Israel continued to pummel Gaza today with air raids, killing dozens of people, including nine children in the city of Khan Younis. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot/APR
A progressive foreign policy group is calling for the New Zealand government to condemn the siege of Gaza, and demand an immediate ceasefire to allow the establishment of a humanitarian aid corridor in the region.
Israel’s complete siege on the Gaza Strip has cut off power, food, water, electricity and fuel to the region, as the death toll from Israeli air strikes climbs over 1,100.
Human rights advocates are condemning this action as a crime against humanity.
Thousands of Palestinians — including the deaths of seven journalists bearing witness — and humanitarian workers have been targeted, injured and killed by Israeli air strikes.
Hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed, as fuel supplies needed to run generators have been cut off, resulting in a power blackout across the region.
“We are horrified by the New Zealand government’s failure to demand an end to Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza,” said Te Kuaka co-director Dr Arama Rata.
“We call for the New Zealand government to urge an immediate ceasefire and the provision of healthcare and humanitarian assistance in Gaza.”
Reckless rhetoric
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant justified the siege by claiming: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
US President Joe Biden condemned Hamas as a “terrorist” organisation, and affirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself”.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta reiterated these statements.
A member of Te Kuaka, researcher and writer Dr Max Harris, said: “There is a pressing danger right now that claims about Israel’s right to self-defence are being used as cover for profound violations of international law, and the destruction of families and communities in Gaza.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, has expressed deep concern about the situation, and about UK Labour leader Keir Starmer’s comments claiming Israel’s right to self-defence justified the cutting off of electricity and supplies to Gaza.
Albanese has called the intentional starvation of civilians as part of a broader attack on civilians a “war crime and, potentially, a crime against humanity”.
Dr Harris said: “New Zealand must set other countries’ sights on the need for a humanitarian aid corridor, and our political leaders must avoid reckless rhetoric that will pave the way for war crimes and further senseless loss of life.”
Nationwide rallies on Saturday, October 14, calling for an end to the Israeli-Gaza war and the killing of civilians – in Auckland at 2pm at Aotea Square.
Indiscriminate Israeli bombardment of civilian districts in Gaza where dozens of families have been wiped out - 974 people (including at least 260 children) have been killed in the enclave. Image: Jadaliyya
ANALYSIS:By Mouin Rabbani
Almost 50 years to the day after the joint Egyptian-Syrian offensive that launched the 1973 October War, Israel has once again been caught with its pants down. On this occasion its briefs were dangling from its ankles as well.
Operation Al Aqsa Storm, as Hamas named its 7 October 2023 offensive into Israeli territory, represents an even greater Israeli failure.
Extensive and reasonably successful Egyptian and Syrian efforts to conceal their intentions, preparations, and capabilities notwithstanding, Israel in 1973 received multiple warnings about an impending Arab attack from, among others, King Hussein of Jordan, a high-level Egyptian agent, and several of its own intelligence officers.
Its primary failure was not ignorance, but the haughty dismissal of knowledge that contradicted preconceptions.
While hubris and complacency have been mainstays in Israel’s dealings with Arab military adversaries, on this occasion it additionally had no information about the impending operation.
This despite its world-leading surveillance and intelligence capabilities, and the reality that the Gaza Strip is not only miniscule in size but also the most intensively and intrusively surveilled territory and population on the planet, and one that has furthermore been under blockade for 17 years.
That Hamas and Islamic Jihad were under these circumstances able to plan and prepare an operation of such scale, scope, and sophistication, a process that will have consumed many months at the least, and will have required extensive communications among leaders, cadres, and operatives, is an astonishing achievement and testament to the legendary resourcefulness of Gaza’s Palestinians.
Launched in plain view
While we can at this point only speculate as to how Hamas managed to prepare and launch this offensive in plain view of Israel, the avoidance or effective encryption of electronic and digital communications will certainly have played an important role.
Similarly, Hamas has in recent years considerably improved its counter-intelligence capabilities to minimise infiltration, an essential feature given the nearly constant flow of Palestinians who transit through Israeli-controlled border crossings and are susceptible to recruitment by Israeli intelligence as conditions for access to health care, employment, and the like.
Rather than serving as Israel’s eyes and ears within the Gaza Strip, it seems likely at least some of these Palestinians conducted reconnaissance for Operation Al Aqsa Storm within Israel.
As for the weaponry used, much of it is either rudimentary or of local manufacture, making ingenious use of available materials such as paragliders, steel from a British ship that sunk off the Gaza coast decades ago to manufacture rocket tubes, and unexploded Israeli ordnance. More advanced capabilities will have been smuggled in, presumably with the assistance of Hezbollah in Lebanon, perhaps with the cooperation of sympathetic or corrupt Egyptian border patrols.
The legendary corruption of Israel’s own border crossings with the Gaza Strip may also have played a role.
Committed to fighting the previous war, Israel constructed formidable underground obstacles to prevent Palestinian commandos from infiltrating Israel through their tunnel network. In response, Hamas and Islamic Jihad simply breached the weak points in the barriers surrounding the Gaza Strip, such as wire fences that relied on electronic monitoring rather than more sturdy concrete obstacles (some of which also appear to have been breached).
And a key objective of the initial Palestinian missile barrage, which targeted Israeli military airfields among other objectives, was to paralyse and thus delay Israel’s ability to rapidly respond.
Immediate objectives
Al Aqsa Storm’s immediate objectives were to infiltrate and seize key Israeli security installations, such as the Re’im military base which serves as the headquarters for the Gaza Division; kill or capture a significant number of Israeli soldiers; establish Palestinian territorial control over population centers within Israel’s boundaries for the first time since 1948; and present significantly improved Palestinian capabilities to the Israeli public and security establishment with a massive missile barrage at Israeli cities and the deployment of new infiltration and combat techniques.
While Israeli civilian casualties do not appear to have been an objective as such, it appears that many were killed, and others abducted. Additionally, there are reports of a massacre at a desert party.
In the event, the operation succeeded in nearly all respects, one suspects beyond the wildest expectations of those who planned and executed it. Dozens of Israeli soldiers, including a major general, were spirited into captivity inside the Gaza Strip.
Many more, including senior officers, were killed and wounded, and almost 24 hours after the operation commenced, Palestinian fighters remained ensconced in multiple locations and installations inside Israel.
Images of Israeli bulldozers and missiles deployed against the Israeli police headquarters in Sderot to dislodge Palestinian fighters within it will remain with us for some time, and as with the Egyptian military’s nearly effortless crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, won’t be erased by subsequent developments.
A more difficult question concerns Hamas’s motives and broader aims. Seen from the movement’s perspective, Israel has simply gone too far, for too long.
Particularly under the stewardship of the Netanyahu government and its predecessor, escalation has been consistent and transformed into a strategy.
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley, army-enabled attacks on villages throughout the West Bank by settler auxiliaries, and increasing incursions by prominent Israeli politicians and settler groups into the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem’s Old City have reached new heights, and done so in the explicit service of formal annexation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a map of the “New Middle East” without Palestine during his September 22, 2023, address to the UN General Assembly in New York. Image: Common Dreams
In the Gaza Strip, Israel has shown no inclination to lift or significantly relax the blockade, and treats Hamas as a force that can safely be ignored on the grounds that the movement cares about little else than maintaining its rule over the Gaza Strip.
Within Israel’s prisons, the situation of Palestinian detainees has been deteriorating by design. Yet every Israeli escalation has been normalised by Israel’s US and European partners, with each outrage met by little more than paeans to “shared values” and Israel’s “right to defend itself” and, under Washington’s leadership, a focus on an Israeli-Saudi agreement intended to render Palestine and the Palestinians irrelevant.
Within the region, a growing number of Arab states have in practice extended to Greater Israel a halal certificate, at Palestinian expense. Closer to home, Turkey has forced a number of Hamas leaders it previously hosted to leave the country, and Qatar has in recent months reduced the financial support it provides to Gaza in agreement with Israel, on the grounds that Hamas needs to find a more sustainable solution to its financial crisis.
So what is Operation Al Aqsa Storm meant to achieve? It appears that the movement concluded, some time ago, that a repeat of previous confrontations with Israel, such as during the 2021 Unity Intifada, the first that Hamas rather than Israel initiated, would be insufficient to break the logjam, and that only a spectacle on the scale of what we witnessed on October 7 would serve to concentrate minds in Israel and other relevant capitals.
In other words, the main objective would seem to be to render the status quo obsolete and put paid to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, entirely or at least in its current form. Secondly, Hamas appears determined to free Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and additionally use those it has captured and abducted as leverage in negotiations on other matters, including for example those relating to the Haram al-Sharif.
Insurmountable obstacles
It is highly unlikely that undermining Saudi-Israeli diplomacy formed an important motivation, because the proposed deal faces too many insurmountable obstacles in Washington and Israel, and both Hamas and its allies understand this.
Additionally, if Muhammad bin Salman is determined to proceed with such a deal, there’s no indication he would be deterred by a mound of Palestinian corpses any more than his Arab cohorts who preceded him, and in any case, could consummate any agreement after a decent interval.
This notwithstanding, embarrassing not Riyadh specifically but all regional capitals that maintain formal or informal relations with Israel is an added benefit for Hamas. Particularly so if mass demonstrations in the region in support of the Palestinians serve to remind its governments and the world at large that Palestine remains a live issue.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad can additionally be presumed to hope that their offensive fatally weakens the PA ensconced in Ramallah, thereby creating greater freedom of action for their movements in the West Bank.
The above notwithstanding, the timing of this operation is curious, because conventional wisdom held that Israel’s various adversaries were content with a strategy of managed escalation so as not to interrupt the growing polarisation and dysfunction within the Israeli political arena.
That Hamas nevertheless chose an unprecedented offensive at this moment may have been related to matters of operational security and fears of exposure, or an assessment that this was an opportune moment with Israel having prioritised sadism in the West Bank and reinforcement of its border with Lebanon, or indeed a revised assessment that exposing the colossal failure of Israel’s extremists and security establishment is the best way to weaken them.
It is inconceivable that Hamas would have embarked on an operation of this scale without also preparing for an unprecedented Israeli response. Together with Islamic Jihad and others, it will probably have prepared for massive Israeli incursions into the Gaza Strip launched for the purpose of significantly degrading their organisations and infrastructure, killing cadres and assassinating leaders it can locate, and leaving a massive trail of death and destruction.
Last stand thinking
Better a last stand than a slow death, the thinking apparently goes, particularly if that stand gives a renewed lease on life. Israel will presumably also conduct a massive sweep throughout the West Bank, crack down on Palestinians within Israel, and may also seek to abduct or liquidate Hamas leaders based abroad.
It’s a scenario based on the reasonable assumption that Israel remains unprepared to resume direct control of the entire territory for a protracted period of time. In other words, and as with previous assaults on the Gaza Strip, Israel’s objective may ultimately be to restore a version of the status quo that produced the present crisis.
Inflicting significant casualties in close-quarter combat, as the Palestinians succeeded in doing in 2014, could reduce the length and intensity of such incursions. The Palestinian organisations presumably know better than to believe that holding dozens of Israeli prisoners will provide them with a measure of protection from the authors of the Hannibal Doctrine, which considers a dead Israeli soldier preferable to a captive one.
It is an issue that can at most be used for psychological warfare.
A key question is whether Gaza’s militants will confront Israel only with their existing preparations, or whether Operation Al Aqsa Storm is part of a broader initiative by the self-styled Axis of Resistance, in which Hezbollah and perhaps others will join the fray if Israel crosses certain red lines to relieve the pressure on the Gaza Strip.
If Israel follows through on its demands of mass evacuations of densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods and proceeds with intensive carpet bombing to flatten them, causing mass casualties in the process, we may soon find out.
Mouin Rabbani has published and commented widely on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He was previously senior analyst Middle East and special advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria. He is co-editor of Jadaliyya Ezine.
"Free Palestine" protesters have demonstrated outside the White House in Washington as thousands of people supporting both sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict across the world have called for an end to the war. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot/APR
COMMENTARY: By John Minto
Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is correct to condemn Hamas killing Israeli civilians in its attacks on Israel this week.
The killing of civilians or taking them hostage is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and should be universally condemned.
However, the Labour government has been deathly silent on the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians under Labour’s watch these past six years.
Under his prime ministerial watch this year, Chris Hipkins has looked the other way while Israel has built more illegal Israeli settlement homes on Palestinian land; killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians; supported Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank and encouraged highly-provocative Israeli ministerial and settler incursions into the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem.
Why does he only wake up when Israelis are killed? Why does he think Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives?
The Prime Minister’s pro-Israel stance is one-sided and blatantly racist.
Israel and Gaza are not two countries at war. Gaza is a territory under siege, where every aspect of life is controlled by Israel.
Palestinians didn’t break through a “border” to enter Israel. They destroyed a fence separating them from the homes they were forced out of. pic.twitter.com/Vt6BjbapyX
New Zealand, along with other Western countries, bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in recent days because we have never held Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.
We have given Israel a free pass to murder and abuse Palestinians and this led to the inevitable tragedy last weekend.
It is precisely the attitude of Western leaders such as our Prime Minister which has meant so many lives have been lost.
The Prime Minister has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on his hands.
John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
Gaza Strip . . . about 2.3 million people have been living trapped under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007. Image: Al Jazeera (CC)
The besieged Gaza Strip
The Palestinian enclave — home to about 2.3 million people — has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007, reports Al Jazeera.
More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and thousands have taken shelter in UN schools as Israeli attacks intensify, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.
Buildings, mosques and offices have been targeted as Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” for the deadly attacks that has sent shockwaves across Israel.
Harrowing images from inside Gaza have emerged with 19 members of a family killed when an air strike on Sunday hit their residential building. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes currently in Israel.
Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza since 2007, a year after Hamas was democratically elected into power. The voting came nearly two years after Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the enclave.
The blockade gives Israel control of Gaza’s borders, and Egypt has stepped in to enforce the western border.
Israel has stated it has blocked the borders to protect its citizens from Hamas, but the act of collective punishment violates the Geneva Conventions and has long been considered illegal by groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Republished from Asia Pacific Report with permission.
The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) says it is “deeply concerned” at reports that Western Australian police are demanding the ABC hand over footage about climate protesters filmed as part of a Four Corners investigation.
“As researchers and teachers of journalism, we uphold the ethical obligation of journalists to honour any assurances given to protect sources,” said JERAA president Associate Professor Alexandra Wake in a statement.
“This obligation is imperative in supporting the Western democratic tradition of journalism and to investigative journalism in particular.”
“I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.” Video: ABC Four Corners
WA police are reported to have demanded footage via “Order to Produce” provisions of the WA Criminal Investigations Act. The law compels organisations to comply.
One of JERAA’s core aims was to promote freedom of expression and communication, said the statement.
“The association is concerned that the WA police action represents a direct threat to media freedom and the practice of ethical investigative journalism,” Dr Wake said.
“We join the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) in urging the ABC to stand firm and not hand over footage which could potentially undermine assurances by the Four Corners team to their sources.”
The union for Australian journalists said it was alarmed at the reports that WA police were demanding the ABC hand over footage featuring climate activists filmed as part of the television investigation before it had even aired.
If you’re ever writing about issues in Pacific nations, there is a rich and detailed free archive of audio, video and text news articles and research abstracts covering a wide range of topics that you can dip into.
The award-winning website was built as part of an extraordinary pioneering initiative led by Professor David Robie, founding director of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology.
It was a publishing platform, similar to The Junction, for student journalists and independent media contributors from media schools and institutions across the Oceania region, including AUT and the University of the South Pacific.
The Pacific Archives . . . story telling from news stories to documentaries to research. Image: PMC/The Junction
When the website was taken offline for a few weeks in September 2023, there was a wave of concern expressed.
Dr Robie called it a disappointing reflection on the decline of independent journalism and lack of respect for history at media schools.
Valuable files
Jemima Garrett, co-convenor of the Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI), described it as an “appalling waste and disrespectful”.
Another investigative journalist and former journalism professor Wendy Bacon said: “This is very bad. … Unfortunately the same thing happened to an enormous amount of valuable files of Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at University of Technology Sydney.”
The Pacific affairs adviser of the Pacific Islands Forum, Lisa Leilani Williams-Lahari, simply wrote: “Sad!
A 2min video on the 10th anniversary of the Pacific Media Centre. Video: PMC
Without making a comment, but perhaps in response to this feedback, the archive was restored by AUT on Monday October 2, 2023.
You can also read articles by AUT and other Pacific Media Centre students here on The Junction.
Israeli airstrikes bomb Gaza . . . The latest of Israel’s settler-state pogroms in the West Bank took place in Huwara one day before Hamas’s action. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot/APR
Israel is carrying out the longest, now-illegal, now-apartheid occupation in modern history. Gaza has been illegally blockaded for 17 years, confining more than two million mostly civilian human beings in deteriorating conditions, subjecting them to repeated bombardments and ceaseless deprivation.
Hamas’s attack is a response to longterm and escalating, immediate violence.
The blockade wall that was breached is an illegal structure. A million children have been born behind that wall; did you expect them to sit quietly?
Wall deserves to fall
That wall deserves to fall — but we, here in Aotearoa and throughout the world, should have brought it down with diplomatic and economic and legal sanctions long before it came to this.
Now Hamas’s violent resistance has broken through the wall.
Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance, but no one has a right to unlimited violence. There is no honour in attacking civilians in their homes or bombing Gazan apartment buildings.
It is a core principle of international humanitarian law that the violations of one armed group do not release another armed group from its constant obligation to uphold the rights of civilians. Armed groups are responsible to the law, to the idea of minimising the harm done in this world.
We who demand the protection of Palestinian civilians can best do that by calling for the protection of all civilians: human rights are either everyone’s rights or they are nothing.
If we lose sight of that, the world becomes even more dangerous — and Palestinians have always borne the brunt of that danger.
No military solution
There is no military solution. Solutions call for political will here, outside Israel/Palestine.
The rage and despair accumulated through generations and decades of brutality will not reset. Do not call for the return to the status quo ante because it was intolerable, unjust and illegal.
We, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, need to act on the basis of law and the equal rights of human beings to protection, to justice, to self-determination.
We call on our government to initiate, to pick up the phone and lead in mustering international action.
For anyone to be safe, Palestinians must be free and civilians must be protected.
Israeli air strikes on Gaza in retaliation to the surprise Hamas attacks that followed more than 240 Palestinians - mostly civilians - being killed by Israeli security forces in the past year. Image: TVNZ screenshot/APR
COMMENTARY:By John Minto
The Hamas attack on Israel yesterday has brought the usual round of systemic misreporting by New Zealand news outlets as they repost stories from the BBC, AP and Reuters which bend the truth in favour of Israeli narratives of “terrorism” and “victimhood”.
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa John Minto . . . “‘Occupied’ is the status these Palestinian territories have under international law, United Nations resolutions and NZ government policy, and should be consistently reported as such.” TVNZ screenshot/APR
The BBC, AP and Reuters typically talk about the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem when they should be reported as the occupied West Bank, occupied Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem.
The BBC, AP and Reuters typically refer to Palestinians resisting Israel’s military occupation Palestinian “militants” or “terrorists” or similar derogatory and dismissive descriptions.
We would not call Ukrainians attacking Russian occupation forces as “militants” so why do our media think it’s OK to use this term to describe Palestinians attacking Israeli occupation forces?
Palestinian right to resist
Under international law, Palestinians have the right to resist Israel’s military occupation, including armed resistance and should not be abused for doing so by our media.
Palestinian resistance groups should be described as “resistance fighters” or “armed resistance organisations” while Israeli soldiers should be described as “Israeli occupation soldiers”.
The BBC, AP and Reuters typically give sympathetic coverage to Israelis killed by Palestinians but do not give similar sympathetic coverage to Palestinians killed, on a near daily basis, by the Israeli occupation (more than 240 killed so far this year, including dozens of children.
Labour leader and NZ Prime Minister Chris Hipkins . . . New Zealand “condemns unequivocally the Hamas attacks on Israel.” Image: TVNZ screenshot/APR
The vast majority of these killings are simply ignored.
Palestinians are the victims of Israeli apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, land theft, house demolitions, military occupation and unbridled brutality and yet our media ends up giving the impression it’s the other way round.
Wide coverage is given to Israeli spokespeople in most stories with rudimentary reporting, if any, from Palestinian viewpoints.
For example, so far Radio New Zealand has reported on the views of New Zealand Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses but has yet to interview any Palestinian New Zealanders who suffer great anxiety every time Palestinians are killed by Israel.
Support for self-determination
New Zealanders overwhelmingly support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination. They rightly reject Israel’s racist narratives and its apartheid policies towards Palestinians.
Yara Eid, a journalist from Gaza, expresses her reaction to the news that her friend and fellow journalist 21-year-old Ibrahim Lafi was murdered by Israeli missiles in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/4LqutaOgmP
We should not be calling for negotiations between the parties because Palestinians face both Israel and US at the negotiating table and this will never bring justice for Palestinians and will therefore never bring peace.
Killings in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict . . . a graph showing the devastating loss of life for Palestinians compared with Israelis in the past 15 years. Source: Al Jazeera (cc)
Instead, we need a timeline for Israel to abide by international law and United Nations resolutions. This would mean:
Ending the Israeli military occupation of Palestine;
Ending Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians, and Allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and land in Palestine
This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished via Pacific Media Watch with permission.
Contact with the journalist Nidal Al-Wahidi was lost yesterday during his coverage of events at the Beit Hanoun checkpoint, and there is no confirmed information about his death. https://t.co/2U9wAkrwaw
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has hailed the news that Narges Mohammadi — an Iranian journalist RSF has been defending for years — has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “fight against the oppression of women in Iran,” her courage and determination.
Persecuted by the Iranian authorities since the late 1990s for her work, and imprisoned again since November 2021, she must be freed at once, RSF declared in a statement.
“Speak to save Iran” is the title of one of the letters published by Mohammadi from Evin prison, near Tehran, where she has been serving a sentence of 10 years and 9 months in prison since 16 November 2021.
She has also been sentenced to hundreds of lashes. The maker of a documentary entitled White Torture and the author of a book of the same name, Mohammadi has never stopped denouncing the sexual violence inflicted on women prisoners in Iran.
It is this fight against the oppression of women that the Nobel Committee has just saluted by awarding the Peace Prize to this 51-year-old journalist and human rights activist, the former vice-president of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre, the Iranian human rights organisation that was created by Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who was herself awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
It is because of this fight that Mohammadi has been hounded by the Iranian authorities, who continue to persecute her in prison.
She has been denied visits and telephone calls since 12 April 2022, cutting her off from the world.
New charges
At the same time, the authorities in Evin prison have brought new charges to keep her in detention.
On August 4, her jail term was increased by a year after the publication of another of her letters about violence against fellow women detainees.
White Torture: The infamy of solitary confinement in Iran with Narges Mohammadi.
Mohammadi was awarded the RSF Prize for Courage on 12 December 2023. At the award ceremony in Paris, her two children, whom she has not seen for eight years, read one of the letters she wrote to them from prison.
“In this country, amid all the suffering, all the fears and all the hopes, and when, after years of imprisonment, I am behind bars again and I can no longer even hear the voices of my children, it is with a heart full of passion, hope and vitality, full of confidence in the achievement of freedom and justice in my country that I will spend time in prison,” she wrote.
She ended the letter with a call to keep alive “the hope of victory”.
RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said:
“It is with immense emotion that I learn that the Nobel Peace Prize is being awarded to the journalist and human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.
At Reporters Without Borders (RSF), we have been fighting for her for years, alongside her husband and her two children, and with Shirin Ebadi. The Nobel Peace Prize will obviously be decisive in obtaining her release.”
On June 7, RSF referred the unacceptable conditions in which Mohammadi is being detained to all of the relevant UN human rights bodies.
During an oral update to the UN Human Rights Council on July 5, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran expressed concern over the “continued detention of human rights defenders and lawyers defending the protesters, and at least 17 journalists”.
It is thanks to Mohammadi’s journalistic courage that the world knows what is happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s prisons, where 20 journalists are currently detained.
Operation "Al Aqsa Flood" . . . the Palestinian armed group Hamas has launched the largest attack on Israel in years, infiltrating areas in the south of the country following a barrage of more than 2000 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot/APR
The New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis in the latest fighting in Israel/Palestine and must revisit its policy, says the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair John Minto.
“Whatever the eventual outcome of the Hamas attacks on Israel today [Saturday], the New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for the loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis,” he said in a statement.
“Like other Western countries, New Zealand has failed to hold Israel to account for its multiple crimes, including war crimes, against the Palestinian people, day after day, year after year and decade after decade.
“We have ignored human rights reports of Israel’s apartheid policies. Our government has been looking the other way.”
Hamas launched a large-scale military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” against Israel, describing it as in response to the desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and increased settler violence.
The group running the besieged Gaza Strip (population 2.1 million) said it had fired thousands of rockets and sent fighters into Israel. Reports said at least 40 Israelis had been killed, 35 people taken captive and more than 750 had been wounded and taken to hospitals.
Palestinian sources said 160 people had been killed, mostly in Gaza Strip.
Repeated Israeli attacks
Minto described the Hamas attacks as “understandable”.
“Over recent months Western countries have turned a blind eye to the brutality of the Israeli army and settler groups engaging in repeated attacks on Palestinian towns and villages and the killing of civilians and children,” he said.
“The result is now playing out in more violence initiated by Israel’s brutal occupation — the longest military occupation in modern history. The occupation includes Israel’s 17-year-old blockade of the Gaza strip — the largest open-air prison in the world.”
“New Zealand must reassess its policy on the Middle East and demand Israel adopt a timetable to implement international law and United Nations resolutions.”
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished. Politically and otherwise,” declared Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara, who says Israel has never learnt from history of colonialism.
“His arrogance has finally caught with him. No matter how many Palestinians this corrupt opportunist kills before his final downfall, he will go down in utter humiliation.
“Israel gets a glimpse of the real future days after Netanyahu cavalierly showed us at the United Nations future maps of the new Middle East centered around Israel — with no Palestine existence.”
Israel launched air strikes on Gaza in retaliation in an operation called “Iron Swords”.
Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara . . . Israel has never learnt from the history of colonialism and the suffering of a third generation of Palestinians in the Gaza “open prison”. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot/APR
Vanuatu's new Prime Minister Charlot Salwai (left) and Graon Mo Jastis Party's Ralph Regenvanu who is back as Minister for Climate Change Adaptation, Energy, Environment. Image: Facebook
By Koroi Hawkins and Don Wiseman
Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Sato Kilman has been voted out through a motion-of-no-confidence in the country’s Parliament in Port Vila today.
The motion was carried by a show of hands, with 27 votes, in the absence of the government bench which had vacated the floor in protest ahead of the motion being moved.
Charlot Salwai was then nominated as the sole candidate for Prime minister and was duly-elected by secret ballot with 29 votes in the absence again of the MPs on the other side of the House.
Salwai was previously prime minister from February 2016 until the general election in 2020.
Immediately after the vote, Salwai took his oath and was installed as the new prime minister of the Republic of Vanuatu.
In his acceptance speech, Salwai apologised to the Vanuatu public for the ongoing “political crises” which have seen four prime ministers elected now in the the space of three years.
He also thanked police for keeping the peace and thanked citizens for respecting the law and each other.
Salwai, who is the leader of the Reunification Movement for Change Party, thanked all of the MPs who voted for him and in particular the leaders of the three major political parties in this coalition government — Ishmael Kalsakau Ma’aukoro from the Union of Moderate Parties, Jotham Napat of the Leaders Party, and Ralph Regenvanu of the Graon Mo Jastis Party.
Salwai said Vanuatu was facing many challenges economically, socially and environmentally with climate change, and he acknowledged the added impacts that political instability were having on local businesses and society at large.
“It has not yet been 12 months since the initial establishment of the government of honourable Ma’aukoro which he led following the snap election in October of 2022 yet today is the second time that we have changed the government,” Salwai said speaking in Bislama.
“I say sorry to the last government but we exist in this system of democracy where when the weight of the number of members moves to one side a change of government follows.”
Following the Prime Minister’s speech, Parliament was adjourned until 8:30am on Tuesday, October 10.
Ousted prime minister Sato Kilman . . . only came to power last month in a similar leadership challenge mounted against the then prime minister Ishmael Kalsakau Ma’aukoro. Image: Vladimir Pesnya /RIA Novosti
Government walk-out
The ousted prime minister Sato Kilman only came to power last month in a similar leadership challenge mounted against the then prime minister Kalsakau.
The current Parliament was elected through a snap election in 2022 which was triggered by then prime minister Bob Loughman before a challenge against his leadership could be mounted.
The walk-out staged this afternoon by the now former government MPs came about after they had argued unsuccessfully against the validity of today’s sitting.
This is in light of an ongoing Court of Appeal case for one of their members, Bruno Leingkone, whose seat had been vacated by the Speaker last week on the basis that the MP had missed three consecutive Parliament sittings without the express consent of the Speaker’s office while receiving medical care in South Korea.
The now opposition grouping were also trying to argue that because of the appeal case today’s vote-of-no-confidence should have been conducted as if the 52 member house were at full complement.
This would have raised the threshold for an absolute majority which is required to unseat a prime minister.
Uncertain future Despite the one-sided affair in Parliament this afternoon, the political instability in Vanuatu is likely to continue with only a handful of MPs required to shift the balance of power.
Before staging their walk-out, members on the other side of the House had also indicated they would likely challenge the legality of this afternoon’s proceedings in court.
The immediate challenge facing the newly elected prime minister in forming his cabinet over the weekend will be keeping everybody in his new coalition government happy as he allocates portfolios.
Koroi Hawkins is the RNZ Pacific editor and Don Wiseman a senior journalist. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ and Asia Pacific Report.
