A forthcoming new edition of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire honours the ship’s final mission and the resilience of those affected by decades of radioactive fallout.
PACIFIC MORNINGS: By Aui’a Vaimaila Leatinu’u
The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow WarriorIII ship returns to Aotearoa this July, 40 years after the bombing of the original campaign ship, with a new edition of its landmark eyewitness account.
On 10 July 1985, two underwater bombs planted by French secret agents destroyed the Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, killing Portuguese-born Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira and sparking global outrage.
The Rainbow Warrior was protesting nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, specifically targeting French atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.
The vessel drew international attention to the environmental devastation and human suffering caused by decades of radioactive fallout.
Eyes of Fire – the cover for the 30th anniversary edition in 2015. Image: Little island Press
The 40th anniversary commemorations include a new edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior by journalist David Robie, who was on board the ship during its historic mission in the Marshall Islands.
The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage, Operation Exodus, helped evacuate the people of Rongelap after years of US nuclear fallout made their island uninhabitable. The vessel arrived at Rongelap Atoll on 15 May 1985.
Dr Robie, who joined the Rainbow Warrior in Hawai‘i as a journalist at the end of April 1985, says the mission was unlike any other.
“The fact that this was a humanitarian voyage, quite different in many ways from many of the earlier protest voyages by Greenpeace, to help the people of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands . . . it was going to be quite momentous,” Dr Robie says.
PMN NEWS
“A lot of people in the Marshall Islands suffered from those tests. Rongelap particularly wanted to move to a safer location. It is an incredible thing to do for an island community where the land is so much part of their existence, their spirituality and their ethos.”
He says the biggest tragedy of the bombing was the death of Pereira.
“He will never be forgotten and it was a miracle that night that more people were not killed in the bombing attack by French state terrorists.
“What the French secret agents were doing was outright terrorism, bombing a peaceful environmental ship under the cover of their government. It was an outrage”.
PMN News interview with Dr David Robie on 20 May 2025.
Russel Norman, executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, calls the 40th anniversary “a pivotal moment” in the global environmental struggle.
“Climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat,” Dr Norman says.
“As we remember the bombing and the murder of our crew member, Fernando Pereira, it’s important to remember why the French government was compelled to commit such a cowardly act of violence.
“Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective. We posed a very real threat to the French Government’s military programme and colonial power.”
As the only New Zealand journalist on board, Dr Robie documented the trauma of nuclear testing and the resilience of the Rongelapese people. He recalls their arrival in the village, where the locals dismantled their homes over three days.
“The only part that was left on the island was the church, the stone, white stone church. Everything else was disassembled and taken on the Rainbow Warrior for four voyages. I remember one older woman sitting on the deck among the remnants of their homes.”
Robie also recalls the inspiring impact of the ship’s banner for the region reading: “Nuclear Free Pacific”.
One of the elderly Rongelap Islanders with her home and possessions on the deck of the Rainbow Warrior in May 1985. Image: David Robie/Eyes of Fire
“That stands out because this was a humanitarian mission but it was for the whole region. It’s the whole of the Pacific, helping Pacific people but also standing up against the nuclear powers, US and France in particular, who carried out so many tests in the Pacific.”
Originally released in 1986, Eyes of Fire chronicled the relocation effort and the ship’s final weeks before the bombing. Robie says the new edition draws parallels between nuclear colonialism then and climate injustice now.
“This whole renewal of climate denialism, refusal by major states to realise that the solutions are incredibly urgent, and the United States up until recently was an important part of that whole process about facing up to the climate crisis.
Nuclear Exodus: The Rongelap Evacuation. Video: In association with TVNZ
“It’s even more important now for activism, and also for the smaller countries that are reasonably progressive, to take the lead. It looks at what’s happened in the last 10 years since the previous edition we did, and then a number of the people who were involved then.
“I hope the book helps to inspire others, especially younger people, to get out there and really take action. The future is in your hands.”
Aui’a Vaimaila Leatinu’u is a multimedia journalist at Pacific Media Network. Republished with permission.
About 2000 protesters took part in a demonstration against Israel's Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing in New Zealand's largest city Auckland yesterday, sparking the global Nakba Day rallies across the world. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, Western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from Western establishments.
Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.
The British establishment’s financial daily, The Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.
In an editorial — effectively the paper’s voice– the FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic cleansing.
Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.
So parlous is the state of Western reporting, from a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize on any small signs of progress.
Next, The Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements there”.
‘Deafening silence on Gaza’
At the weekend, The Independentdecided the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave”.
Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the Western press corps and Western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.
Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.
It wrote of Israel: “Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”
The paper could more properly have asked a different question: Why have Israel’s Western allies — as well as media like The Guardian and FT — waited 19 months to speak up against the horror?
And, predictably bringing up the rear, was the BBC. On Wednesday, the BBC Radio’s PM programme chose to give top billing to testimony from Tom Fletcher, the United Nation’s humanitarian affairs chief, to the Security Council. Presenter Evan Davis said the BBC had decided to “do something a little unusual”.
Unusual indeed. It played Fletcher’s speech in full — all 12 and a half minutes of it. That included Fletcher’s comment: “For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you act — decisively — to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”
‘Genocide’ from taboo to mainstream
We had gone in less than a week from the word “genocide” being taboo in relation to Gaza to it becoming almost mainstream.
Cracks are evident in the British Parliament too. Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP and life-long Israel supporter, stood up from the back benches to admit he had been wrong about Israel, and condemned it “for what it is doing to the Palestinian people”.
He was one of more than a dozen Tory MPs and peers in the House of Lords, all formerly staunch defenders of Israel, who urged British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to immediately recognise a Palestinian state.
Their move followed an open letter published by 36 members of the Board of Deputies, a 300-member body that claims to represent British Jews, dissenting from its continuing support for the slaughter. The letter warned: “Israel’s soul is being ripped out.”
Pritchard told fellow MPs it was time to “stand up for humanity, for us being on the right side of history, for having the moral courage to lead.”
Sadly, there is no sign of that yet. Research published last week, based on Israeli tax authority data, showed Starmer’s government has been lying even about the highly limited restrictions on arms sales to Israel it claimed to have imposed last year.
Despite an ostensible ban on shipments of weapons that could be used in Gaza, Britain has covertly exported more than 8500 separate munitions to Israel since the ban.
More weapons details
This week more details emerged. According to figures published by The National, the current government exported more weapons to Israel in the final three months of last year, after the ban came into effect, than the previous Conservative government did through the whole of 2020 to 2023.
So shameful is the UK’s support for Israel in the midst of what the International Court of Justice — the World Court — has described as a “plausible genocide” that Starmer’s government needs to pretend it is doing something, even as it actually continues to arm that genocide.
More than 40 MPs wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy last week calling for him to respond to allegations that he had misled the public and Parliament. “The public deserves to know the full scale of the UK’s complicity in crimes against humanity,” they wrote.
There are growing rumblings elsewhere. This week French President Emmanuel Macron called Israel’s complete blockade on aid into Gaza “shameful and unacceptable”. He added: “My job is to do everything I can to make it stop.”
“Everything” seemed to amount to nothing more than mooting possible economic sanctions.
Still, the rhetorical shift was striking. Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, similarly denounced the blockade, calling it “unjustifiable”. She added: “I have always recalled the urgency of finding a way to end the hostilities and respect international law and international humanitarian law.”
“International law”? Where has that been for the past 19 months?
Similar change of priorities
There was a similar change of priorities across the Atlantic. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen, for example, recently dared to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “ethnic cleansing”.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a bellwether of the Beltway consensus, gave Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister, Sharren Haskel, an unusually tough grilling. Amanpour all but accused her of lying about Israel starving children.
Meanwhile, Josep Borrell, the recently departed head of European Union foreign policy, broke another taboo last week by directly accusing Israel of preparing a genocide in Gaza.
“Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide,” he said, adding: “We’re facing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War.”
Borrell, of course, has no influence over EU policy at this point.
This is all painfully slow progress, but it does suggest that a tipping point may be near.
If so, there are several reasons. One — the most evident in the mix — is US President Donald Trump.
It was easier for The Guardian, the FT and old-school Tory MPs to watch the extermination of Gaza’s Palestinians in silence when it was kindly Uncle Joe Biden and the US military industrial complex behind it.
Trump forgets ‘his bit’
Unlike his predecessor, Trump too often forgets the bit where he is supposed to put a gloss on Israeli crimes, or distance the US from them, even as Washington ships the weapons to carry out those crimes.
But also, there are plenty of indications that Trump — with his constant craving to be seen as the top dog — is increasingly annoyed at being publicly outfoxed by Netanyahu.
This week, as Trump headed to the Middle East, his administration secured the release of Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, the last living US citizen in captivity in Gaza, by bypassing Israel and negotiating directly with Hamas.
In his comments on the release, Trump insisted it was time to “put an end to this very brutal war” — a remark he had very obviously not coordinated with Netanyahu.
Notably, Israel is not on Trump’s Middle East schedule.
Right now seems a relatively safe moment to adopt a more critical stance towards Israel, as presumably the FT and Guardian appreciate.
Then there is the fact that Israel’s genocide is reaching its endpoint. No food, water or medicines have entered Gaza for more than two months. Everyone is malnourished. It is unclear, given Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system, how many have already died from hunger.
Skin-and-bones children
But the pictures of skin-and-bones children emerging from Gaza are uncomfortably reminiscent of 80-year-old images of skeletal Jewish children imprisoned in Nazi camps.
It is a reminder that Gaza — strictly blockaded by Israel for 16 years before Hamas’ 7 October 2023 breakout — has been transformed over the past 19 months from a concentration camp into a death camp.
Parts of the media and political class know mass death in Gaza cannot be obscured for much longer, not even after Israel has barred foreign journalists from the enclave and murdered most of the Palestinian journalists trying to record the genocide.
Cynical political and media actors are trying to get in their excuses before it is too late to show remorse.
And finally there is the fact that Israel has declared its readiness to take hands-on responsibility for the extermination in Gaza by, in its words, “capturing” the tiny territory.
The long-anticipated “day after” looks like it is about to arrive.
For 20 years, Israel and Western capitals have conspired in the lie that Gaza’s occupation ended in 2005, when Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, pulled out a few thousand Jewish settlers and withdrew Israeli soldiers to a highly fortified perimeter encaging the enclave.
Always under Israeli occupation
In a ruling last year, the World Court gave this claim short shrift, emphasising that Gaza, as well as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, had never stopped being under Israeli occupation, and that the occupation must end immediately.
The truth is that, even before the 2023 Hamas attacks, Israel had been besieging Gaza by land, sea and air for many, many years. Nothing — people or trade — went in or out without the Israeli military’s say-so.
Israeli officials instituted a secret policy of putting the population there on a strict “diet” – a war crime then as now — one that ensured most of Gaza’s young became progressively more malnourished.
Drones whined constantly overhead, as they do now, watching the population from the skies 24 hours a day and occasionally raining down death. Fishermen were shot and their boats sunk for trying to fish their own waters. Farmers’ crops were destroyed by herbicides sprayed from Israeli planes.
And when the mood took it, Israel sent in fighter jets to bomb the enclave or sent soldiers in on military operations, killing hundreds of civilians at a time.
When Palestinians in Gaza went out week after week to stage protests close to the perimeter fence of their concentration camp, Israeli snipers shot them, killing some 200 and crippling many thousands more.
Yet, despite all this, Israel and Western capitals insisted on the story that Hamas “ruled” Gaza, and that it alone was responsible for what went on there.
Fiction important to West
“That fiction was very important to the Western powers. It allowed Israel to evade accountability for the crimes against humanity committed in Gaza over the past two decades – and it allowed the West to avoid complicity charges for arming the criminals.
Instead, the political and media class perpetuated the myth that Israel was engaged in a “conflict” with Hamas — as well as intermittent “wars” in Gaza — even as Israel’s own military termed its operations to destroy whole neighbourhoods and kill their residents “mowing the lawn”.
Israel, of course, viewed Gaza as its lawn to mow. And that is precisely because it never stopped occupying the enclave.
Even today Western media outlets collude in the fiction that Gaza is free from Israeli occupation by casting the slaughter there — and the starvation of the population — as a “war”.
But the “day after” — signalled by Israel’s promised “capture” and “reoccupation” of Gaza — brings a conundrum for Israel and its Western sponsors.
Until now Israel’s every atrocity has been justified by Hamas’ violent breakout on 7 October 2023.
Israel and its supporters have insisted that Hamas must return the Israelis it took captive before there can be some undefined “peace”. At the same time, Israel has also maintained that Gaza must be destroyed at all costs to root out Hamas and eliminate it.
Goals never looked consistent
These two goals never looked consistent — not least because the more Palestinian civilians Israel killed “rooting out” Hamas, the more young men Hamas recruited seeking vengeance.
The constant stream of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli leaders made clear that they believed there were no civilians in Gaza — not “uninvolved” –– and that the enclave should be levelled and the population treated like “human animals”, punished with “no food, water or fuel”.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reiterated that approach last week, vowing that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and that its people would be ethnically cleansed — or, as he put it, forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”.
Israeli officials have echoed him, threatening to “flatten” Gaza if the hostages are not released. But in truth, the captives held by Hamas are just a convenient pretext.
Smotrich was more honest in observing that the hostages’ release was “not the most important thing”. His view is apparently shared by the Israeli military, which has reportedly put that aim last in a list of six “war” objectives.
More important to the military are “operational control” of Gaza, “demilitarization of the territory” and “concentration and movement of the population”.
With Israel about to be indisputably, visibly in direct charge of Gaza again — with the cover stories stripped away of a “war”, of the need to eliminate of Hamas, of civilian casualties as “collateral damage” — Israel’s responsibility for the genocide will be incontestable too, as will the West’s active collusion.
Mossad agents’ letter
That was why more than 250 former officials with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency — including three of its former heads — signed a letter this week decrying Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in early March and its return to “war”.
The letter called Israel’s official objectives “unattainable”.
Similarly, the Israeli media reports large numbers of Israel’s military reservists are no longer showing up when called for a return to duty in Gaza.
Israel’s western patrons must now grapple with Israel’s “plan” for the ruined territory. Its outline has been coming more sharply into focus in recent days.
In January Israel formally outlawed the United Nations refugee agency Unrwa that feeds and cares for the large proportion of the Palestinian population driven off their historic lands by Israel in earlier phases of its decades-long colonisation of historic Palestine.
Gaza is packed with such refugees – the outcome of Israel’s biggest ethnic cleansing programme in 1948, at its creation as a “Jewish state”.
Removing Unrwa had been a long-held ambition, a move by Israel designed to help rid it of the yoke of aid agencies that have been caring for Palestinians – and thereby helping them to resist Israel’s efforts at ethnic cleansing – as well as monitoring Israel’s adherence, or rather lack of it, to international law.
Private contractor scheme
For the ethnic cleansing and genocide programmes in Gaza to be completed, Israel has needed to produce an alternative system to Unrwa’s.
Last week, it approved a scheme in which it intends to use private contractors, not the UN, to deliver small quantities of food and water to Palestinians. Israel will allow in 60 trucks a day — barely a tenth of the absolute minimum required, according to the UN.
There are several catches. To stand any hope of qualifying for this very limited aid, Palestinians will need to collect it from military distribution points located in a small area at the southern tip of the Gaza strip.
In other words, some two million Palestinians will have to crowd into a location that has no chance of accommodating them all, and even then will have only a tenth of the aid they need.
They will have to relocate too without any guarantee from Israel that it won’t continue bombing the “humanitarian zones” they have been herded into.
These military distribution zones just so happen to be right next to Gaza’s sole, short border with Egypt — exactly where Israel has been seeking to drive the Palestinians over the past 19 months in the hope of forcing Egypt to open the border so the people of Gaza can be ethnically cleansed into Sinai.
Under Israel’s scheme, Palestinians will be screened in these military hubs using biometric data before they stand any hope of receiving minimum calorie-controlled handouts of food.
Once inside the hubs, they can be arrested and shipped off to one of Israel’s torture camps.
Torture and abuse rife
Just last week Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published testimony from an Israeli soldier turned whistleblower — confirming accounts from doctors and other guards — that torture and abuse are rife against Palestinians, including civilians, at Sde Teiman, the most notorious of the camps.
Last Friday, shortly after Israel announced its “aid” plan, it fired a missile into an Unrwa centre in Jabaliya camp, destroying its food distribution centre and warehouse.
Then on Saturday, Israel bombed tents used for preparing food in Khan Younis and Gaza City. It has been targeting charity kitchens and bakeries to close them down, in an echo of its campaign of destruction against Gaza’s hospitals and health system.
In recent days, a third of UN-supported community kitchens — the population’s last life line — have closed because their stores of food are depleted, as is their access to fuel.
According to the UN agency OCHA, that number is rising “by the day”, leading to “widespread” hunger.
Facing ‘catastrophic hunger’
The UN reported this week that nearly half a million people in Gaza — a fifth of the population — faced “catastrophic hunger”.
Predictably, Israel and its ghoulish apologists are making light of this sea of immense suffering. Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, argued that critics were unfairly condemning Israel for starving Gaza’s population, and ignoring the health benefits of reducing “obesity” among Palestinians.
In a joint statement last week, 15 UN agencies and more than 200 charities and humanitarian groups denounced Israel’s “aid” plan. The UN children’s fund Unicef warned that Israel was forcing Palestinians to choose between “displacement and death”.
But worse, Israel is setting up its stall once again to turn reality on its head.
Those Palestinians who refuse to cooperate with its “aid” plan will be blamed for their own starvation. And international agencies who refuse to go along with Israeli criminality will be smeared both as “antisemitic” and as responsible for the mounting toll of starvation on Gaza’s population.
There is a way to stop these crimes degenerating further. But it will require Western politicians and journalists to find far more courage than they have dared muster so far. It will need more than rhetorical flourishes. It will need more than public handwringing.
Are they capable of more? Don’t hold your breath.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair John Minto surveys the protest march up Queen Street in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland today as part of the global Nakba Day demonstrations against Israel's war on Gaza. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacifc Report
By David Robie
About 2000 New Zealand protesters marched through the heart of Auckland city today chanting “no justice, no peace” and many other calls as they demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the Israeli atrocities in its brutal war on the besieged Palestinian enclave.
For more than 73 days, Israel has blocked all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza, creating a man-made crisis with the Strip on the brink of a devastating famine.
Israel’s attacks killed more than 150 and wounded 450 in a day in a new barrage of attacks that aid workers described as “Gaza is bleeding before our eyes”.
The global Nakba Day protest with marchers today in Queen Street in New Zealand’s largest city Auckland in solidarity with the Gazan people who are being slaughtered in the Israeli war on the besieged Palestinian enclave. Image: Asia Pacific Report
in Auckland, several Palestinian and other speakers spoke of the anguish and distress of the global Gaza community in the face of Western indifference to the suffering in a rally before the march marking the 77th anniversary of the Nakba — the “Palestinian catastrophe”.
“There are cracks opening up all around the world that haven’t been there for 77 years,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) co-chair John Minto in an inspired speech to the protesters.
“We’ve got politicians in Britain speaking out for the first time. Some conservative politician got standing up the other day saying, ‘I supported Israel right or wrong for 20 years, and I was wrong.’
‘The world is coming right’
“Yet a lot of the world has been wrong for 77 years, but the world is coming right. We are on the right side of history, give us a big round of applause.”
Minto was highly critical of the public broadcasters, Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand, saying they relied too heavily on a narrow range of Western sources whose credibility had been challenged and eroded over the past 19 months.
PSNA co-chair John Minto . . . .capturing an image of the march up Auckland’s Queen Street in protest over the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Image: APR
He also condemned their “proximity” news value, blaming it for news editors’ lapse of judgment on news values because Israelis “spoke English”.
Minto told the crowd that that they should be monitoring Al Jazeera for a more balanced and nuanced coverage of the war on Palestine.
His comments echoed a similar theme of a speech at the Fickling Centre in Three Kings on Thursday night and protesters followed up by picketing the NZ Voyager Media Awards last night with a light show of killed Gazan journalists beamed on the hotel venue.
Protesters at the NZ Voyager Media Awards protesting last night against unbalanced media coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Image: Achmat Eesau/PSNA
About 230 Gazan journalists have been killed in the war so far, many of them allegedly targeted by the Israeli forces.
Minto said he could not remember a previous time when a New Zealand government had remained silent in the face of industrial-scale killing of civilians anywhere in the world.
“We have livestreamed genocide happening and we have our government refusing to condemn any of Israel’s war crimes,” he said.
NZ ‘refusing to condemn war crimes’
“Yet we’ve got everybody in the leadership of this government having condemned every act of Palestinian resistance yet refused to condemn the war crimes, refused to condemn the bombing of civilians, and refused to condemn the mass starvation of 2.3 million people.
“What a bunch of depraved bastards run this country. Shame on all of them.”
Palestinian speaker Samer Al Malalha . . . “Everything we were told about international law and human rights is bullshit.” A golden key symbolising the right of return for Palestinians is in the background. Image: APR
Palestinian speaker Samer Al Malalha spoke of the 1948 Nakba and the injustices against his people.
“Everything we were told about international law and human rights is bullshit. The only rights you have are the ones you take,” he said.
“So today we won’t stand here to plead, we are here to remind you of what happened to us. We are here to take what is ours. Today, and every day, we fight for a free Palestine.”
Nakba survivor Ghazi Dassouki . . . a harrowing story about a massacre village. Image: Bruce King survivor
Nakba survivor Ghazi Dassouki is now a 90-year-old and he told a harrowing story from his homeland. As a 14-year-old boy, he and his family were driven out of Palestine during the Nakba.
He described “waking up to to the smell of gunpowder” — his home was close to the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, when Zionist militias attacked the village killing 107 people, including women and children.
‘Palestine will be free – and so will we’
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said: “What we stand for is truth, justice, peace and love.
“Palestine will be free and, in turn, so will we.”
Israel has blocked all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza, creating a man-made crisis, with the integrated food security agency IPC warning that famine could be declared any time between now and September, reports Al Jazeera.
The head of the UN Children’s Fund, Catherine Russell, said the world should be shocked by the killing of 45 children in Israeli air strikes in just two days.
Instead, the slaughter of children in Gaza is “largely met with indifference”.
“More than 1 million children in Gaza are at risk of starvation. They are deprived of food, water and medicine,” Russell wrote in a post on social media.
“Nowhere is safe for children in Gaza,” she said.
“This horror must stop.”
“The coloniser lied” . . . a placard in today’s Palestine rally in Auckland. Image: APR
Famine worst level of hunger
Famine is the worst level of hunger, where people face severe food shortages, widespread malnutrition, and high levels of death due to starvation.
According to the UN’s criteria, famine is declared when:
At least 20 percent (one-fifth) of households face extreme food shortages;
More than 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and
At least two out of every 10,000 people or four out of every 10,000 children die each day from starvation or hunger-related causes.
Famine is not just about hunger; it is the worst humanitarian emergency, indicating a complete collapse of access to food, water and the systems necessary for survival.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), since Israel’s complete blockade began on March 2, at least 57 children have died from the effects of malnutrition.
“Stop Genocide in Gaza” . . . the start of the rally with PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal on the right. Image: APR
"The Israel-Palestine conflict touches both the credibility of the national broadcaster and our country’s tangential connection to major ongoing war crimes that many experts categorise as a textbook case of genocide." Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
ANALYSIS:By Jeremy Rose, Eugene Doyle and Ramon Das
Radio New Zealand’s decision to conduct a review of its Israel-Palestine coverage post-7 October 2023 is commendable. It commissioned Colin Feslier, an experienced and respected communications expert to undertake this work.
Feslier delivered his report in March 2025. His brief was to assess complaints against the various standards, principles and codes, monitoring coverage outside this, and suggesting actions for improvement.
Feslier has a long and close affiliation with Radio New Zealand. His remuneration, time allocation, and RNZ’s own requirements of him may have constrained the scope of his work.
However, the report, as presented, we believe, does not meet a credible standard in terms of breadth, methodology and analysis. Unfortunately, the result — an assessment that the broadcaster was almost unswerving in meeting journalistic codes and standards — fails to do justice to the issue on numerous counts.
“The Israel-Palestine conflict touches both the credibility of the national broadcaster and our country’s tangential connection to major ongoing war crimes that many experts categorise as a textbook case of genocide.” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Given its self-limiting scope and its conclusions (which we do not agree with), the report risks appearing to be a quick sanitising exercise that ended in a predictable finding of, “Nothing to see here; you’re doing a great job.”
Why deeper analysis is required The issue of bias in Radio New Zealand’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict is too important to leave at that. The Israel-Palestine conflict touches both the credibility of the national broadcaster and our country’s tangential connection to major ongoing war crimes that many experts categorise as a textbook case of genocide.
Missing the forest for the trees Its most glaring failure is not to see the forest for the trees. By concentrating on complaints about individual stories and claiming that balance is achieved over time it avoids tackling the most serious complaint that RNZ has failed to cover the unfolding genocide in Gaza with anything like the attention it demands.
The report lacks any quantitative analysis, any comparison with coverage by other public broadcasters, and doesn’t tackle the question of whether enough attention has been given to what human rights groups like Amnesty International, Israel’s B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, as well as leading academic authorities, have called an ongoing genocide.
Similarly, it fails to note an alarming absence of Palestinian voices in its coverage since 7 October 2023. Nor does it interrogate the reasons why Israeli and Palestinian voices are not given equal weight.
Remedying the inadequacies of the report is beyond the scope of this article but even a cursory look at the evidence suggests a far more rigorous investigation is needed.
Genocide avoidance on RNZ The very first principle of the Media Council Principles (“Accuracy, Fairness and Balance”) states that broadcasters are not to “mislead or misinform readers by commission or omission.” In other words, the Principles explicitly recognise a positive duty to inform the public on matters that are in the public interest.
RNZ’s sparse and incomplete coverage of the Israeli genocide has, we submit, clearly failed to meet this positive duty to the public.
In November 2023, leading holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov — an Israeli citizen — wrote a New York Times op-ed claiming Israeli leaders from the president and PM down were expressing genocidal intent. He has since become one of many prominent genocide scholars to say Israel has gone from expressing intent to carrying out a genocide.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Bartov after his initial essay claiming there was genocidal intent was published, and he’s had two in-depth interviews since. Bartov has not appeared on Radio New Zealand since 2009.
The claim by leading human rights groups, genocide scholars, distinguished Israeli historians, such as Avi Shlaim, that a genocide is ongoing is unprecedented and has focussed the world’s attention on the issue of genocide like never before. South Africa taking a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), now supported by a growing number of countries, adds great weight to the issue.
A search of RNZ’s audio returns just one interview on the topic: a 7-minute interview on Checkpoint with Amnesty International Aotearoa campaigns director Lisa Woods.
Absence of Palestinian voices News items regularly feature either IDF spokespeople or clips of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges) but almost never clips of either Hamas or Palestinian Authority spokespeople.
The absence of feature interviews with either Palestinians or Israelis is a striking aspect of the last 19-months of coverage.
Rashid Khalidi, the author of The One Hundred Year War on Palestine, is a leading US-based Palestinian intellectual who has appeared on numerous media outlets since 7 October 2023, including twice on the ABC and once on RTE — but not once on RNZ.
He is, of course, just one example, and there are numerous other Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals and politicians who could provide useful context.
On two occasions when local Palestinians were interviewed, they were paired not with Israelis but Jewish New Zealanders
Crimes against Palestinians given less weight The RNZ report refers to a listener’s complaint that BBC reports carried by RNZ are biased. In response it recommended that RNZ dedicate a section of its website explaining its choice of sources and why it trusts them.
It failed to note that more than 100 BBC staff as well as prominent historians and academics had raised similar concerns about the public broadcaster’s lack of balance in its coverage of Israel Palestine in an open letter published last November.
We are not suggesting RNZ ditch the BBC; but relying so heavily on a select few outlets, that may themselves lack balance when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, is more likely to amplify a lack of balance than lessen it.
Some lives matter more than others Establishing for a fact that less weight is given to the suffering of one group than others is extremely difficult but there’s reason to believe that this is the case in RNZ’s Palestine coverage.
To take just two recent examples. On Monday 14 April Morning Report ran a six-minute item on a Russian attack that killed 34 Ukrainian civilians. Israel’s attack on the last hospital left standing in Gaza the day before didn’t rate a mention.
According to Al Jazeera an average of 62 Palestinians were killed each day between March 18 and April 12. During that same period Morning Report ran just two stories on the bombing of civilians in Gaza totaling 9 minutes 42 seconds.
On Monday, May 5, the RNZ’s website ran a lengthy Reuters report and a Checkpoint report on a Houthi missile strike on Ben Gurion airport. A US strike on Yemen a week earlier that resulted in the killing of 68 civilians went unreported. This should be of interest to our national broadcaster as New Zealand has military targeting specialists working in the Red Sea to support the US-Israeli campaign against Yemen’s Houthis.
Israelis are ‘people like us’. Palestinians are not? One of the more revealing parts of the report notes that the journalistic concept of “proximity” may influence RNZ’s news judgement. In essence the idea is that journalists give greater weight to a bus crash in their own city than to one on the other side of the world.
The report claims that: “Israel, as a result of tourism, trade, ‘western’ alignment and language (with English a common first and second language there) have a greater ‘news proximity’ to New Zealand than do Palestinians and Palestine. Stories may be chosen for these reasons and the inevitable result is a stronger perception of news relevance of Israeli stories. Coverage of stories with a Palestinian angle will tend to be less often reported. This tendency needs to be recognized.”
If that “tendency” has been in play in RNZ’s news judgement it has to be more than “recognised” it needs to be properly investigated and stamped out. The implication that RNZ listeners care more about the life of an Israeli baby than a Palestinian one is abhorrent.
But, having flagged that possibility, the report then fails to investigate whether RNZ’s coverage has favoured Israeli stories over Palestinian ones and simply recommends that the public broadcaster recognises the risk. This is unacceptable.
There is, as it happens, a stark illustration of RNZ providing more airtime to an Israeli spokesperson justifying the war crime of bombing a hospital than a leading UN expert on the war crimes being committed in Gaza.
In November 2023, Francesa Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, visited New Zealand. Her only appearance on RNZ to date was an interview of under a minute on Morning Report during her nationwide tour.
The 3 minute 52 second item consists of almost two minutes of IDF spokesperson Mark Regev justifying Israel’s bombing of the Al Shifa hospital followed by less than a minute of Albanese.
Normal practice would be to give more airtime to a visiting expert than a BBC recording of a government spokesperson spinning a line.
A search of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website for Francesca Albanese returns 14 items including an 18-minute interview from the Australian leg of her speaking tour, and a 10-minute interview from earlier this year.
And it’s a similar story on the website of Irish public broadcaster RTE with around a dozen interviews since Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Israeli-caused famine merits coverage As we write Israel’s complete ban on food, medicine and other essentials of life entering the wasteland that is Gaza has passed the two-month mark. A search of RNZ’s audio items over that period shows that the starvation of Gaza has been touched on in six or seven crosses to correspondents in their summaries of the latest developments but there hasn’t been a single interview with legal or humanitarian experts.
An RNZ listener relying on the National programme as their main source of news would need to have been an avid listener of First Up, Morning Report, Checkpoint and Saturday Morning to have any idea of what is going on. (Sunday Morning has all but ignored the issue.)
RNZ is failing in its duty to inform the public of an entirely preventable humanitarian catastrophe.
A detailed investigation is required Radio New Zealand is without a doubt one of our very best media outlets. We want it to be even better and a far more detailed investigation of its Israeli-Palestine coverage is needed. This would cover systemic bias, media sourcing and reliability, bias in coverage scale, compliance with code of ethics, comparative coverage analysis, cultural identification bias (proximity), other reasons why some stories aren’t told, the overall framing of the conflict, genocide recognition, and overall balance.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington based journalist. He spent a decade as a producer on RNZ’s Mediawatch, Ideas, and Sunday programmes. He is a member of Alternative Jewish Voices.
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 hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz. He worked for Radio New Zealand in the 1980s.
Ramon Das is senior lecturer in the Philosophy Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He has taught and written for many years on issues related to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
How Palestine has been swallowed up by Greater Israel expansionism since the 1948 Nakba . . . the author describes Trump's Middle East visit "a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace." Graphic: Visualizing Palestine
Nakba Day today marks 15 May 1948 — the day after the declaration of the State of Israel — when the Palestinian society and homeland was destroyed and more than 750,000 people forced to leave and become refugees. The day is known as the “Palestinian Catastrophe”.
ANALYSIS: By Soumaya Ghannoushi
US President Donald Trump’s tour of Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha is not diplomacy. It is theatre — staged in gold, fuelled by greed, and underwritten by betrayal.
A US president openly arming a genocide is welcomed with red carpets, handshakes and blank cheques. Trillions are pledged; personal gifts are exchanged. And Gaza continues to burn.
Gulf regimes have power and wealth. They have Trump’s ear. Yet they use none of it — not to halt the slaughter, ease the siege or demand dignity.
How Palestine has been swallowed up by Greater Israel expansionism since the 1948 Nakba . . . the author describes Trump’s Middle East visit “a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace.” Graphic: Visualizing Palestine
In return for their riches and deference, Trump grants Israel bombs and sets it loose upon the region.
This is the real story. At the heart of Trump’s return lies a project he initiated during his first presidency: the erasure of Palestine, the elevation of autocracy, and the redrawing of the Middle East in Israel’s image.
“See this pen? This wonderful pen on my desk is the Middle East, and the top of the pen — that’s Israel. That’s not good,” he once told reporters, lamenting Israel’s size compared to its neighbours.
To Trump, the Middle East is not a region of history or humanity. It is a marketplace, a weapons depot, a geopolitical ATM.
His worldview is forged in evangelical zeal and transactional instinct. In his rhetoric, Arabs are chaos incarnate: irrational, violent, in need of control. Israel alone is framed as civilised, democratic, divinely chosen. That binary is not accidental. It is ideology.
Obedience for survival Trump calls the region “a rough neighbourhood” — code for endless militarism that casts the people of the Middle East not as lives to protect, but as threats to contain.
His $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia in 2017 was marketed as peace through prosperity. Now, he wants trillions more in Gulf capital. As reported by The New York Times, Trump is demanding that Saudi Arabia invest its entire annual GDP — $1 trillion — into the US economy.
Riyadh has already offered $600 billion. Trump wants it all. Economists call it absurd; Trump calls it a deal.
This is not realpolitik. It is a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace
Across the Gulf, a race is underway — not to end the genocide in Gaza, but to outspend one another for Trump’s favour, showering him with wealth in return for nothing.
The Gulf is no longer treated as a region. It is a vault. Sovereign wealth funds are the new ballot boxes. Sovereignty — just another asset to be traded.
Trump’s offer is blunt: obedience for survival. For regimes still haunted by the Arab Spring, Western blessing is their last shield. And they will pay any price: wealth, independence, even dignity.
To them, the true threat is not Israel, nor even Iran. It is their own people, restless, yearning, ungovernable.
Democracy is danger; self-determination, the ticking bomb. So they make a pact with the devil.
Doctrine of immunity That devil brings flags, frameworks, photo ops and deals. The new order demands normalisation with Israel, submission to its supremacy, and silence on Palestine.
Once-defiant slogans are replaced by fintech expos and staged smiles beside Israeli ministers.
In return, Trump offers impunity: political cover and arms. It is a doctrine of immunity, bought with gold and soaked in Arab blood.
They bend. They hand him deals, honours, trillions. They believe submission buys respect. But Trump respects only power — and he makes that clear.
He praises Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Is Putin smart? Yes . . . that’s a hell of a way to negotiate.” He calls Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “a guy I like [and] respect”. Like them or not, they defend their nations. And Trump, ever the transactional mind, respects power.
Arab rulers offer no such strength. They offer deference, not defiance. They don’t push; they pay.
And Trump mocks them openly. King Salman “might not be there for two weeks without us”, he brags. They give him billions; he demands trillions.
It is not just the US Treasury profiting. Gulf billions do not merely fuel policy; they enrich a family empire. Since returning to office, Trump and his sons have chased deals across the Gulf, cashing in on the loyalty they have cultivated.
The message was clear: access to the Trumps has a price, and Gulf rulers are eager to pay.
Now, Trump is receiving a private jet from Qatar’s ruling family — a palace in the sky worth $400 million.
This is not diplomacy. It is plunder.
And how does Trump respond? With insult: “It was a great gesture,” he said of the jet, before adding: “We keep them safe. If it wasn’t for us, they probably wouldn’t exist right now.”
That was his thank you to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar; lavish gifts answered with debasement.
And what are they rewarding him for? For genocide. For 100,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on Gaza. For backing ethnic cleansing in plain sight. For empowering far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as they call for Gaza’s depopulation.
For presiding over the most fanatically Zionist, most unapologetically Islamophobic administration in US history.
Still, they ask nothing, while offering everything. They could have used their leverage. They did not.
The Yemen precedent proves they can act. Trump halted the bombing under Saudi pressure, to Netanyahu’s visible dismay. When they wanted a deal, they struck one with the Houthis.
And when they sought to bring Syria in from the cold, Trump complied. He agreed to meet former rebel leader turned President Ahmed al-Sharaa — a last-minute addition to his Riyadh schedule — and even spoke of lifting sanctions, once again at Saudi Arabia’s request, to “give them a chance of greatness”.
No US president is beyond pressure. But for Gaza? Silence.
Price of silence While Trump was being feted in Riyadh, Israel rained American-made bombs on two hospitals in Gaza. In Khan Younis, the European Hospital was reportedly struck by nine bunker-busting bombs, killing more than two dozen people and injuring scores more.
Earlier that day, an air strike on Nasser Hospital killed journalist Hassan Islih as he lay wounded in treatment.
As Trump basked in applause, Israel massacred children in Jabalia, where around 50 Palestinians were killed in just a few hours.
This is the bloody price of Arab silence, buried beneath the roar of applause and the glitter of tributes.
This week marks the anniversary of the Nakba — and here it is again, replayed not through tanks alone, but through Arab complicity.
With every cheque signed, Arab rulers do not secure history’s respect. They seal their place in its sordid footnotes of shame
The bombs fall. The Gaza Strip turns to dust. Two million people endure starvation. UN food is gone.
Hospitals overflow with skeletal infants. Mothers collapse from hunger. Tens of thousands of children are severely malnourished, with more than 3500 on the edge of death.
Meanwhile, Smotrich speaks of “third countries” for Gaza’s people. Netanyahu promises their removal.
And Trump — the man enabling the annihilation? He is not condemned, but celebrated by Arab rulers. They eagerly kiss the hand that sends the bombs, grovel before the architect of their undoing, and drape him in splendour and finery.
While much of the world stands firm — China, Europe, Canada, Mexico, even Greenland – refusing to bow to Trump’s bullying, Arab rulers kneel. They open wallets, bend spines, empty hands — still mistaking humiliation for diplomacy.
They still believe that if they bow low enough, Trump might toss them a bone. Instead, he tosses them a bill.
This is not realpolitik. It is a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace.
With every cheque signed, every jet offered, every photo op beside the butcher of a people, Arab rulers do not secure history’s respect. They seal their place in its sordid footnotes of shame.
Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and Al Quds. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @SMGhannoushi.
The IDF has admitted to bombing a hospital in order to assassinate a prominent Palestinian journalist in Gaza, Hassan Aslih, explicitly stating that they assassinated him for engaging in journalistic activities.
The official Israel Defense Forces account made the following post on Twitter (emphasis added):
“Don’t let Aslih’s press vest fool you: Hassan Abdel Fattah Mohammed Aslih, a terrorist from the Hamas Khan Yunis brigade, was eliminated along with other terrorists in the ‘Nasser’ hospital in Khan Yunis. Aslih participated in the brutal October 7 massacre under the guise of a journalist and owner of a news network. During the massacre, he documented acts of murder, looting, and arson, posting the footage online. Journalist? More like terrorist.”
Documenting newsworthy acts and posting the footage online is also known as journalism. It’s the thing that journalism is.
Aslih was killed in Nasser Hospital’s burn unit where he was recovering from a previous Israeli assassination attempt in which they bombed a tent near that same hospital.
Assassinated Palestinian journalist Hassan Aslih . . . “documenting newsworthy acts and posting the footage online is also known as journalism. It’s the thing that journalism is.” Image: APR
That’s right kids, Israel will literally assassinate a journalist by bombing a hospital, openly admit that they bombed the hospital to assassinate the journalist for engaging in journalistic activities —and then call you an antisemite if you say Israel bombs hospitals and assassinates journalists.
Don’t let Aslih’s press vest fool you:
Hassan Abdel Fattah Mohammed Aslih, a terrorist from the Hamas Khan Yunis brigade, was eliminated along with other terrorists in the ‘Nasser’ hospital in Khan Yunis.
The following things are Hamas: journalists, journalism, the new pope, the last pope, the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, human rights, critical thinking, hospitals, schools, campus protesters, Greta Thunberg, doctors, women, children, Ireland, and Ms Rachel.
Israel admits it bombed a hospital to kill a jourmalist. Video: Caitlin Johnstone
Benjamin Netanyahu is now saying that the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza was “inevitable,” reportedly telling the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee on Sunday that “We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.”
So there you have it. Shut up about hostages. Shut up about Hamas. Shut up about October 7. This is about removing Palestinians from a Palestinian territory to replace them with Jewish settlers. That’s all this has ever been about. Anyone who pretends otherwise is evil.
❖
“You support terrorism,” said the person who supports daily massacres of civilians to advance political aims.
❖
Everyone’s yelling about Trump accepting a jet from Qatar as a bribe, which would make sense if they hadn’t been completely ignoring how Trump has openly admitted to being bought and controlled by the world’s richest Israeli Miriam Adelson, and how pervasively influential the Israel lobby is throughout all of US politics.
It’s so gross that Western society tolerates the existence of an Israel lobby. Like “Oh so you’re here to convince my government to stomp out my free speech rights and use my tax dollars for wars and genocide to advance the interests of an apartheid state? Yeah cool, I guess that’s fine.”
The existence of the Israel lobby should be treated the same as a Nazi lobby or a pedophilia lobby. Taking donations from pro-Israel groups should be as stigmatised as taking donations from the KKK or NAMBLA.
It’s not okay that each Western nation has its own high-powered lobby group whose whole entire job is to insert itself into key points of influence and persuade our governments to destroy our civil rights and commit genocide. Nobody should tolerate the existence of these groups.
❖
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
~ Aaron Bushnell https://t.co/FtQt5UbWyl
I always get Israel apologists telling me “Stop calling it a genocide! It’s not a genocide!”
And I’m always just like okay well then they’re doing some sort of thing where the people in power work to eliminate a population because of their ethnicity using mass-scale violence and deliberate starvation. I guess there’s no word for it.
❖
The last year and a half in Gaza is a strong enough reason to dismantle the entire US-led Western empire. The Gaza holocaust could end tomorrow and it would still be reason enough. All the empire’s other worldwide abuses could have never happened and it’d still be reason enough.
In Gaza alone the empire has already established beyond any doubt that it should not exist, even if you ignore all its other crimes throughout the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia. If you would perpetrate history’s first live-streamed genocide in full view of the entire world, then you are not the sort of power structure who should be leading humanity into the future.
If you would inflict the kinds of abuses we’ve been watching on our screens for the last year and a half upon helpless human beings who have done nothing wrong, then you should not rule the world. Your rule must end.
The alternative is to let the fate of humanity be determined by genocidal monsters. This is simply not an option. The sooner the US-centralised empire ends, the better.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:We begin today’s show looking at Israel’s ongoing targeting of Palestinian journalists. A recent report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University described the war in Gaza as the “worst ever conflict for reporters” in history.
By one count, Israel has killed 214 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past 18 months, including two journalists killed on Wednesday — Yahya Subaih and Nour El-Din Abdo. Yahya Subaih died just hours after his wife gave birth to their first child.
Meanwhile, new details have emerged about the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist who was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier three years ago on 11 May 2022.
She was killed while covering an Israeli army assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Shireen and another reporter were against a stone wall, wearing blue helmets and blue flak jackets clearly emblazoned with the word “Press”.
Shireen was shot in the head. She was known throughout the Arab world for her decades of tireless reporting on Palestine.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel initially claimed she had been shot by Palestinian militants, but later acknowledged she was most likely shot by an Israeli soldier. But Israel has never identified the soldier who fired the fatal shot, or allowed the soldier to be questioned by US investigators.
Renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot by an Israeli sniper in the head on 11 May 2022. She was known throughout the Arab world for her decades of tireless reporting on Palestine. Image: Democracy Now!/Zeteo screenshot APR
But a new documentary just released by Zeteo has identified and named the Israeli soldier for the first time. Below is the trailer to the documentary Who Killed Shireen?
DION NISSENBAUM: That soldier looked down his scope and could see the blue vest and that it said “press.”
ISRAELI SOLDIER: That’s what I think, yes.
SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: US personnel have never had access to those who are believed to have committed those shootings.
DION NISSENBAUM: No one has been held to account. Justice has not been served.
FATIMA ABDULKARIM: She is the first American Palestinian journalist who has been killed by Israeli forces.
DION NISSENBAUM: I want to know: Who killed Shireen?
CONOR POWELL: Are we going to find the shooter?
DION NISSENBAUM: He’s got a phone call set up with this Israeli soldier that was there that day.
CONOR POWELL: We just have to go over to Israel.
DION NISSENBAUM: Did you ever talk to the guy who fired those shots?
ISRAELI SOLDIER: Of course. I know him personally. The US should have actually come forward and actually pressed the fact that an American citizen was killed intentionally by IDF.
FATIMA ABDULKARIM: The drones are still ongoing, the explosions going off.
CONOR POWELL: Holy [bleep]! We’ve got a name.
DION NISSENBAUM: But here’s the twist.
Who Shot Shireen Abu Akleh? Video: Zeteo/Democracy Now!
NERMEEN SHAIKH:The trailer for the new Zeteo documentary Who Killed Shireen? The film identifies the Israeli soldier who allegedly killed Shireen Abu Akleh as Alon Scagio, who would later be killed during an Israeli military operation last June in Jenin, the same city where Shireen was fatally shot.
AMY GOODMAN:We’re joined right now by four guests, including two members of Shireen Abu Akleh’s family: her brother Anton, or Tony, and her niece Lina. They’re both in North Bergen, New Jersey. We’re also joined by Mehdi Hasan, the founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo, and by Dion Nissenbaum, the executive producer of Who Killed Shireen?, the correspondent on the documentary, longtime Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem and other cities, a former foreign correspondent. He was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Dion, we’re going to begin with you. This is the third anniversary, May 11th exactly, of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. Talk about your revelation, what you exposed in this documentary.
DION NISSENBAUM: Well, there were two things that were very important for the documentary. The first thing was we wanted to find the soldier who killed Shireen. It had been one of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel. US officials said that if they wanted to determine if there was a crime here, if there was a human rights violation, they needed to talk to this soldier to find out what he was thinking when he shot her.
And we set out to find him. And we did. We did what the US government never did. And it turned out he had been killed, so we were never able to answer that question — what he was thinking.
But the other revelation that I think is as significant in this documentary is that the initial US assessment of her shooting was that that soldier intentionally shot her and that he could tell that she was wearing a blue flak jacket with “Press” across it.
That assessment was essentially overruled by the Biden administration, which came out and said exactly the opposite. That’s a fairly startling revelation, that the Biden administration and the Israeli government essentially were doing everything they could to cover up what happened that day to Shireen Abu Akleh.
‘Who Killed Shireen?’
Zeteo premiered an explosive investigative documentary that reveals the identity of the soldier who shot Shireen Abu Akleh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to a clip from the documentary Who Killed Shireen?, in which Dion Nissenbaum, our guest, speaks with former State Department official Andrew Miller. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs in 2022 when Shireen was killed.
ANDREW MILLER: It’s nearly 100 percent certain that an Israeli soldier, likely a sniper, fired the shot that killed or the shots that killed Shireen Abu Akleh. Based on all the information we have, it is not credible to suggest that there were targets either in front of or behind Shireen Abu Akleh.
The fact that the official Israeli position remains that this was a case of crossfire, the entire episode was a mistake, as opposed to potentially a mistaken identification or the deliberate targeting of this individual, points to, I think, a broader policy of seeking to manage the narrative.
DION NISSENBAUM: And did the Israelis ever make the soldier available to the US to talk about it?
ANDREW MILLER: No. And the Israelis were not willing to present the person for even informal questioning.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was State Department official — former State Department official Andrew Miller, speaking in the Zeteo documentary Who Killed Shireen? He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs in 2022 when Shireen was killed.
I want to go to Shireen’s family, whom we have as guests, Anton Abu Akleh and Lina, who are joining us from New Jersey. You both watched the film for the first time last night when it premiered here in New York City. Lina, if you could begin by responding to the revelations in the film?
LINA ABU AKLEH: Hi, Amy. Hi. Thank you for having us.
Honestly, we always welcome and we appreciate journalists who try to uncover the killing of Shireen, but also who shed light on her legacy. And the documentary that was released by Zeteo and by Dion, it really revealed findings that we didn’t know before, but we’ve always known that it was an Israeli soldier who killed Shireen. And we know how the US administration failed our family, failed a US citizen and failed a journalist, really.
And that should be a scandal in and of itself.
But most importantly, for us as a family, it’s not just about one soldier. It’s about the entire chain of command. It’s not just the person who pulled the trigger, but who ordered the killing, and the military commanders, the elected officials.
So, really, it’s the entire chain of command that needs to be held to account for the killing of a journalist who was in a clear press vest, press gear, marked as a journalist.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anton, if you could respond? Shireen, of course, was your younger sister. What was your response watching the documentary last night?
ANTON ABU AKLEH: It’s very painful to look at all these scenes again, but I really extend my appreciation to Zeteo and all those who supported and worked on this documentary, which was very revealing, many things we didn’t know. The cover-up by the Biden administration, this thing was new to us.
He promised. First statements came out from the White House and from the State Department stressed on the importance of holding those responsible accountable. And apparently, in one of the interviews heard in this documentary, he never raised — President Biden never raised this issue with Bennett, at that time the prime minister.
So, that’s shocking to us to know it was a total cover-up, contradictory to what they promised us. And that’s — like Lina just said, it’s a betrayal, not only to the family, not only to Shireen, but the whole American nation.
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, you’ve backed this documentary. It’s the first big documentary Zeteo is putting out. It’s also the first anniversary of the founding of Zeteo. Can you talk about the proof that you feel is here in the documentary that Alon Scagio, this — and explain who he is and the unit he was a part of? Dion, it’s quite something when you go to his grave. But how you can absolutely be sure this is the man?
MEHDI HASAN:So, Amy, Nermeen, thanks for having us here. I’ve been on this show many times. I just want to say, great to be here on set with both of you. Thank you for what you do.
This is actually our second documentary, but it is our biggest so far, because the revelations in this film that Dion and the team put out are huge in many ways — identifying the soldier, as you mentioned, Alon Scagio, identifying the Biden cover-up, which we just heard Tony Abu Akleh point out. People didn’t realise just how big that cover-up was.
Remember, Joe Biden was the man who said, “If you harm an American, we will respond.” And what is very clear in the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, an American citizen who spent a lot of her life in New Jersey, they did not respond.
In terms of the soldier itself, when Dion came to me and said, “We want to make this film. It’ll be almost like a true crime documentary. We’re going to go out and find out who did it” — because we all — everyone followed the story. You guys covered it in 2022. It was a huge story in the world.
But three years later, to not even know the name of the shooter — and I was, “Well, will we be able to find this out? It’s one of Israel’s most closely guarded secrets.” And yet, Dion and his team were able to do the reporting that got inside of Duvdevan, this elite special forces unit in Israel.
It literally means “the cherry on top.” That’s how proud they are of their eliteness. And yet, no matter how elite you are, Israel’s way of fighting wars means you kill innocent people.
And what comes out in the film from interviews, not just with a soldier, an Israeli soldier, who speaks in the film and talks about how, “Hey, if you see a camera, you take the shot,” but also speaking to Chris Van Hollen, United States Senator from Maryland, who’s been one of the few Democratic voices critical of Biden in the Senate, who says there’s been no change in Israel’s rules of engagement over the years.
And therefore, it was so important on multiple levels to do this film, to identify the shooter, because, of course, as you pointed out in your news headlines, Amy, they just killed a hundred Palestinians yesterday.
So this is not some old story from history where this happened in 2022 and we’re going back. Everything that happened since, you could argue, flows from that — the Americans who have been killed, the journalists who have been killed in Gaza, Palestinians, the sense of impunity that Israel has and Israel’s soldiers have.
There are reports that Israeli soldiers are saying to Palestinians, “Hey, Trump has our back. Hey, the US government has our back.” And it wasn’t just Trump. It was Joe Biden, too.
And that was why it was so important to make this film, to identify the shooter, to call out Israel’s practices when it comes to journalists, and to call out the US role.
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to go to Dion, for people who aren’t familiar with the progression of what the Biden administration said, the serious cover-up not only by Israel, but of its main military weapons supplier and supporter of its war on Gaza, and that is Joe Biden, from the beginning.
First Israel said it was a Palestinian militant. At that point, what did President Biden say?
DION NISSENBAUM: So, at the very beginning, they said that they wanted the shooter to be prosecuted. They used that word at the State Department and said, “This person who killed an American journalist should be prosecuted.” But when it started to become clear that it was probably an Israeli soldier, their tone shifted, and it became talking about vague calls for accountability or changes to the rules of engagement, which never actually happened.
So, you got to a point where the Israeli government admitted it was likely them, the US government called for them to change the rules of engagement, and the Israeli government said no. And we have this interview in the film with Senator Chris Van Hollen, who says that, essentially, Israel was giving the middle finger to the US government on this.
And we have seen, since that time, more Americans being killed in the West Bank, dozens and dozens and dozens of journalists being killed, with no accountability. And we would like to see that change.
This is a trajectory that you’re seeing. You know, the blue vest no longer provides any protection for journalists in Israel. The Israeli military itself has said that wearing a blue vest with “Press” on it does not necessarily mean that you are a journalist.
They are saying that terrorists wear blue vests, too. So, if you are a journalist operating in the West Bank now, you have to assume that the Israeli military could target you.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to another clip from the film Who Killed Shireen?, which features Ali Samoudi, Shireen Abu Akleh’s producer, who was with Shireen when she was killed, and was himself shot and injured. In the clip, he speaks to the journalist Fatima AbdulKarim.
FATIMA ABDULKARIM: We are set up here now, even though we were supposed to meet at the location where you got injured and Shireen got killed.
ALI SAMOUDI: [translated] We are five minutes from the location in Maidan al-Awdah. But you could lose your soul in the five minutes it would take us to reach it. You could be hit by army bullets. They could arrest you.
So it is essentially impossible to get there. I believe the big disaster which prevented the occupation from being punished and repeating these crimes is the neglect and indifference by many of the institutions, especially American ones, which continue to defend the occupation.
FATIMA ABDULKARIM: [translated] We’re now approaching the third anniversary of Shireen’s death. How did that affect you?
ALI SAMOUDI: [translated] During that period, the occupation was making preparations for a dangerous scenario in the Jenin refugee camp. And for this reason, they didn’t want witnesses.
They opened fire on us in order to terroriSe us enough that we wouldn’t go back to the camp. And in that sense, they partially succeeded.
Since then, we have been overcome by fear. From the moment Shireen was killed, I said and continue to say and will continue to say that this bullet was meant to prevent the Palestinian media from the documentation and exposure of the occupation’s crimes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Ali Samoudi, Shireen Abu Akleh’s producer, who was with Shireen when she was killed, and was himself shot and injured.
We should note, Ali Samoudi was just detained by Israeli forces in late April. The Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti recently wrote, “Ali Samoudi was beaten so bad by Israeli soldiers he was immediately hospitalised. This man has been one of the few journalists that continues reporting on Israeli military abuses north of the West Bank despite the continued risk on his life,” Mariam Barghouti wrote.
The Committee to Protect Journalists spoke to the journalist’s son, Mohammed Al Samoudi, who told CPJ, quote, “My father suffers from several illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and a stomach ulcer . . . He needs a diabetes injection every two days and a specific diet. It appears he was subjected to assault and medical neglect at the interrogation center . . .
“Our lawyer told us he was transferred to an Israeli hospital after a major setback in his health. We don’t know where he is being held, interrogated, or even the hospital to which he was taken. My father has been forcibly disappeared,” he said.
So, Dion Nissenbaum, if you could give us the latest? You spoke to Ali Samoudi for the documentary, and now he’s been detained.
DION NISSENBAUM: Yeah. His words were prophetic, right? He talks about this was an attempt to silence journalists. And my colleague Fatima says the same thing, that these are ongoing, progressive efforts to silence Palestinian journalists.
And we don’t know where Ali is. He has not actually been charged with anything yet. He is one of the most respected journalists in the West Bank. And we are just seeing this progression going on.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the latest we know is he was supposed to have a hearing, and that hearing has now been delayed to May 13th, Ali Samoudi?
DION NISSENBAUM: That’s right. And he has yet to be charged, so . . .
AMY GOODMAN:I want to go back to Lina Abu Akleh, who’s in New Jersey, where Shireen grew up. Lina, you were listed on Time magazine’s 100 emerging leaders for publicly demanding scrutiny of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the horror.
And again, our condolences on the death of your aunt, on the killing of your aunt, and also to Anton, Shireen’s brother. Lina, you’ve also, of course, spoken to Ali Samoudi. This continues now. He’s in detention — his son says, “just disappeared”.
What are you demanding right now? We have a new administration. We’ve moved from the Biden administration to the Trump administration. And are you in touch with them? Are they speaking to you?
LINA ABU AKLEH: Well, our demands haven’t changed. From day one, we’re calling for the US administration to complete its investigation, or for the FBI to continue its investigation, and to finally release — to finally hold someone to account.
And we have enough evidence that could have been — that the administration could have used to expedite this case. But, unfortunately, this new administration, as well, no one has spoken to us. We haven’t been in touch with anyone, and it’s just been radio silence since.
For us, as I said, our demands have never changed. It’s been always to hold the entire system to account, the entire chain of command, the military, for the killing of an American citizen, a journalist, a Palestinian, Palestinian American journalist.
As we’ve been talking, targeting journalists isn’t happening just by shooting at them or killing them. There’s so many different forms of targeting journalists, especially in Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem.
So, for us, it’s really important as a family that we don’t see other families experience what we are going through, for this — for impunity, for Israel’s impunity, to end, because, at the end of the day, accountability is the only way to put an end to this impunity.
AMY GOODMAN: I am horrified to ask this question to Shireen’s family members, to Lina, to Tony, Shireen’s brother, but the revelation in the film — we were all there last night at its premiere in New York — that the Israeli soldiers are using a photograph of Shireen’s face for target practice. Tony Abu Akleh, if you could respond?
ANTON ABU AKLEH: You know, there is no words to describe our sorrow and pain hearing this. But, you know, I would just want to know why. Why would they do this thing? What did Shireen do to them for them to use her as a target practice? You know, this is absolutely barbaric act, unjustified. Unjustified.
And we really hope that this US administration will be able to put an end to all this impunity they are enjoying. If they didn’t enjoy all this impunity, they wouldn’t have been doing this. Practising on a journalist? Why? You know, you can practice on anything, but on a journalist?
This shows that this targeting of more journalists, whether in Gaza, in Palestine, it’s systematic. It’s been planned for. And they’ve been targeting and shutting off those voices, those reports, from reaching anywhere in the world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:And, Anton, if you could say — you know, you mentioned last night, as well, Shireen was, in fact, extremely cautious as a journalist. If you could elaborate on that? What precisely —
ANTON ABU AKLEH: Absolutely. Absolutely. Shireen was very careful. Every time she’s in the field, she would take her time to put on the gear, the required helmet, the vest with “press” written on it, before going there. She also tried to identify herself as a journalist, whether to the Israelis or to the Palestinians, so she’s not attacked.
And she always went by the book, followed the rules, how to act, how to be careful, how to speak to those people involved, so she can protect herself. But, unfortunately, he was — this soldier, as stated in the documentary, targeted Shireen just because she’s Shireen and she’s a journalist. That’s it. There is no other explanation.
Sixteen bullets were fired on Shireen. Not even her helmet, nor the vest she was wearing, were able to protect her, unfortunately.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mehdi Hasan, you wanted to respond.
MEHDI HASAN: So, Tony asks, “Why? Why would you do this? Why would you target not just a journalist in the field, but then use her face for target practice?” — as Dion and his team reveal in the film. And there is, unfortunately, a very simple answer to that question, which is that the Israeli military — and not just the Israeli military, but many people in our world today — have dehumanised Palestinians.
There is the removal of humanity from the people you are oppressing, occupying, subjugating and killing. It doesn’t matter if you’re an American citizen. It doesn’t matter if you have a press jacket on. It only matters that you are Palestinian in the sniper’s sights.
And that is how they have managed to pull of the killing of so many journalists, so many children. The first documentary we commissioned last year was called Israel’s Real Extremism, and it was about the Israeli soldiers who go into Gaza and make TikTok videos wearing Palestinian women’s underwear, playing with Palestinian children’s toys. It is the ultimate form of dehumanisation, the idea that these people don’t count, their lives have no value.
And what’s so tragic and shocking — and the film exposes this — is that Joe Biden — forget the Israeli military — Joe Biden also joined in that dehumanisation. Do you remember at the start of this conflict when he comes out and he says, “Well, I’m not sure I believe the Palestinian death toll numbers,” when he puts out a statement at the hundred days after October 7th and doesn’t mention Palestinian casualties.
And that has been the fundamental problem. This was the great comforter-in-chief. Joe Biden was supposed to be the empath. And yet, as Tony points out, what was so shocking in the film is he didn’t even raise Shireen’s case with Naftali Bennett, the prime minister of Israel at the time.
Again, would he have done that if it was an American journalist in Moscow? We know that’s not the case. We know when American journalists, especially white American journalists, are taken elsewhere in the world, the government gives a damn. And yet, in the case of Shireen, the only explanation is because she was a Palestinian American journalist.
AMY GOODMAN:You know, in the United States, the US government is responsible for American citizens, which Biden pointed out at the beginning, when he thought it was a Palestinian militant who had killed her. But, Lina, you yourself are a journalist. And I’m thinking I want to hear your response to using her face, because, of course, that is not just the face of Shireen, but I think it’s the face of journalism.
And it’s not just American journalism, of course. I mean, in fact, she’s known to hundreds of millions of people around world as the face and voice of Al Jazeera Arabic. She spoke in Arabic. She was known as that to the rest of the world. But to see that and that revealed in this documentary?
LINA ABU AKLEH: Yeah, it was horrifying, actually. And it just goes on to show how the Israeli military is built. It’s barbarism. It’s the character of revenge, of hate. And that is part of the entire system. And as Mehdi and as my father just mentioned, this is all about dehumanizing Palestinians, regardless if they’re journalists, if they’re doctors, they’re officials. For them, they simply don’t care about Palestinian lives.
And for us, Shireen will always be the voice of Palestine. And she continues to be remembered for the legacy that she left behind. And she continues to live through so many, so many journalists, who have picked up the microphone, who have picked up the camera, just because of Shireen.
So, regardless of how the Israeli military continues to dehumanise journalists and how the US fails to protect Palestinian American journalists, we will continue to push forward to continue to highlight the life and the legacy that Shireen left behind.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:Well, let’s turn to Shireen Abu Akleh in her own words. This is an excerpt from the Al Jazeera English documentary The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh.
SHIREEN ABU AKLEH: [translated] Sometimes the Israeli army doesn’t want you there, so they target you, even if they later say it was an accident. They might say, “We saw some young men around you.” So they target you on purpose, as a way of scaring you off because they don’t want you there.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Shireen in her own words in an Al Jazeera documentary. So, Lina, I know you have to go soon, but if you could just tell us: What do you want people to know about Shireen, as an aunt, a sister and a journalist?
LINA ABU AKLEH: Yes, so, we know Shireen as the journalist, but behind the camera, she was one of the most empathetic people. She was very sincere. And something not a lot of people know, but she was a very funny person. She had a very unique sense of humor, that she lit up every room she entered. She cared about everyone and anyone. She enjoyed life.
Shireen, at the end of the day, loved life. She had plans. She had dreams that she still wanted to achieve. But her life was cut short by that small bullet, which would change our lives entirely.
But at the end of the day, Shireen was a professional journalist who always advocated for truth, for justice. And at the end of the day, all she wanted to do was humanise Palestinians and talk about the struggles of living under occupation. But at the same time, she wanted to celebrate their achievements.
She shed light on all the happy moments, all the accomplishments of the Palestinian people. And this is something that really touched millions of Palestinians, of Arabs around the world. She was able to enter the hearts of the people through the small camera lens. And until this day, she continues to be remembered for that.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, we’re going to keep you on, Mehdi, to talk about other issues during the Trump administration, but how can people access Who Killed Shireen?
MEHDI HASAN: So, it’s available online at WhoKilledShireen.com, is where you can go to watch it. We are releasing the film right now only to paid subscribers. We hope to change that in the forthcoming days.
People often say to me, “How can you put it behind a paywall?” Journalism — a free press isn’t free, sadly. We have to fund films like this. Dion came to us because a lot of other people didn’t want to fund a topic like this, didn’t want to fund an investigation like this.
So, we’re proud to be able to fund such documentaries, but we also need support from our contributors, our subscribers and the viewers. But it’s an important film, and I hope as many people will watch it as possible, WhoKilledShireen.com.
AMY GOODMAN:We want to thank Lina, the niece of Shireen Abu Akleh, and Anton, Tony, the older brother of Shireen Abu Akleh, for joining us from New Jersey. Together, we saw the documentary last night, Who Killed Shireen? And we want to thank Dion Nissenbaum, who is the filmmaker, the correspondent on this film, formerly a correspondent with The Wall Street Journal. The founder of Zeteo, on this first anniversary of Zeteo, is Mehdi Hasan.
We’ve visited Ground Zero. Not once, but three times. But for generations, before these locations were designated as such, they were the ancestral home to the people of the Marshall Islands.
As part of a team of Greenpeace scientists and specialists from the Radiation Protection Advisers team, we have embarked on a six-week tour on board the Rainbow Warrior, sailing through one of the most disturbing chapters in human history: between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs across the Marshall Islands — equivalent to 7200 Hiroshima explosions.
During this period, testing nuclear weapons at the expense of wonderful ocean nations like the Marshall Islands was considered an acceptable practice, or as the US put it, “for the good of mankind”.
Instead, the radioactive fallout left a deep and complex legacy — one that is both scientific and profoundly human, with communities displaced for generations.
Between March and April, we travelled on the Greenpeace flagship vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, throughout the Marshall Islands, including to three northern atolls that bear the most severe scars of Cold War nuclear weapons testing:
Enewetak atoll, where, on Runit Island, stands a massive leaking concrete dome beneath which lies plutonium-contaminated waste, a result of a partial “clean-up” of some of the islands after the nuclear tests;
Bikini atoll, a place so beautiful, yet rendered uninhabitable by some of the most powerful nuclear detonations ever conducted; and
Rongelap atoll, where residents were exposed to radiation fallout and later convinced to return to contaminated land, part of what is now known as Project 4.1, a US medical experiment to test humans’ exposure to radiation.
This isn’t fiction, nor the distant past. It’s a chapter of history still alive through the environment, the health of communities, and the data we’re collecting today.
Each location we visit, each sample we take, adds to a clearer picture of some of the long-term impacts of nuclear testing—and highlights the importance of continuing to document, investigate, and attempt to understand and share these findings.
These are our field notes from a journey through places that hold important lessons for science, justice, and global accountability.
Our mission: why are we here? With the permission and support of the Marshallese government, a group of Greenpeace science and radiation experts, together with independent scientists, are in the island nation to assess, investigate, and document the long-term environmental and radiological consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands.
Our mission is grounded in science. We’re conducting field sampling and radiological surveys to gather data on what radioactivity remains in the environment — isotopes such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239/240. These substances are released during nuclear explosions and can linger in the environment for decades, posing serious health risks, such as increased risk of cancers in organs and bones.
But this work is not only about radiation measurements, it is also about bearing witness.
We are here in solidarity with Marshallese communities who continue to live with the consequences of decisions made decades ago, without their consent and far from the public eye.
Stop 1: Enewetak Atoll — the dome that shouldn’t exist
At the far western edge of the Marshall Islands is Enewetak. The name might not ring a bell for many, but this atoll was the site of 43 US nuclear detonations. Today, it houses what may be one of the most radioactive places in the world — the Runit Dome.
Once a tropical paradise thick with coconut palms, Runit Island is capped by a massive concrete structure the size of a football field. Under this dome — cracked, weather-worn, and only 46 centimetres thick in some places — lies 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste. These substances are not only confined to the crater — they are also found across the island’s soil, rendering Runit Island uninhabitable for all time.
The contrast between what it once was and what it has become is staggering. We took samples near the dome’s base, where rising sea levels now routinely flood the area.
We collected coconut from the island, which will be processed and prepared in the Rainbow Warrior’s onboard laboratory. Crops such as coconut are a known vector for radioactive isotope transfer, and tracking levels in food sources is essential for understanding long-term environmental and health risks.
The local consequences of this simple fact are deeply unjust. While some atolls in the Marshall Islands can harvest and sell coconut products, the people of Enewetak are prohibited from doing so because of radioactive contamination.
They have lost not only their land and safety but also their ability to sustain themselves economically. The radioactive legacy has robbed them of income and opportunity.
One of the most alarming details about this dome is that there is no lining beneath the structure — it is in direct contact with the environment, while containing some of the most hazardous long-lived substances ever to exist on planet Earth. It was never built to withstand flooding, sea level rise, and climate change.
The scientific questions are urgent: how much of this material is already leaking into the lagoon? What are the exposure risks to marine ecosystems and local communities?
We are here to help answer questions with new, independent data, but still, being in the craters and walking on this ground where nuclear Armageddon was unleashed is an emotional and surreal journey.
Stop 2: Bikini — a nuclear catastrophe, labelled ‘for the good of mankind’
Unlike Chernobyl or Fukushima, where communities were devastated by catastrophic accidents, Bikini tells a different story. This was not an accident.
The nuclear destruction of Bikini was deliberate, calculated, and executed with full knowledge that entire ways of life were going to be destroyed.
Bikini Atoll is incredibly beautiful and would look idyllic on any postcard. But we know what lies beneath: the site of 23 nuclear detonations, including Castle Bravo, the largest ever nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States.
Castle Bravo alone released more than 1000 times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. The radioactive fallout massively contaminated nearby islands and their populations, together with thousands of US military personnel.
Bikini’s former residents were forcibly relocated in 1946 before nuclear testing began, with promises of a safe return. But the atoll is still uninhabited, and most of the new generations of Bikinians have never seen their home island.
As we stood deep in the forest next to a massive concrete blast bunker, reality hit hard — behind its narrow lead-glass viewing window, US military personnel once watched the evaporation of Bikini lagoon.
On our visit, we noticed there’s a spectral quality to Bikini. The homes of the Bikini islanders are long gone. In its place now stand a scattering of buildings left by the US Department of Energy: rusting canteens, rotting offices, sleeping quarters with peeling walls, and traces of the scientific experiments conducted here after the bombs fell.
On dusty desks, we found radiation reports, notes detailing crop trials, and a notebook meticulously tracking the application of potassium to test plots of corn, alfalfa, lime, and native foods like coconut, pandanus, and banana. The potassium was intended to block the uptake of caesium-137, a radioactive isotope, by plant roots.
The logic was simple: if these crops could be decontaminated, perhaps one day Bikini could be repopulated.
We collected samples of coconuts and soil — key indicators of internal exposure risk if humans were to return. Bikini raises a stark question: What does “safe” mean, and who gets to decide?
The US declared parts of Bikini habitable in 1970, only to evacuate people again eight years later after resettled families suffered from radiation exposure. The science is not abstract here. It is personal. It is human. It has real consequences.
The Rainbow Warrior arrived at the eastern side of Rongelap atoll, anchoring one mile from the centre of Rongelap Island, the church spire and roofs of “new” buildings reflecting the bright sun.
n 1954, fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear detonation on Bikini blanketed this atoll in radioactive ash — fine, white powder that children played in, thinking it was snow. The US government waited three days to evacuate residents, despite knowing the risks. The US government declared it safe to return to Rongelap in 1957 — but it was a severely contaminated environment. The very significant radiation exposure to the Rongelap population caused severe health impacts: thyroid cancers, birth defects such as “jellyfish babies”, miscarriages, and much more.
In 1985, after a request to the US government to evacuate was dismissed, the Rongelap community asked Greenpeace to help relocate them from their ancestral lands. Using the first Rainbow Warrior, and over a period of 10 days and four trips, 350 residents collectively dismantled their homes, bringing everything with them — including livestock, and 100 metric tons of building material — where they resettled on the islands of Mejatto and Ebeye on Kwajalein atoll.
It is a part of history that lives on in the minds of the Marshallese people we meet in this ship voyage — in the gratitude they still express, the pride in keeping the fight for justice, and in the pain of still not having a permanent, safe home.
Now, once again, we are standing on their island of Rongelap, walking past abandoned buildings and rusting equipment, some of it dating from the 1980s and 1990s — a period when the US Department of Energy launched a push to encourage resettlement declaring that the island was safe — a declaration that this time, the population welcomed with mistrust, not having access to independent scientific data and remembering the deceitful relocation of some decades before.
Here, once again, we sample soil and fruits that could become food if people came back. It is essential to understand ongoing risks — especially for communities considering whether and how to return.
Our scientific mission is to take measurements, collect samples, and document contamination. But that’s not all we’re bringing back.
We carry with us the voices of the Marshallese who survived these tests and are still living with their consequences. We carry images of graves swallowed by tides near Runit Dome, stories of entire cultures displaced from their homelands, and measurements of radiation showing contamination still persists after many decades.
There are 9700 nuclear warheads still held by military powers around the world – mostly in the United States and Russian arsenals. The Marshall Islands was one of the first nations to suffer the consequences of nuclear weapons — and the legacy persists today.
We didn’t come to speak for the Marshallese. We came to listen, to bear witness, and to support their demand for justice. We plan to return next year, to follow up on our research and to make results available to the people of the Marshall Islands.
And we will keep telling these stories — until justice is more than just a word.
Kommol Tata (“thank you” in the beautiful Marshallese language) for following our journey.
Shaun Burnie is a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine and was part of the Rainbow Warrior team in the Marshall Islands. This article was first published by Greenpeace Aotearoa and is republished with permission.
The author of the book Eyes of Fire, one of the many publications on the Rainbow Warrior bombing almost 40 years ago but the only one by somebody actually on board the bombed ship, says he was under no illusions that France was behind the attack.
Journalist David Robie was speaking last month at a Greenpeace Aotearoa workshop at Mātauri Bay for environmental staff and activists and revealed that he has a forthcoming new book to mark the anniversary of the bombing.
“I don’t think I had any illusions at the time. For me, I knew it was the French immediately the bombing happened,” he said.
New Zealand journalist and author David Robie talks to Greenpeace activists last month about the Rainbow Warrior bombing and the Rongelap voyage in a tent near the iconic Mātauri Bay site of the bombed ship. Image: Greenpeace screenshot APR
Eyes of Fire . . . the earlier 30th anniversary edition in 2015. Image: Little Island Press/DR
“You know with the horrible things they were doing at the time with their colonial policies in Kanaky New Caledonia, assassinating independence leaders and so on, and they had a heavy military presence.
“A sort of clamp down in New Caledonia, so it just fitted in with the pattern — an absolute disregard for the Pacific.”
He said it was ironic that four decades on, France had trashed the goodwill that had been evolving with the 1988 Matignon and 1998 Nouméa accords towards independence with harsh new policies that led to the riots in May last year.
Dr Robie’s series of books on the Rainbow Warrior focus on the impact of nuclear testing by both the Americans and the French, in particular, on Pacific peoples and especially the humanitarian voyages to relocate the Rongelap Islanders in the Marshall Islands barely two months before the bombing by French secret agent saboteurs at Marsden wharf in Auckland on 10 July 1985.
Plantu’s cartoon on the Rainbow Warrior bombers from the slideshow. Image: David Robie/Plantu
“This edition is the most comprehensive work on the sinking of the first Rainbow Warrior, but also speaks to the first humanitarian mission undertaken by Greenpeace,” said publisher Tony Murrow.
“It’s an important work that shows us how we can act in the world and how we must continue to support all life on this unusual planet that is our only home.”
Little Island Press produced an educational microsite as a resource to accompany Eyes of Fire with print, image and video resources.
The book will be launched in association with a nuclear-free Pacific exhibition at Ellen Melville Centre in mid-July.
Celebrated sculptor Chris Booth also spoke at the Greenpeace workshop last month, describing the enormous challenges that he and his colleagues in the project faced in constructing the impressive basalt “black rainbow” Rainbow Warrior memorial on Pikipuke hill overlooking the burial site of the wreck.
The centrepiece of the memorial, built in 1988-90, is the one tonne Rainbow Warrior propellor.
Benjamin Netanyahu said last Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal.
“We have many objectives, many goals in this war,” Netanyahu said. “We want to bring back all of our hostages. That is a very important goal. In war, there is a supreme objective. And that supreme objective is victory over our enemies. And that is what we will achieve.”
Nothing the prime minister said here is true or valid — unless by “enemies” he means “all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.
Netanyahu has been fairly transparent about the fact that Israel’s ultimate goal in Gaza is neither freeing the hostages nor defeating Hamas, but seizing Palestinian territory and removing its Palestinian inhabitants.
It was never about hostages . . . Video: Caitlin Johnstone
So they’ve made this perfectly clear. This isn’t about Hamas, except insofar as an armed resistance group will make it difficult to forcibly remove all Palestinians from Gaza. And it certainly isn’t about hostages.
And yet, bizarrely, this is how the Western political-media class continues to frame this onslaught. They call it Israel’s “war with Hamas”, when it’s nothing other than an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.
They prattle on about “October 7, hostages, and terrorism”, even though it has already been made abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with any of those things. They act as though the admission was simply never made.
There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about hostages and Hamas after the US and Israel said the goal is the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They told you what this is really about. They said it. With their face holes. They said it right to you. End of debate.
Israel has been seeking ways to purge Gaza of Palestinians for generations. That’s all this has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not Hamas. Not terrorism.
Everything about Israel’s operations in Gaza have indicated that their real goal is to remove Palestinians from a Palestinian territory and not to free hostages or defeat Hamas. And then when Trump took office, they started openly admitting it.
How is this not the whole entire conversation every time Gaza comes up? How is this not the beginning, middle and end of every single discussion?
This is like a cop looking right into someone’s phone camera while strangling a black man to death and saying “I am killing this man because I am racist and I want to kill black people,” and then afterward everyone’s still saying “resisting arrest” and “we don’t know what happened before the video started recording”.
He said what he was doing and what his motives were with his own mouth.
You don’t get to babble about Hamas, October 7 or hostages in defence of Israel’s actions in Gaza anymore. That is not a thing. If you want to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza, the sole topic of conversation is whether or not it’s okay to forcibly purge an entire population from their historic homeland by systematically bombing, shooting and starving them while destroying their civilian infrastructure, solely because of their ethnicity.
That is what the discussion is about. Not anything else. That and that only.
