupy Gaza and the West Bank.”
Suspend diplomatic ties She also wanted all diplomatic ties with Israel suspended, along with sanctions against Israeli companies, military officials and additional support for the international courts — also saying the government should have done more.
“This government has been doing everything to do nothing . . . to appease allies that have dangerously overstepped unjustifiable marks, and they should not be silent.
“It’s not a war, it’s an annihilation, it’s an absolute annihilation of human beings . . . we’re way out there supporting those allies that are helping to weaponise Israel and the flattening and the continual cruel occupation of a nation, and it’s just nothing that I thought in my living days I’d be witnessing.”
She said the government should be pushing back against “a very polarised, very Trump attitude” to the conflict.
“Trumpism has arrived in Aotearoa . . . and we continue to go down that line, that is a really frightening part for this beautiful nation of ours.
“As a nation, we have a different set of values. We’re a Pacific-based country with a long history of going against the grain – the mainstream, easy grind. We’ve been a peaceful, loving nation that stood up against the big boys when it came to our anti nuclear stance and that’s our role in this, our role is not to follow blindly.”
Undermining two-state solution In a statement, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson Peeni Henare said the actions of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir had attempted to undermine the two-state solution and international law, and described the situation in Gaza as horrific.
“The travel bans echo the sanctions placed on Russian individuals and organisations that supported the illegal invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
He called for further action.
“Labour has been calling for stronger action from the government on Israel’s invasion of Gaza, including intervening in South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, creation of a special visa for family members of New Zealanders fleeing Gaza, and ending government procurement from companies operating illegally in the Occupied Territories.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary reflected on her years in Fiji as a television journalist and media educator at a Fiji Centre function in Auckland celebrating Fourth Estate values and independence at the weekend.
It was a reunion with former journalism professor David Robie — they had worked together as a team at the University of the South Pacific amid media and political controversy leading up to the George Speight coup in May 2000.
Leary, a former British Council executive director and lawyer, was the guest speaker at a gathering of human rights activists, development advocates, academics and journalists hosted at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub, the umbrella base for the Fiji Centre, Auckland Rotuman Fellowship, Asia Pacific Media Network and other groups.
She said she was delighted to meet “special people in David’s life” and to be speaking to a diverse group sharing “similar values of courage, freedom of expression, truth and tino rangatiratanga”.
“I want to start this talanoa on Friday, 19 May 2000 — 13 years almost to the day of the first recognised military coup in Fiji in 1987 — when failed businessman George Speight tore off his balaclava to reveal his identity.
She pointed out that there had actually been another “coup” 100 years earlier by Ratu Cakobau.
“Speight had seized Parliament holding the elected government at gunpoint, including the politician mother, Lavinia Padarath, of one of my best friends — Anna Padarath.
Hostage-taking report “Within minutes, the news of the hostage-taking was flashed on Radio Fiji’s 10 am bulletin by a student journalist on secondment there — Tamani Nair. He was a student of David Robie’s.”
Nair had been dispatched to Parliament to find out what was happening and reported from a cassava patch.
“Fiji TV was trashed . . . and transmission pulled for 48 hours.
“The university shut down — including the student radio facilities, and journalism programme website — to avoid a similar fate, but the journalism school was able to keep broadcasting and publishing via a parallel website set up at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The pictures were harrowing, showing street protests turning violent and the barbaric behaviour of Speight’s henchmen towards dissenters.
“Thus began three months of heroic journalism by David’s student team — including through a period of martial law that began 10 days later and saw some of the most restrictive levels of censorship ever experienced in the South Pacific.”
Leary paid tribute to some of the “brave satire” produced by senior Fiji Times reporters filling the newspaper with “non-news” (such as about haircuts, drinking kava) as an act of defiance.
“My friend Anna Padarath returned from doing her masters in law in Australia on a scholarship to be closer to her Mum, whose hostage days within Parliament Grounds stretched into weeks and then months.
Whanau Community Centre and Hub co-founder Nik Naidu speaking at the Asia Pacific Media Network event at the weekend. Image: Khairiah A. Rahman/APMN
Invisible consequences “Anna would never return to her studies — one of the many invisible consequences of this profoundly destructive era in Fiji’s complex history.
“Happily, she did go on to carve an incredible career as a women’s rights advocate.”
“Meanwhile David’s so-called ‘barefoot student journalists’ — who snuck into Parliament the back way by bushtrack — were having their stories read and broadcast globally.
“And those too shaken to even put their hands to keyboards on Day 1 emerged as journalism leaders who would go on to win prizes for their coverage.”
Speight was sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned in 2024.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary speaking at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub. Image: Nik Naidu/APMN
Leary said that was just one chapter in the remarkable career of David Robie who had been an editor, news director, foreign news editor and freelance writer with a number of different agencies and news organisations — including Agence France-Presse, Rand Daily Mail, The Auckland Star, Insight Magazine, and New Outlook Magazine — “a family member to some, friend to many, mentor to most”.
Reflecting on working with Dr Robie at USP, which she joined as television lecturer from Fiji Television, she said:
“At the time, being a younger person, I thought he was a little bit crazy, because he was communicating with people all around the world when digital media was in its infancy in Fiji, always on email, always getting up on online platforms, and I didn’t appreciate the power of online media at the time.
“And it was incredible to watch.”
Ahead of his time She said he was an innovator and ahead of his time.
Dr Robie viewed journalism as a tool for empowerment, aiming to provide communities with the information they needed to make informed decisions.
“We all know that David has been a champion of social justice and for decolonisation, and for the values of an independent Fourth Estate.”
She said she appreciated the freedom to develop independent media as an educator, adding that one of her highlights was producing the groundbreaking 1999 documentary Maire about Maire Bopp Du Pont, who was a Tahitian student journalist at USP and advocate for the Pacific community living with HIV/AIDs.
She became a nuclear-free Pacific campaigner in Pape’ete and was also founding chief executive of the Pacific Islands AIDS Foundation (PIAF).
Leary presented Dr Robie with a “speaking stick” carved from an apricot tree branch by the husband of a Labour stalwart based in Cromwell — the event doubled as his 80th birthday.
In response, Dr Robie said the occasion was a “golden opportunity” to thank many people who had encouraged and supported him over many years.
Massive upheaval “We must have done something right,” he said about USP, “because in 2000, the year of George Speight’s coup, our students covered the massive upheaval which made headlines around the world when Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour-led coalition government was held at gunpoint for 56 days.
“The students courageously covered the coup with their website Pacific Journalism Online and their newspaper Wansolwara — “One Ocean”. They won six Ossie Awards – unprecedented for a single university — in Australia that year and a standing ovation.”
He said there was a video on YouTube of their exploits called Frontline Reporters and one of the students, Christine Gounder, wrote an article for a Commonwealth Press Union magazine entitled, “From trainees to professionals. And all it took was a coup”.
Dr Robie said this Fiji experience was still one of the most standout experiences he had had as a journalist and educator.
Along with similar coverage of the 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis by his students at the University of Papua New Guinea.
He made some comments about the 1985 Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap in the Marshall islands and the subsequent bombing by French secret agents in Auckland.
But he added “you can read all about this adventure in my new book” being published in a few weeks.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary (right) with Dr David Robie and his wife Del Abcede at the Fiji Centre function. Image: Camille Nakhid
Biggest 21st century crisis Dr Robie said the profession of journalism, truth telling and holding power to account, was vitally important to a healthy democracy.
Although media did not succeed in telling people what to think, it did play a vital role in what to think about. However, the media world was undergoing massive change and fragmentation.
“And public trust is declining in the face of fake news and disinformation,” he said
“I think we are at a crossroads in society, both locally and globally. Both journalism and democracy are under an unprecedented threat in my lifetime.
“When more than 230 journalists can be killed in 19 months in Gaza and there is barely a bleep from the global community, there is something savagely wrong.
“The Gazan journalists won the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize collectively last year with the judges saying, “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”
“The carnage and genocide in Gaza is deeply disturbing, especially the failure of the world to act decisively to stop it. The fact that Israel can kill with impunity at least 54,000 people, mostly women and children, destroy hospitals and starve people to death and crush a people’s right to live is deeply shocking.
“This is the biggest crisis of the 21st century. We see this relentless slaughter go on livestreamed day after day and yet our media and politicians behave as if this is just ‘normal’. It is shameful, horrendous. Have we lost our humanity?
“Gaza has been our test. And we have failed.”
Dr Robie praised the support of his wife, social justice activist Del Abcede, and family members.
Other speakers included Whānau Hub co-founder Nik Naidu, one of the anti-coup Coalition for Democracy in Fiji (CDF) stalwarts; the Heritage New Zealand’s Antony Phillips; and Multimedia Investments and Evening Report director Selwyn Manning.
The United States has denounced sanctions by Britain and allies — including New Zealand and Australia — against Israeli far-right ministers, saying they should focus instead on the Palestinian armed group Hamas.
New Zealand has banned two Israeli politicians from travelling to the country because of comments about the war in Gaza that Foreign Minister Winston Peters says “actively undermine peace and security”.
New Zealand joins Australia, Canada, the UK and Norway in imposing the sanctions on Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Peters said they were targeted towards two individuals, rather than the Israeli government.
“Our action today is not against the Israeli people, who suffered immeasurably on October 7 [2023] and who have continued to suffer through Hamas’ ongoing refusal to release all hostages.
“Nor is it designed to sanction the wider Israeli government.”
The two ministers were “using their leadership positions to actively undermine peace and security and remove prospects for a two-state solution”, Peters said.
‘Severely and deliberately undermined’ peace “Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have severely and deliberately undermined that by personally advocating for the annexation of Palestinian land and the expansion of illegal settlements, while inciting violence and forced displacement.”
The sanctions were consistent with New Zealand’s approach to other foreign policy issues, he said.
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (left) and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich . . . sanctioned by Australia, Canada, the UK and Norway because they have “incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights. These actions are not acceptable,” says British Foreign Minister David Lammy. Image: TRT screenshot APR
“New Zealand has also targeted travel bans on politicians and military leaders advocating violence or undermining democracy in other countries in the past, including Russia, Belarus and Myanmar.”
New Zealand had been a long-standing supporter of a two-state solution, Peters said, which the international community was also overwhelmingly in favour of.
“New Zealand’s consistent and historic position has been that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are a violation of international law. Settlements and associated violence undermine the prospects for a viable two-state solution,” he said.
“The crisis in Gaza has made returning to a meaningful political process all the more urgent. New Zealand will continue to advocate for an end to the current conflict and an urgent restart of the Middle East Peace Process.”
‘Outrageous’, says Israel Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the move was “outrageous” and the government would hold a special meeting early next week to decide how to respond to the “unacceptable decision”.
His comments were made while attending the inauguration of a new Israeli settlement on Palestinian land.
Peters is currently in Europe for the sixth Pacific-France Summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Nice.
US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters: “We find that extremely unhelpful. It will do nothing to get us closer to a ceasefire in Gaza.”
Britain, Canada, Norway, New Zealand and Australia “should focus on the real culprit, which is Hamas”, she said of the sanctions.
“We remain concerned about any step that would further isolate Israel from the international community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
COMMENTARY:By Steven Cowan, editor of Against The Current
The New Zealand Foreign Minster’s decision to issue a travel ban against two Israeli far-right politicians is little more than a tokenistic gesture in opposing Israel’s actions.
It is an attempt to appease growing opposition to Israel’s war, but the fact that Israel has killed more than 54,000 innocent people in Gaza, a third under the age of 18, still leaves the New Zealand government unmoved.
Foreign Minister Peters gave the game away when he commented that the sanctions were targeted towards two individuals, rather than the Israeli government.
Issuing travel bans against two Israeli politicians, who are unlikely to visit New Zealand at any stage, is the easy option.
It appears to be doing something to protest against Israel’s actions when actually doing nothing. And it doesn’t contradict the interests of the United States in the Middle East.
Under the government of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, New Zealand has become a vassal state of American imperialism.
New Zealand has joined four other countries, the United States, Britain, Australia and Norway, in issuing a travel ban. But all four countries continue to supply Israel with arms.
Unions demand stronger action Last week, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions demanded that the New Zealand government take stronger action against Israel. In a letter to Winston Peters, CTU president Richard Wagstaff wrote:
“For too long, the international community has allowed the state of Israel to act with impunity. It is now very clearly engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
“All efforts must be made to put diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel to end this murderous campaign.”
THE CTU has called for a series of sanctions to be imposed on Israel. They include “a ban on all imports of goods made in whole or in part in Israel” and “a rapid review of Crown investments and immediately divest from any financial interests in Israeli companies”.
The CTU is also calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador.
This article was first published on Steven Cowan’s website Against The Current. Republished with permission.
Many people have been closely following the journey this week of the Madleen, a small humanitarian yacht seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with a crew of 12 on board, including humanitarian activists and journalists.
This morning we woke to the harrowing, yet not unexpected, news that the vessel had been illegally hijacked by Israeli forces, who boarded and took the crew captive into Israeli territories, in contravention of international law.
Yet another on the long list of war crimes Israel has committed over the last 20 months of genocide, and decades of illegal occupation.
Communication with the crew was lost after the final moments of tense onboard footage as they donned lifejackets, threw phones and other sensitive data overboard, and raised their arms in preparation for whatever might come next.
Israel has a detailed history of attacking all previous freedom flotillas — including the 2010 mission aboard the Mavi Marmara in which 10 crew were killed and dozens more injured when Israeli forces hijacked the humanitarian vessel.
Another mission earlier this year was cut short when it was targeted by an airstrike in international waters, injuring crew.
The next updates were scenes filmed by Israeli forces which appear to show them calmly handing bread rolls and water to the detained crew, painting a picture which immediately recalled my own experience last year being unlawfully arrested in the southern West Bank.
Detained while documenting I was detained while documenting armed settler violence, taken illegally to a military base where myself and three other internationals were given a bathroom stop, bread and water.
While we ate, they filmed us, saying “You are unharmed, yes? We are looking after you well?”
We were then loaded into a police van where a Palestinian farmer sat blindfolded, in silence, with his hands zip-tied behind him.
Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen before being arrested by Israeli forces today. Image: FFC screenshot APR
Israel loves to put on a show of their “humane treatment” when internationals are present and cameras are rolling, but it’s a shallow and sinister facade for their abusive racism and cruelty towards Palestinians.
It appears their response to the Madleen’s crew over the next few days will be exactly that. Don’t buy into it; this is no more than deeply sinister propaganda to cover state-backed racism, supremacy, and cruelty.
Families in Gaza are still facing indiscriminate airstrikes, continuous displacement, forced starvation, and the phony Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which has led to more than 100 civilians being shot while desperately seeking food.
Thousands of trucks still wait at the border to Gaza, barred entry by Israeli forces, while Palestinians face severe malnutrition and a man-made famine.
The New Zealand government has still not placed a single sanction on the Israeli state.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Contact has been lost with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla humanitarian aid boat Madleen after Israeli commandos intercepted it in international waters.
The commandos demanded that everyone on board turn off their phones, and the boat lost contact with Al Jazeera Mubasher journalist Omar Faiad as well as its live feed, reports the AJ live tracker.
International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf confirmed that they had also lost contact with the Madleen.
Arraf, whose ISM is supporting the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, later said from Sicily: “Just moments ago, communication seemed to be cut.”
“So, we have lost all contact with our colleagues on the Madleen.”
“Before that, we know that they had two drones hovering above them that dropped some kind of chemical on the vessel. We don’t know what that chemical was,” she said.
“Some people reported that their eyes were burning. Before that, they were also approached by vessels in a very threatening manner.”
So at least for the last hour the Madleen crew had been threatened by Israeli forces.
“The last we saw, were able to hear from them, they were surrounded . . . by Israeli naval commandos and it looked like the commandos were about to take over the vessel.”
The Freedom Flotilla earlier posted a message on social media saying “Red Alert: The Madleen is currently under assault in international waters.” It also said: “Israel navy ‘here right now, please sound the alarm’.”
“Red Alert: The Madleen is currently under assault in international waters.” Image: Gaza Freedom Forum Coalition
A video posted by Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza showed Brazilian activist Thiago Avila on board the Madleen wearing a life jacket.
“The IOF [Israel Occupation Forces] is here right now, please sound the alarm. We are being surrounded by their boats,” he said in the video.
“Yes this is an interception, a war crime is happening right now,” he said.
More than 150 press freedom advocacy groups and international newsrooms have joined Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in issuing a public appeal demanding that Israel grant foreign journalists immediate, independent and unrestricted access to the Gaza Strip.
The organisations are also calling for the full protection of Palestinian journalists, nearly 200 — the Gaza Media Office says more than 230 — of whom have been killed by the Israeli military over the past 20 months.
For more than 20 months, Israeli authorities have barred foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, says RSF in a media release.
During the same period, the Israeli army killed nearly 200 Palestinian journalists in the blockaded territory, including at least 45 slain for their work.
Palestinian journalists who continue reporting — the only witnesses on the ground — are facing unbearable conditions, including forced displacement, famine, and constant threats to their lives.
This collective appeal, launched by RSF and CPJ, brings together prominent news outlets from every continent demanding the right to send correspondents into Gaza to report alongside Palestinian journalists.
“The media blockade imposed on Gaza, combined with the massacre of nearly 200 journalists by the Israeli army, is enabling the total destruction and erasure of the blockaded territory,” said RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin.
“Israeli authorities are banning foreign journalists from entering and ruthlessly asserting their control over information.
“This is a methodical attempt to silence the facts, suppress the truth, and isolate the Palestinian press and population.
Asia Pacific Report . . . one of the signatories to the Gaza plea. Image: APR
“We call on governments, international institutions and heads of state to end their complicit silence, enforce the immediate opening of Gaza to foreign media, and uphold a principle that is frequently trampled — under international humanitarian law, killing a journalist is a war crime.
“This principle has been violated far too often and must now be enforced.”
RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin speaking at the reception celebrating seven years of Taipei’s Asia Pacific office in October 2024. Image: Pacific Media Watch
The media blockade on Gaza persists despite repeated calls from RSF to guarantee foreign journalists independent access to the Strip, and legal actions such as the Foreign Press Association’s (FPA) petition to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Palestinian journalists, meanwhile, are trapped, displaced, starved, defamed and targeted due to their work.
Those who have survived this unprecedented massacre of journalists now find themselves without shelter, equipment, medical care or even food, according to a CPJ report. They face the risk of being killed at any moment.
To end the enduring impunity that allows these crimes to continue, RSF has repeatedly referred cases to the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging it to investigate alleged war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza by the Israeli army.
RSF also provides aid to Palestinian journalists on the ground — particularly in Gaza — through partnerships with local organisations such as ARIJ (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism).
This partnership provides Palestinian journalists with psychological and professional support, ensuring the continued publication of high-quality reporting despite the blockade and the risks.
Through this cooperation, RSF reaffirms its commitment to defending independent, rigorous journalism — even under the most extreme conditions.
The word antisemitism has become so debased that depending on who is using it I might well take it as a sign that the accused is worth listening to.
When the World Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest, he responded by saying the court was being antisemitic. One of the court’s legal advisers was Theodor Meron, a former Israeli ambassador and legal adviser who spent a chunk of his childhood in a Nazi concentration camp.
Last month, Netanyahu declared the leaders of France, the UK and Canada of fuelling antisemitism.
Their “crime”? Threatening “concrete action” against Israel if it continues its “egregious” blockade of aid entering Gaza.
Egregious not genocidal. And the concrete action referred to wasn’t sanctions or a full arms embargo but stalling free trade talks.
The bitter irony is that with none of those countries having yet imposed a complete ban on arms exports to Israel they are all in a sense fuelling a genocide.
The Army-McCarthy hearings We’re coming up to the 71st anniversary of the Army-McCarthy hearings where an army lawyer, Joseph Welch, rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with the famous line: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
We’ll be waiting a long time for the wanted war criminal Netanyahu to show any decency, but could we be approaching a tipping point where the establishment finally calls off a witch hunt after realising no one is safe from false accusations.
The McCarthyite red scare, which began in the late 1940s, saw more than 2000 federal workers sacked, thousands of academics, teachers, and union members pressured or forced to resign due to anti-communist policies, and up to 500 Hollywood directors and actors blacklisted for being leftwing or refusing to name names.
Welch’s rebuke was triggered by none of that. It was McCarthy turning his metaphorical guns onto the military implying he would expose high ranking army personnel that saw the army lawyer return fire.
The conflating of criticism of Israel with antisemitism has been spectacularly successful in making any criticism of Israel a potentially career ending move. Three Ivy League presidents have been pushed out of their jobs for failing to crack down hard enough on students protesting the brutality of Israel’s ongoing genocide.
UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose popularity had seen the party become the biggest political movement in Europe, was toppled in 2016 after bogus accusations of antisemitism.
In the purge of the Labour Party that followed Jews were five times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism than goys.
It’s the same story in Germany where Jews feature prominently among those cancelled for alleged antisemitism. Renowned professor of Jewish studies Peter Schäfe was forced to resign as the director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum after it retweeted a post critical of Germany’s anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions.
Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis — not a Jew — has been banned from Germany or even appearing via Zoom for this response, on 8 October 2023, to being asked if he condemned Hamas:
“I condemn every single atrocity, whomever is the perpetrator or the victim. What I do not condemn is armed resistance to an apartheid system designed as part of a slow-burning, but inexorable, ethnic cleansing programme. As a European, it is important to refrain from condemning either the Israelis or the Palestinians when it is us, Europeans, who have caused this never-ending tragedy: after practising rabid anti-Semitism for centuries, leading up to the uniquely vile Holocaust, we have been complicit for decades with the slow genocide of Palestinians, as if two wrongs make one right.”
That nuanced response, with its acknowledgement of the dreadful legacy of real antisemitism, has not only seen him banned from speaking — in person or virtually — but dropped by his German publisher.
Antisemitism is often referred to as the oldest hatred — with good reason — but the word itself is relatively recent.
A ‘scientific’ word for an old hatred Nineteenth century German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, popularised the term in a pamphlet the title of which translates as: The way to victory of Germanism over Judaism.
What distinguished antisemitism from the commonly used Judenhass — or Jewish hate — was the idea that it was a Jew’s race not their religion that was deserving of hate.
Antisemitism was a prejudice proud to speak its name. It was respectable in a way that religious intolerance wasn’t. Prominent professors and politicians happily declared themselves antisemites and adherents of “scientific racism”.
It was an old idea dressed up in new clothing. Fifteenth century Spain passed Limpieza de Sangre (cleanliness of blood) statutes to allow discrimination against Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity.
The Judeo-Christian civilisational conflict with Islam, often referred to by right-wing supporters of Israel, is a relatively new construct. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, the Ottomans sent ships to take them to new homes in Istanbul, Thessaloniki and Izmer.
Times change and while it was once possible — even common — to be a respectable antisemite and scientific racist but frowned upon to discriminate based on religious belief, now the reverse is true.
So-called new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins declare all religions bad but Islam worse.
“Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing?” Dawkins once tweeted.
The cultures of Europe have indeed cultivated racist ideas for centuries. And just as half a millennia ago conversion offered you no protection from the racism of the Spanish court, embracing Buddhism didn’t protect Columbia University student Moshen Mahdawi from being snatched from a naturalisation interview by balaclava-clad ICE agents.
His crime? Being Palestinian and telling his story.
It’s a topsy-turvy world where life-long anti-fascists like Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis are sanctioned on bogus claims of antisemitism while the likes of Elon Musk and Hungarian PM Victor Orban — both peddlers of old-style antisemitic conspiracies — are welcomed to Israel as friends and allies in a contrived battle of civilisations.
One thing that differentiates antisemitism from the Judeophobia, which has been a European disease since the early days of Christianity, is that it places Jews among the victims of the continent’s white supremacist legacy.
It’s perhaps no coincidence the Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas in the same year, 1492, that Spain expelled its Jews and Muslims.
The settler colonisation of the Americas has been estimated by historian David Stannard to have resulted in the death of 100 million indigenous people — many from introduced diseases but tens of millions also died in genocides only recently making their way into history books.
Last month, when Netanyahu declared Israel’s attacks on Gaza “a war against human beasts” he was echoing the words of settler colonialists from Alaska to Aotearoa and the dehumanising language of the Nazis against the Jews.
So, back to that question about whether we’ve reached a tipping point where unfair accusations of antisemitism will be seen in a similar light to McCarthy’s red scare.
With Netanyahu accusing the leader of the Democrats party, Yair Golan, an IDF reserve major-general, of promoting a blood libel for speaking out against the starving of babies in Gaza, it’s hard not to draw parallels with the Army-McCarthy hearings.
It’s worth quoting the words that saw Israel’s PM accuse Golan of a blood libel — a reference to the lie that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children in the baking of matzos, and a trigger for centuries of pogroms.
“A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population.”
The idea that an IDF general speaking out against the killing of babies is propagating racist hatred of Jews is surely a leap too far even for many fervent Zionists.
Another sign that the tide might be turning is Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, saying the US administration’s weaponisation of the IHRA definition is making academics and students (including Jews) less safe.
The self-described Zionist said the definition was being distorted and used to silence anti-Israel critics.
The IHRA working definition has been widely adopted internationally — including by institutions in New Zealand and Australia.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both criticised the definition claiming it has seen those documenting Israel’s human rights abuses being falsely accused of antisemitism.
It’s a tragedy that weaponised accusations of antisemitism aimed at protecting Israel from criticism are obscuring a rise in Judeophobic conspiracy theories and attacks on Jewish community centres and synagogues around the world.
And even more tragically that those accusations are blunting criticisms of Israel that could help bring the ongoing genocide in Gaza to an end.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary reflected on her years in Fiji as a television journalist and media educator at a Fiji Centre function in Auckland celebrating Fourth Estate values and independence at the weekend.
It was a reunion with former journalism professor David Robie — they had worked together as a team at the University of the South Pacific amid media and political controversy leading up to the George Speight coup in May 2000.
Leary was the guest speaker at a gathering of human rights activists, development advocates, academics and journalists hosted at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub, the umbrella base for the Fiji Centre and Asia Pacific Media Network.
She said she was delighted to meet “special people in David’s life” and to be speaking to a diverse group sharing “similar values of courage, freedom of expression, truth and tino rangatiratanga”.
“I want to start this talanoa on Friday, 19 May 2000 — 13 years almost to the day of the first recognised military coup in Fiji in 1987 — when failed businessman George Speight tore off his balaclava to reveal his identity.
She pointed out that there had actually been another “coup” 100 years earlier by Ratu Cakobau.
“Speight had seized Parliament holding the elected government at gunpoint, including the politician mother, Lavinia Padarath, of one of my best friends — Anna Padarath.
Hostage-taking report “Within minutes, the news of the hostage-taking was flashed on Radio Fiji’s 10 am bulletin by a student journalist on secondment there — Tamani Nair. He was a student of David Robie’s.”
Nair had been dispatched to Parliament to find out what was happening and reported from a cassava patch.
“Fiji TV was trashed . . . and transmission pulled for 48 hours.
“The university shut down — including the student radio facilities, and journalism programme website — to avoid a similar fate, but the journalism school was able to keep broadcasting and publishing via a parallel website set up at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The pictures were harrowing, showing street protests turning violent and the barbaric behaviour of Speight’s henchmen towards dissenters.
“Thus began three months of heroic journalism by David’s student team — including through a period of martial law that began 10 days later and saw some of the most restrictive levels of censorship ever experienced in the South Pacific.”
Leary paid tribute to some some of the “brave satire” produced by senior Fiji Times reporters filling paper with “non-news” (such as haircuts, drinking kava) as act of defiance.
“My friend Anna Padarath returned from doing her masters in law in Australia on a scholarship to be closer to her Mum, whose hostage days within Parliament Grounds stretched into weeks and then months.
Whanau Community Centre and Hub co-founder Nik Naidu speaking at the Asia Pacific Media Network event at the weekend. Image: Khairiah A. Rahman/APMN
Invisible consequences “Anna would never return to her studies — one of the many invisible consequences of this profoundly destructive era in Fiji’s complex history.
“Happily, she did go on to carve an incredible career as a women’s rights advocate.”
“Meanwhile David’s so-called ‘barefoot student journalists’ — who snuck into Parliament the back way by bushtrack — were having their stories read and broadcast globally.
“And those too shaken to even put their hands to keyboards on Day 1 emerged as journalism leaders who would go on to win prizes for their coverage.”
Speight was sentenced to life in prison, but was pardoned in 2024.
Taeri MP Ingrid Leary speaking at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub. Image: Nik Naidu/APMN
Leary said that was just one chapter in the remarkable career of David Robie who had been an editor, news director, foreign news editor and freelance writer with a number of different agencies and news organisations — including Agence France-Presse, Rand Daily Mail, The Auckland Star, Insight Magazine, and New Outlook Magazine — “a family member to some, friend to many, mentor to most”.
Reflecting on working with Dr Robie at USP, which she joined as television lecturer from Fiji Television, she said:
“At the time, being a younger person, I thought he was a little but crazy, because he was communicating with people all around the world when digital media was in its infancy in Fiji, always on email, always getting up on online platforms, and I didn’t appreciate the power of online media at the time.
“And it was incredible to watch.”
Ahead of his time She said he was an innovator and ahead of his time.
Dr Robie viewed journalism as a tool for empowerment, aiming to provide communities with the information they needed to make informed decisions.
“We all know that David has been a champion of social justice and for decolonisation, and for the values of an independent Fourth Estate.”
She said she appreciated the freedom to develop independent media as an educator, adding that one of her highlights was producing the groundbreaking documentary Maire about Maire Bopp Du Pont, who was a student journalist at USP and advocate for the Pacific community living with HIV/AIDs community.
She later became a nuclear-free Pacific parliamentarian in Pape’ete.
Leary presented Dr Robie with a “speaking stick” carved from an apricot tree branch by the husband of a Labour stalwart based in Cromwell — the event doubled as his 80th birthday.
In response, Dr Robie said the occasion was a “golden opportunity” to thank many people who had encouraged and supported him over many years.
Massive upheaval “We must have done something right,” he said about USP, “because in 2000, the year of George Speight’s coup, our students covered the massive upheaval which made headlines around the world when Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour-led coalition government was held at gunpoint for 56 days.
“The students courageously covered the coup with their website Pacific Journalism Online and their newspaper Wansolwara — “One Ocean”. They won six Ossie Awards – unprecedented for a single university — in Australia that year and a standing ovation.”
He said there was a video on YouTube of their exploits called Frontline Reporters and one of the students, Christine Gounder, wrote an article for a Commonwealth Press Union magazine entitled, “From trainees to professionals. And all it took was a coup”.
Dr Robie said this Fiji experience was still one of the most standout experiences he had had as a journalist and educator.
Along with similar coverage of the 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis by his students at the University of Papua New Guinea.
He made some comments about the 1985 Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap in the Marshall islands and the subsequent bombing by French secret agents in Auckland.
But he added “you can read all about this adventure in my new book” being published in a few weeks.
Taieri MP Ingrid Leary (right) with Dr David Robie and his wife Del Abcede at the Fiji Centre function. Image: Camille Nakhid
Biggest 21st century crisis Dr Robie said the profession of journalism, truth telling and holding power to account, was vitally important to a healthy democracy.
Although media did not succeed in telling people what to think, it did play a vital role in what to think about. However, the media world was undergoing massive change and fragmentation.
“And public trust is declining in the face of fake news and disinformation,” he said
“I think we are at a crossroads in society, both locally and globally. Both journalism and democracy are under an unprecedented threat in my lifetime.
“When more than 230 journalists can be killed in 19 months in Gaza and there is barely a bleep from the global community, there is something savagely wrong.
“The Gazan journalists won the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize collectively last year with the judges saying, “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”
“The carnage and genocide in Gaza is deeply disturbing, especially the failure of the world to act decisively to stop it. The fact that Israel can kill with impunity at least 54,000 people, mostly women and children, destroy hospitals and starve people to death and crush a people’s right to live is deeply shocking.
“This is the biggest crisis of the 21st century. We see this relentless slaughter go on livestreamed day after day and yet our media and politicians behave as if this is just ‘normal’. It is shameful, horrendous. Have we lost our humanity?
“Gaza has been our test. And we have failed.”
Other speakers included Whānau Hub co-founder Nik Naidu, one of the anti-coup Coalition for Democracy in Fiji (CDF) stalwarts; the Heritage New Zealand’s Antony Phillips; and Multimedia Investments and Evening Report director Selwyn Manning.
I want to share a writer’s journey — of living and writing through the Genocide. Where I live and how I live could not be further from the horror playing out in Gaza and, increasingly, on the West Bank.
Yet, because my country provides military, intelligence and diplomatic support to Israel and the US, I feel compelled to answer the call to support Palestine by doing the one thing I know best: writing.
I live in a paradise that supports genocide I am one of the blessed of the earth. I’m surrounded by similarly fortunate people. I live in a heart-stoppingly beautiful bay.
Even in winter I swim in the marine reserve across the road from our house. Seals, Orca, all sorts of fish, octopus, penguins and countless other marine life so often draw me from my desk towards the rocky shore. My home is on the Wild South Coast of Wellington. Every few days our local Whatsapp group fires a message, for example: “Big pod of dolphins heading into the bay!”
I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, a country that, in the main, is yawning its way through a genocide and this causes me daily frustration and pain. It drives me back to the keyboard.
I am surrounded by good friends and suffer no fears for my security. I am materially comfortable and well-fed. I love being a writer. Who could ask for more?
I write, on average, a 1200-word article per week. It’s a seven days a week task and most of my writing time is spent reading, scouring news sites from around the world, note-taking, fact-checking, fretting, talking to people and thinking about the story that will emerge, always so different from my starting concept.
I’m in regular contact with historians, ex-diplomats, geopolitical analysts, writers and activists from around the world and count myself fortunate to know these exceptional people.
This article is different, simpler; it is personal — one person’s experience of writing from the far periphery of the conflict.
I don’t want to live in a country that turns a blind or a sleep-laden eye to one of the great crimes against humanity. I have come to the hurtful realisation that I have a very different worldview from most people I know and from most people I thought I knew.
Fortunately, I have old friends who share in this struggle and I have made many new friends here in New Zealand and across the world who follow their own burning hearts and work every day to challenge the role our governments play in supporting Israel to destroy the lives of millions of innocent people. To me, these people — and above all the Palestinian people in their steadfast resistance — are the heroes who fuel my life.
Writing is fighting Most of us have multiple demands on our time; three of my good writer friends are grappling with cancer, another lost his job for challenging the official line and now must work long hours in a menial day job to keep the family afloat. Despite these challenges they all head to the keyboard to continue the struggle. Writing is fighting.
There’s so little we can all do but, as Māori people say: “ahakoa he iti, he pounamu” – it may only be a little but every bit counts, every bit is as precious as jade.
That sentiment is how movements for change have been built – anti-Vietnam war, anti-nuclear, anti-Apartheid — all of them pro-humanity, all of them about standing with the victims not with the oppressors, nor on the sideline muttering platitudes and excuses. As another writer said: “Washing one’s hands of the struggle between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” (Paolo Friere) Back to the keyboard.
My life until October 7th was more focussed on environmental issues, community organisation and water politics. I had ceased being “a writer” years ago.
One day in October 2023 I was in the kitchen, ranting about what was being done to the Palestinians and what was obviously about to be done to the Palestinians: genocide. My emotions were high because I had had a deeply unpleasant exchange with a good friend of mine on the golf course (yes, I play golf). He told me that the people of Gaza deserved to be collectively punished for the Hamas attack of October 7th.
I had angrily shot back at him, correctly but not diplomatically, that this put him shoulder-to-shoulder with the Nazis and all those who imposed collective punishment on civilian populations. My wife, to her credit, had heard enough: “Get upstairs and write an article! You have to start writing!”
It changed my life. She was right, of course. Impotent rage and parlour-room speeches achieve nothing. Writing is fighting.
’40 beheaded babies survived the Hamas attack’ My first article “40 Beheaded Babies Survived the Hamas Attack” was a warning drawn from history about narratives and what the Americans and Israelis were really softening the ground for. Since then I have had about 70 articles published, all in Australia and New Zealand, some in China, the USA, throughout Asia Pacific, Europe and on all sorts of email databases, including those sent out by the exemplary Ambassador Chas Freeman in the US and another by my good friend and human rights lawyer J V Whitbeck in Paris.
As with historians, part of a writer’s job is to spot patterns and recurrent themes in stories, to detect lies and expose deeper agendas in the official narratives. The mainstream media is surprisingly bad at this. Or chooses to be.
Just like the Incubator Babies story in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in Vietnam, reaching right back to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana in 1898, propaganda is often used as a prelude to atrocities. The blizzard of lies after October 7th were designed to be-monster the Palestinians and prepare the ground for what would obviously follow.
The narrative of beheaded babies promoted by world leaders, including President Biden, was powerfully amplified by our mainstream media; journalists at the highest level of the trade spread the lies.
I have to tell you, it was frightening in October 2023 to challenge these narratives. Every day I pored through the Israeli news site Ha’aretz for updates. Eventually the narrative fell apart — but by then the damage was done. Thousands of real babies had been murdered by the Israelis.
Never before have so many of my fellow writers been killedFollowing events in Palestine closely, it still comes as a shock when a journalist I have read, seen, heard is suddenly killed by the Israelis. This has happened several times. When it does I take a coffee and walk up the ridiculously steep track behind my house and sit high above the bay on a bench seat I built (badly).
That bench is my “top office” where I like to chew thoughts in my mind as I see the cold waves break on the brown rocks below. High up there I feel detached and better able to ask and answer the questions I need to process in my writing.
Why does our media pay little attention to the killing of so many fellow writers? Why don’t they call out the Israelis for having killed more journalists than any military machine in history? Why the silence around Israel’s “Where’s Daddy?” killing programme that has silenced so many Palestinian journalists and doctors by tracking their mobile phones and striking with a missile just when they arrive back home to their families? Why does “the world’s most moral army” commit such ugly crimes? Where’s the solidarity with our fellow journalists?
Is it because their skin is mainly dark? Is that why, according to Radio New Zealand’s own report on its Gaza coverage, New Zealanders have more in common with Israelis than we do with Palestinians? RNZ refers to this as our “proximity” to Israelis. They’re right, of course: by failing to shoulder our positive duty to act decisively against Israel and the US we show that we share values with people committing genocide.
Is this why stories about our own region — Kanaky New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands and so on, get so little coverage? I have heard many times the immense frustration of journalists I know who work on Pacific issues. The answer is simple: we have greater “proximity” to Benjamin Netanyahu than we do to the Polynesians or Melanesians in our own backyard. Really?
Such questions need answers. Back to the keyboard.
Solidarity I try not to permit myself despair. It’s a privilege we shouldn’t allow ourselves while our government supports the genocide. Sometimes that’s hard.
There’s a photo I’ve seen of a Palestinian mother holding her daughter that haunts me. In traditional thobe, her head covered by her simple robe, she could easily be Mary, mother of Jesus. She stares straight at the camera. Her expression is hard to read. Shock? Disbelief? Wounded humanity? Blood flows from below her eyes and stains her cheek and chin. Her forehead is blackened, probably from an explosive blast. She holds her child, a girl of perhaps 10, also damaged and blackened from the Israeli attack. The child is asleep or unconscious; I can’t tell which. The mother holds her as lovingly, as poignantly, as Mary did to Jesus when he came down from the cross. La Pietà in Gaza.
Why do some of us care less about this pair? Where is our humanity that we can let this happen day after day until the last syllable of our sickening rhetoric that somehow we in the West are morally superior has been vomited out.
I’ll give the last word to another writer:
“Verily I say unto you, in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
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.
Journalists have been targeted, detained and tortured by the Israeli military in Gaza — and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has now taken a new approach towards bringing justice these crimes.
The Paris-based global media freedom NGO has submitted multiple formal requests to the International Criminal Court (ICC) asking that Palestinian journalists who are victims of Israeli war crimes in Gaza be allowed to participate as such in international judicial proceedings.
If granted this status, these journalists would be able to present the ICC with the direct and personal harm they have suffered at the hands of Israeli forces, reports RSF.
RSF has filed four complaints with the ICC concerning war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza and recently joined director Sepideh Farsi at the Cannes Film Festival to pay tribute to Fatma Hassoun, a photojournalist killed by the Israeli army after it was revealed she was featured in the documentary film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
After filing the four complaints with the ICC concerning war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza since October 2023, RSF is resolutely continuing its efforts to bring the issue before international justice.
The NGO has submitted several victim participation forms to the ICC so that Gazan journalists can participate in the legal process as recognised victims, not just as witnesses.
Being officially recognised as victims is a first step toward justice, truth, and reparations — and it is an essential step toward protecting press freedom and journalistic integrity in conflict zones.
Nearly 200 journalists killed Since October 2023, Israeli armed forces have killed nearly 200 journalists in Gaza — the Gaza Media Office says more than 215 journalists have been killed — at least 44 of whom were targeted because of their work, according to RSF data.
Not only are foreign journalists barred from entering the blockaded Palestinian territory, but local reporters have watched their homes and newsrooms be destroyed by Israeli airstrikes and have been constantly displaced amid a devastating humanitarian crisis.
“The right of victims to participate in the ICC investigation is a crucial mechanism that will finally allow for the recognition of the immense harm suffered by Palestinian journalists working in Gaza, who are the target of an unprecedented and systematic crackdown,” said Clémence Witt, a lawyer at the Paris and Barcelona Bars, and Jeanne Sulzer, a lawyer at the Paris Bar and member of the ICC’s list of counsel.
Jonathan Dagher, head of the RSF Middle East desk, said: “It is time for justice for Gaza’s journalists to be served. The Israeli army’s ongoing crimes against them must end.
“RSF will tirelessly continue demanding justice and reparations. This new process in the ICC investigation is an integral part of this combat, and allowing journalists to participate as victims is essential to moving forward.
“They should be able to testify to the extreme violence targeting Gaza’s press. This is a new step toward holding the Israeli military and its leaders accountable for the crimes committed with impunity on Palestinian territory.”
When I despairingly contemplate the horrors and cruelty that Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to, I sometimes try to put this in the context of where I live.
I live on the Kāpiti Coast in the lower North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Geographically it is around the same size as Gaza. Both have coastlines running their full lengths. But, whereas the population of Gaza is a cramped two million, Kāpiti’s is a mere 56,000.
The Gaza Strip . . . 2 million people living in a cramped outdoor prison about the same size as Kāpiti. Map: politicalbytes.blog
I find it incomprehensible to visualise what it would be like if what is presently happening in Gaza occurred here.
The only similarities between them are coastlines and land mass. One is an outdoor prison while the other’s outdoors is peaceful.
New Zealand and Palestine state recognition Currently Palestine has observer status at the United Nations General Assembly. In May last year, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of Palestine being granted full membership of the United Nations.
To its credit, New Zealand was among 143 countries that supported the resolution. Nine, including the United States as the strongest backer of Israeli genocide outside Israel, voted against.
However, despite this massive majority, such is the undemocratic structure of the UN that it only requires US opposition in the Security Council to veto the democratic vote.
Notwithstanding New Zealand’s support for Palestine broadening its role in the General Assembly and its support for the two-state solution, the government does not officially recognise Palestine.
While its position on recognition is consistent with that of the genocide-supporting United States, it is inconsistent with the over 75 percent of UN member states who, in March 2025, recognised Palestine as a sovereign state (by 147 of the 193 member states).
NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon . . . his government should “correct this obscenity” of not recognising Palestinians’ right to have a sovereign nation. Image: RNZ/politicalbytes.blog/
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government does have the opportunity to correct this obscenity as Palestine recognition will soon be voted on again by the General Assembly.
In this context it is helpful to put the Hamas-led attack on Israel in its full historical perspective and to consider the reasons justifying the Israeli genocide that followed.
7 October 2023 and genocide justification The origin of the horrific genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the associated increased persecution, including killings, of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank (of the River Jordan) was not the attack by Hamas and several other militant Palestinian groups on 7 October 2023.
This attack was on a small Israeli town less than 2 km north of the border. An estimated 1,195 Israelis and visitors were killed.
The genocidal response of the Israeli government that followed this attack can only be justified by three factors:
The Judaism or ancient Jewishness of Palestine in Biblical times overrides the much larger Palestinian population in Mandate Palestine prior to formation of Israel in 1948;
The right of Israelis to self-determination overrides the right of Palestinians to self-determination; and
The value of Israeli lives overrides the value Palestinian lives.
The first factor is the key. The second and third factors are consequential. In order to better appreciate their context, it is first necessary to understand the Nakba.
Understanding the Nakba Rather than the October 2023 attack, the origin of the subsequent genocide goes back more than 70 years to the collective trauma of Palestinians caused by what they call the Nakba (the Disaster).
The foundation year of the Nakba was in 1948, but this was a central feature of the ethnic cleansing that was kicked off between 1947 and 1949.
During this period Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.
The Nakba – the Palestinian collective trauma in 1948 that started ethnic cleansing by Zionist paramilitary forces. Image: David Robie/APR
During the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or forced to flee. Initially this was through Zionist paramilitaries.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in May this repression was picked up by its military. Massacres, biological warfare (by poisoning village wells) and either complete destruction or depopulation of Palestinian-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods (which were then given Hebrew names) followed
By the end of the Nakba, 78 percent of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.
Genocide to speed up ethnic cleansing Ethnic cleansing was unsuccessfully pursued, with the support of the United Kingdom and France, in the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. More successful was the Six Day War of 1967, which included the military and political occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Throughout this period ethnic cleansing was not characterised by genocide. That is, it was not the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying them.
Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began in May 1948 and has accelerated to genocide in 2023. Image: politicalbytes.blog
In fact, the acceptance of a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) under the ill-fated Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 put a temporary constraint on the expansion of ethnic cleansing.
Since its creation in 1948, Israel, along with South Africa the same year (until 1994), has been an apartheid state. I discussed this in an earlier Political Bytes post (15 March 2025), When apartheid met Zionism.
However, while sharing the racism, discrimination, brutal violence, repression and massacres inherent in apartheid, it was not characterised by genocide in South Africa; nor was it in Israel for most of its existence until the current escalation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Following 7 October 2023, genocide has become the dominant tool in the ethnic cleansing tool kit. More recently this has included accelerating starvation and the bombing of tents of Gaza Palestinians.
The magnitude of this genocide is discussed further below.
The Biblical claim Zionism is a movement that sought to establish a Jewish nation in Palestine. It was established as a political organisation as late as 1897. It was only some time after this that Zionism became the most influential ideology among Jews generally.
Despite its prevalence, however, there are many Jews who oppose Zionism and play leading roles in the international protests against the genocide in Gaza.
Zionist ideology is based on a view of Palestine in the time of Jesus Christ. Image: politicalbytes.blog
Based on Zionist ideology, the justification for replacing Mandate Palestine with the state of Israel rests on a Biblical argument for the right of Jews to retake their “homeland”. This justification goes back to the time of that charismatic carpenter and prophet Jesus Christ.
The population of Palestine in Jesus’ day was about 500,000 to 600,000 (a little bigger than both greater Wellington and similar to that of Jerusalem today). About 18,000 of these residents were clergy, priests and Levites (a distinct male group within Jewish communities).
Jerusalem itself in biblical times, with a population of 55,000, was a diverse city and pilgrimage centre. It was also home to numerous Diaspora Jewish communities.
In fact, during the 7th century BC at least eight nations were settled within Palestine. In addition to Judaeans, they included Arameans, Samaritans, Phoenicians and Philistines.
A breakdown based on religious faiths (Jews, Christians and Muslims) provides a useful insight into how Palestine has evolved since the time of Jesus. Jews were the majority until the 4th century AD.
By the fifth century they had been supplanted by Christians and then from the 12th century to 1947 Muslims were the largest group. As earlier as the 12th century Arabic had become the dominant language. It should be noted that many Christians were Arabs.
Adding to this evolving diversity of ethnicity is the fact that during this time Palestine had been ruled by four empires — Roman, Persian, Ottoman and British.
Prior to 1948 the population of the region known as Mandate Palestine approximately corresponded to the combined Israel and Palestine today. Throughout its history it has varied in both size and ethnic composition.
The Ottoman census of 1878 provides an indicative demographic profile of its three districts that approximated what became Mandatory Palestine after the end of World War 1.
Group
Population
Percentage
Muslim citizens
403,795
86–87%
Christian citizens
43,659
9%
Jewish citizens
15,011
3%
Jewish (foreign-born)
Est. 5–10,000
1–2%
Total
Up to 472,465
100.0%
In 1882, the Ottoman Empire revealed that the estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine represented just 0.3 percent of the world’s Jewish population.
The self-determination claim Based on religion the estimated population of Palestine in 1922 was 78 percent Muslim, 11 percent Jewish, and 10 percent Christian.
By 1945 this composition had changed to 58 percent Muslim, 33 percent Jewish and 8 percent Christian. The reason for this shift was the success of the Zionist campaigning for Jews to migrate to Palestine which was accelerated by the Jewish holocaust.
By 15 May 1948, the total population of the state of Israel was 805,900, of which 649,600 (80.6 percent) were Jews with Palestinians being 156,000 (19.4 percent). This turnaround was primarily due to the devastating impact of the Nakba.
Today Israel’s population is over 9.5 million of which over 77 percent are Jewish and more than 20 percent are Palestinian. The latter’s absolute growth is attributable to Israel’s subsequent geographic expansion, particularly in 1967, and a higher birth rate.
Palestine today (parts of West Bank under Israeli occupation). Map: politicalbytes.blog
The current population of the Palestinian Territories, including Gaza, is more than 5.5 million. Compare this with the following brief sample of much smaller self-determination countries — Slovenia (2.2 million), Timor-Leste (1.4 million), and Tonga (104,000).
The population size of the Palestinian Territories is more than half that of Israel. Closer to home it is a little higher than New Zealand.
The only reason why Palestinians continue to be denied the right to self-determination is the Zionist ideological claim linked to the biblical time of Jesus Christ and its consequential strategy of ethnic cleansing.
If it was not for the opposition of the United States, then this right would not have been denied. It has been this opposition that has enabled Israel’s strategy.
Comparative value of Palestinian lives The use of genocide as the latest means of achieving ethnic cleansing highlights how Palestinian lives are valued compared with Israeli lives.
While not of the same magnitude appropriated comparisons have been made with the horrific ethnic cleansing of Jews through the means of the holocaust by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Per capita the scale of the magnitude gap is reduced considerably.
Since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (and confirmed by the World Health Organisation) more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed. Of those killed over 16,500 were children. Compare this with less than 2000 Israelis killed.
Further, at least 310 UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) team members have been killed along with over 200 journalists and media workers. Add to this around 1400 healthcare workers including doctors and nurses.
What also can’t be forgotten is the increasing Israeli ethnic cleansing on the occupied West Bank. Around 950 Palestinians, including around 200 children, have also been killed during this same period.
Time for New Zealand to recognise Palestine The above discussion is in the context of the three justifications for supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians strategy that goes back to 1948 and which, since October 2023, is being accelerated by genocide.
First, it requires the conviction that the theology of Judaism in Palestine in the biblical times following the birth of Jesus Christ trumps both the significantly changing demography from the 5th century at least to the mid-20th century and the numerical predominance of Arabs in Mandate Palestine;
Second, and consequentially, it requires the conviction that while Israelis are entitled to self-determination, Palestinians are not; and
Finally, it requires that Israeli lives are much more valuable than Palestinian lives. In fact, the latter have no value at all.
Unless the government, including Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, shares these convictions (especially the “here and now” second and third) then it should do the right thing first by unequivocally saying so, and then by recognising the right of Palestine to be an independent state.
Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.
Papua New Guinea’s state broadcaster NBC wants shortwave radio reintroduced to achieve the government’s goal of 100 percent broadcast coverage by 2030.
Last week, the broadcaster hosted a workshop on the reintroduction of shortwave radio transmission, bringing together key government agencies and other stakeholders.
NBC had previously a shortwave signal, but due to poor maintenance and other factors, the system failed.
The NBC’s 50-year logo to coincide with Papua New Guinea’s half century independence anniversary celebrations. Image: NBC
Its managing director Kora Nou spoke with RNZ Pacific about the merits of a return to shortwave.
Kora Nou: We had shortwave at NBC about 20 or so years ago, and it reached almost the length and breadth of the country.
So fast forward 20, we are going to celebrate our 50th anniversary. Our network has a lot more room for improvement at the moment, that’s why there’s the thinking to revisit shortwave again after all this time.
Don Wiseman: It’s a pretty cheap medium, as we here at RNZ Pacific know, but not too many people are involved with shortwave anymore. In terms of the anniversary in September, you’re not going to have things up and running by then, are you?
KN: It’s still early days. We haven’t fully committed, but we are actively pursuing it to see the viability of it.
We’ve visited one or two manufacturers that are still doing it. We’ve seen some that are still on, still been manufactured, and also issues surrounding receivers. So there’s still hard thinking behind it.
We still have to do our homework as well. So still early days and we’ve got the minister who’s asked us to explore this and then give him the pros and cons of it.
DW: Who would you get backing from? You’d need backing from international donors, wouldn’t you?
KN: We will put a business case into it, and then see where we go from there, including where the funding comes from — from government or we talk to our development partners.
There’s a lot of thinking and work still involved before we get there, but we’ve been asked to fast track the advice that we can give to government.
DW: How important do you think it is for everyone in the country to be able to hear the national broadcaster?
KN: It’s important, not only being the national broadcaster, but [with] the service it provides to our people.
We’ve got FM, which is good with good quality sound. But the question is, how many does it reach? It’s pretty critical in terms of broadcasting services to our people, and 50 years on, where are we? It’s that kind of consideration.
I think the bigger contention is to reintroduce software transmission. But how does it compare or how can we enhance it through the improved technology that we have nowadays as well? That’s where we are right now.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Asia Pacific Report editor David Robie was honoured with Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) at the weekend by the Governor-General, Dame Cindy Kiro, in an investiture ceremony at Government House Tāmaki Makaurau.
He was one of eight recipients for various honours, which included Joycelyn Armstrong, who was presented with Companion of the King’s Service Order (KSO) for services to interfaith communities.
Dr Robie’s award, which came in the King’s Birthday Honours in 2024 but was presented on Saturday, was for “services to journalism and Asia-Pacific media education”.
Dr David Robie has contributed to journalism in New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region for more than 50 years.
Dr Robie began his career with The Dominion in 1965 and worked as an international journalist and correspondent for agencies from Johannesburg to Paris. He has won several journalism awards, including the 1985 Media Peace Prize for his coverage of the Rainbow Warrior bombing.
He was Head of Journalism at the University of Papua New Guinea from 1993 to 1997 and the University of the South Pacific in Suva from 1998 to 2002. He founded the Pacific Media Centre in 2007 while professor of journalism and communications at Auckland University of Technology.
He developed four award-winning community publications as student training outlets. He pioneered special internships for Pacific students in partnership with media and the University of the South Pacific. He has organised scholarships with the Asia New Zealand Foundation for student journalists to China, Indonesia and the Philippines.
He was founding editor of Pacific Journalism Review journal in 1994 and in 1996 he established the Pacific Media Watch, working as convenor with students to campaign for media freedom in the Pacific.
He has authored 10 books on Asia-Pacific media and politics. Dr Robie co-founded and is deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network/Te Koakoa NGO.
The investiture ceremony on 24 May 2025. Video: Office of the Governor-General
In an interview with Global Voices last year, Dr Robie praised the support from colleagues and students and said:
“There should be more international reporting about the “hidden stories” of the Pacific such as the unresolved decolonisation issues — Kanaky New Caledonia, “French” Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), both from France; and West Papua from Indonesia.
“West Papua, in particular, is virtually ignored by Western media in spite of the ongoing serious human rights violations. This is unconscionable.”
A punitive defamation charge filed against one of Samoa’s most experienced and trusted journalists last week has sparked a flurry of criticism over abuse of power and misuse of a law that has long been heavily criticised as outdated.
Talamua Online senior journalist Lagi Keresoma, who is also president of the Journalists Association of Samoa (JAWS), was charged with one count of defamation under Section 117A of Samoa’s Crimes Act 2013 on May 18.
She was elected in 2021 as the first woman to hold the presidency.
The charge followed an article she had published more than two weeks earlier on May 1 alleging that a former police officer had appealed to Samoa’s Head of State to have charges against him withdrawn.
The accused was charged with “allegedly forging the signature of the complainant as guarantor to secure a $200,000 loan from the Samoa National Provident Fund”. He denies the allegation.
It was reported that the complainant was another senior police officer.
Criminal libel removed, then restored The criminal libel law was removed by the Samoan government in 2013, but was revived four years later in 2017. It was claimed at the time that it was needed to deal with issues triggered by social media.
JAWS immediately defended their president, saying it stood in “full solidarity” with Keresoma and calling for an immediate repeal of the law.
The association said the provision was a “troubling development for press freedom in Samoa” and added that it “should not be used to silence journalists and discourage investigative reporting”.
“It is deeply concerning that a journalist of Lagi Keresoma’s integrity and professionalism is being prosecuted under a law that has long been criticised for its negative effect on press freedom,” said the association.
Talamua Online senior journalist Lagi Keresoma . . . charged with criminal defamation over a report earlier this month. Image: Samoa Observer
Keresoma told Talamua Online she had been summoned twice to the police station and the police suggested that she apologise publicly and to the complainant and the complaint would be withdrawn.
However, she said: “To apologise is an admission that the story is wrong, so after speaking to my lawyer and my editor, it was decided to have the police file their charges, but no apology from my end.”
Her lawyer also contacted the police investigating officer informing that her client was not making a statement but to prepare the charges against her.
Keresoma was summoned to the police headquarters on Saturday and Sunday and the charges were only finalised on Monday morning before she was released.
‘Outdated and controversial provision’ “Her arrest under this outdated and controversial provision raises serious concerns about the misuse of legal tools to silence independent journalism. The action appears heavy-handed and disproportionate, and risks being perceived as an abuse of power to suppress public scrutiny and dissent,” Lagipoiva said.
“The United Nations Human Rights Committee and UN Special Rapporteurs, particularly the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, have repeatedly called for defamation to be treated as a civil matter, not a criminal one.
“The continued application of criminal defamation in Samoa contradicts international standards and poses a chilling threat to press freedom, particularly for women journalists who already face systemic risks and intimidation.”
Pacific Media Watch notes: “This is a disturbing development in Pacific media freedom trends. Clearly it is a clumsy attempt to intimidate and silence in-depth investigation and reporting on Pacific governance.
“For years, Samoa has been a beacon for media freedom in the region, but it has fared badly in the latest World Press Freedom Index and this incident involving alleged criminal libel, a crime that should have been struck from the statutes years ago, is not going to help Samoa’s standing.
An Auckland University law academic says Samoa’s criminal libel law under which a prominent journalist has been charged should be repealed.
Lagi Keresoma, the first female president of the Journalists Association of Samoa (JAWS) and editor of Talamua Online, was charged under the Crimes Act 2013 on Sunday after publishing an article about a former police officer, whom she asserted had sought the help of the Head of State to withdraw charges brought against him.
JAWS has already called for the criminal libel law to be scrapped and Auckland University academic Beatrice Tabangcoro told RNZ Pacific that the law was “unnecessary and impractical”.
“A person who commits a crime under this section is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding 175 penalty units or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 months,” the Crimes Act states.
JAWS said this week that the law, specifically Section 117A of the Crimes Act, undermined media freedom, and any defamation issues could be dealt with in a civil court.
JAWS gender representative to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said Keresoma’s arrest “raises serious concerns about the misuse of legal tools to independent journalism” in the country.
Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson called on the Samoan government “to urgently review and repeal criminal defamation laws that undermine democratic accountability and public trust in the justice system”.
Law removed and brought back The law was removed by the Samoan government in 2013, but was brought back in 2017, ostensibly to deal with issues arising on social media.
Auckland University’s academic Beatrice Tabangcoro . . . reintroduction of the law was widely criticised at the time. Image: University of Auckland
Auckland University’s academic Beatrice Tabangcoro told RNZ Pacific that this reintroduction was widely criticised at the time for its potential impact on freedom of speech and media freedom.
She said that truth was a defence to the offence of false statement causing harm to reputation, but in the case of a journalist this could lead to them being compelled to reveal their sources.
The academic said that the law remained unnecessary and impractical, and she pointed to the Samoa Police Commissioner telling media in 2023 that the law should be repealed as it was used “as a tool for harassing the media and is a waste of police resources”.
Tonga and Vanuatu are two other Pacific nations with the criminal libel law on their books, and it is something the media in both those countries have raised concerns about.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Journalists in Papua New Guinea are likely to face legal threats as powerful individuals and companies use court actions to silence public interest reporting, warns Media Council of PNG president Neville Choi.
As co-chair of the second Community Coalition Against Corruption (CCAC) National Meeting, he said lawfare was likely because Parliament had passed no laws to protect reporters and individuals from such tactics.
Choi said journalists were being left unprotected against Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) — legal actions used by powerful individuals or corporations to silence criticism and reporting.
“In Papua New Guinea right now, we don’t have any law to stop SLAPPs,” Choi said.
“Big corporations or organisations with more money can use lawsuits to silence people, civil society and the media. That’s the reality.”
SLAPPs are lawsuits filed not to win on merit, but to drain resources, silence critics, and stop public debate.
In some other countries, anti-SLAPP laws exist to protect journalists and whistleblowers. But in PNG, no such legal shield exists.
Legal pressure for speaking out “We’ve seen it happen,” Choi added, referring to ACTNOW PNG’s Eddie Tanago, a civil society advocate who has faced legal pressure for speaking out.
“He’s experienced it. And we know it can happen to journalists too.”
Participants in the second CCAC National Meeting in Port Moresby . . . journalists are being left unprotected from corporate lawfare. Image: PNG Post-Courier
Despite increasing threats, journalists do not have access to legal defence funds or institutional protection.
Choi confirmed that there was no system in place to defend reporters who were hit with defamation lawsuits or other forms of legal retaliation.
“Our advice to journalists is simple. Do your job well. The truth is the only protection we have,” he said.
“If you stick to facts, follow professional ethics and report responsibly, you reduce your risk. But if you make a mistake, you leave yourself open to lawsuits.”
The Media Council, in partnership with Transparency International under the CCAC, are discussing the idea of drafting an anti-SLAPP law but no formal proposal has been put forward yet.
Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.
How global power struggles are impacting in local communities, culture and sovereignty in Kanaky, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and Samoa.
In episode one, The Battlefield, tensions between the United States and China over the Pacific escalate, affecting the lives of Pacific Islanders.
Key figures like former Malaita Premier Daniel Suidani and tour guide Maria Loweyo reveal how global power struggles impact on local communities, culture and sovereignty in the Solomon Islands and Samoa.
The episode intertwines these personal stories with the broader geopolitical dynamics, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of the Pacific’s role in global diplomacy.
Fight for the Pacific, a four-part series by Tuki Laumea and Cleo Fraser, showcases the Pacific’s critical transformation into a battleground of global power.
This series captures the high-stakes rivalry between the US and China as they vie for dominance in a region pivotal to global stability.
The series frames the Pacific not just as a battleground for superpowers but also as a region with its own unique challenges and aspirations.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Morning Report today it was “intolerable” that Israel had blocked any aid reaching residents for many weeks.
The UK, France and Canada have expressed their frustration, with the UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy telling Parliament the war in Gaza had entered a “dark new phase” and the UK was cancelling trade talks with Israel.
Although the situation had come about because of acts of terrorism by Hamas, for residents in Gaza it had become “intolerable”, Peters told Morning Report.
“We’ve had enough of this and we want the matter resolved and now.”
A full resumption of aid should have happened a long time ago and it was essential that the United Nations be involved in delivering it.
‘Had enough of it’ “… we’ve just simply had enough of it, utterly so [from Israel].”
The statement by the countries reaffirmed what had been said for a long time that Israel must make aid available.
New Zealand also opposed Israel’s latest expansion of military operations in Gaza, Peters said.
The Palestinian Authority and countries such as Egypt and Indonesia understood New Zealand’s position.
“We just want to sort this out and the long-term thing [Palestinians’ future alongside Israel] has got to be resolved as well.
“Israel needs to get the message very clear — we are running out of patience and hearing excuses.”
Asked if the Israeli ambassador should be called in so the message could be conveyed more clearly, he said it would be a symbolic gesture that would not help starving babies.
Israel already knew what this country’s stance was, he said.
It was an appalling situation that had started with “unforgivable terrorism” but Israel had gone “far too far” in its response, Peters said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Reading an NBC News report a couple of days ago about a Trump administration plan to relocate 1 million Gazans to Libya reminded me of a conversation between the legendary Warsaw Ghetto leader Marek Edelman and fellow fighter and survivor Simcha Rotem that took place more than quarter of a century ago.
In the conversation, first reported in Haaretz in 2023, Rotem said the Jews who walked into the gas chambers without a fight did so only because they were hungry.
Edelman disagreed, but Rotem insisted. “Listen, man. Marek, I’m surprised by your attitude. They only went because they were hungry. Even if they’d known what awaited them they would have walked into the gas chambers. You and I would have done the same.”
Edelman cut him off. “You would never have gone” [to the gas chamber.] Rotem replied, “I’m not so sure. I was never that hungry.”
Edelman agreed, saying: “I also wasn’t that hungry,” to which Rotem said, “That’s why you didn’t go.”
The NBC report claims that Israeli officials are aware of the plan and talks have been held with the Libyan leadership about taking in 1 million ethnically cleansed Palestinians.. The carrot being offered is the unfreezing of billions of dollars of Libya’s own money seized by the US more than a decade ago.
The Arabic word Sumud — or steadfastness — is synonymous with the Palestinian people. The idea that 1 million Gazans would agree to walk off the 1.4 percent of historic Palestine that is Gaza is inconceivable.
Equally incomprehensible But then the idea that my great grandmother and other relatives walked into the gas chambers is equally incomprehensible. But we’ve never been that hungry.
The people of Gaza are. No food has entered Gaza for 76 days. Half a million Gazans are facing starvation and the rest of the population (more than 1.5 million people) are suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the UN.
Last year, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was widely condemned when he suggested starving Gaza might be “justified and moral”.
The lack of outrage and urgency being expressed by world leaders — particularly Western leaders — after nearly 11 weeks of Israel actually starving the inhabitants of what retired IDF general Giora Eiland has called a giant concentration camp — is an outrage.
As far as I’m aware there’s been no talk of cutting off diplomatic relations, trade embargos or even cultural boycotts.
Israel — which last time I looked wasn’t in Europe — just placed second in Eurovision. “I’m happy,” an Israeli friend messaged me, “that my old genocidal homeland (Austria) won and not my current genocidal nation.”
A third generation Israeli, she’s one of a tiny minority protesting the war crimes being committed less than 100km from her apartment.
Sanchez had declared Israel a genocidal state and said Spain won’t do business with such a nation.
And peaking at a national famine commemoration held over the weekend Higgens said the UN Security Council had failed again and again by not dealing with famines and the current “forced starvation of the people of Gaza”.
He cited UN Secretary-General António Guterres saying “as aid dries up, the floodgates of horror have re-opened. Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”
Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen argued in his 1981 book Poverty and Famines that famines are man-made and not natural disasters.
Unlike Gaza, the famines he wrote about were caused by either callous disregard by the ruling elites for the populations left to starve or the disastrous results of following the whims of an all-powerful leader like Chairman Mao.
He argued that a famine had never occurred in a functioning democracy.
A horrifying fact It’s a horrifying fact that a self-described democracy, funded and abetted by the world’s most powerful democracy, has been allowed by the international community to starve two million people with no let-up in its bombing of barely functioning hospitals and killing of more than 2000 Gazans since the ban on food entering the strip was put in place. (Many more will have died due to a lack of medicine, food, and access to clean water.)
After more than two months of denying any food or medicine to enter Gaza Israel is now saying it will allow limited amounts of food in to avoid a full-scale famine.
“Due to the need to expand the fighting, we will introduce a basic amount of food to the residents of Gaza to ensure no famine occurs,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained.
“A famine might jeopardise the continuation of Operation Gideon’s Chariots aimed at eliminating Hamas.”
If 19-months of indiscriminate bombardment, the razing to the ground of whole cities, the displacement of virtually the entire population, and more than 50,000 recorded deaths (the Lancet estimated the true figure is likely to be four times that) hasn’t destroyed Hamas to Israel’s satisfaction it’s hard to conceive of what will.
But accepting that that is the real aim of the ongoing genocide would be naïve.
Shamefully indifferent Western world In the first cabinet meeting following the Six Day War, long before Hamas came into existence, ridding Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants was top of the agenda.
“If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places . . . we can annex Gaza without a problem,” Defence Minister Moshe Dayan said.
The population of Gaza was 400,000 at the time.
“We should take them to the East Bank [Jordan] by the scruff of their necks and throw them there,” Minister Yosef Sapir said.
Fifty-eight years later the possible destinations may have changed but the aim remains the same. And a shamefully indifferent Western world combined with a malnourished and desperate population may be paving the way to a mass expulsion.
If the US, Europe and their allies demanded that Israel stop, the killing would end tomorrow.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and his Towards Democracy blog is at Substack.