Fiji opening an embassy in Jerusalem last month in defiance of United Nations resolutions on Occupied Palestine and hosting a visit by a senior Israeli minister from the paraiah state this week has revived condemnation by Pacific human rights groups and Palestinian advocates.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel visited the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Fiji — where she welcomed a possible “peacekeeping” role — in a week-long Pacific friendship mission.

She also faced controversy in New Zealand over the trip.

Both Fiji and Papua New Guinea have opened controversial embassies in Jerusalem, recognised as the capital of Palestine when statehood is granted.

The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji has condemned Fiji’s coalition government for “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza”, saying it was being “deliberately orchestrated” by Israel in a statement.

The statement was issued before the opening of the embassy and the declaration of a Gaza ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump and three mediating Middle East countries.

While Israel has violated the fragile ceasefire several times in the past two weeks, killing at least 100 Palestinians, the International Court of Justice has made a nonbinding ruling that Israel must support UN relief efforts in Gaza, including those conducted by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

Embassy entourage
The NGOCHR statement by chair Shamima Ali, dated September 9, criticised widespread reports in Fiji media that Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka would take “an entourage of 17 government officials and spouses” to officially establish the residential Fijian embassy.

“The coalition government appears to be callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel,” she said.

“This very same Fiji government previously defended the destruction, killing, and maiming of scores of thousands of innocent civilians — 70 percent of them women and children — by Israel at the International Court of Justice [in an earlier and ongoing case on genocide].”

Shamima Ali highlighted the visit in August by two World Elders — Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand and former Head of UNDP) — to the Rafah crossing into Gaza from Egypt.

They had witnessed how Israel was preventing the flow of food, water, and medicine to the suffering people of Gaza, and declared it as an “unfolding genocide” — “this is not the chaos of war, nor the result of an environmental disaster. It is intentional.”

Ali said Prime Minster Rabuka, and ministers Lynda Tabuya and Pio Tikoduadua had made “rather unconvincing arguments” about opening of the Fijian embassy in Jerusalem on September 18 amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

“Whether they like it or not, in the eyes of the world, Fiji will be seen as a country that supports the apartheid and pariah state of Israel, and its genocide in Gaza,” the statement said.

‘Not in our name’
Ali said the NGOCHR reiterated its “Not in our name” opposition to Fiji’s defence of Israel at the ICJ in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide.

It also declared its strongest “Not in our name” opposition to the establishment of the Fiji Embassy in Jerusalem.

“Neither action reflects the wishes of all citizens of Fiji. It does not reflect well on Fiji for the present coalition government to be effectively supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine.”

Members of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights are Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Program, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji.

Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.

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I am alarmed by reports that Filipino journalists were flown in by the Israeli government to participate in what is essentially a whitewashing campaign for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At least two articles, atrocious excuses for journalism, have come out of this trip.One is a piece by Wilson Lee Flores for The Philippine Star, entitled “Israel beyond the headlines: Where ancient stones speak.”

By attempting to divert attention from the massacre of Palestinian civilians to “the Old City’s labyrinthine alleys,” Flores acts as an apologist for war crimes, akin to writing a travel blog about Nazi Germany.

In a Facebook post, Flores further parrots Israel’s propaganda by highlighting how the brutal IDF employs both men and women to carry out atrocities, a cynical weaponisation of “feminism.”

Even more repulsive is the piece from the Daily Tribune about “Gaza’s Fake Famine” from Vernon Velasco. It is a parody of a story, overly simplifying the famine of Gaza to a matter of food truck logistics, and uncritically quoting an IDF Officer.

Fittingly, the article contains three photos of shipping containers but not a single photo of a human being.

This runs counter to facts laid out by UN officials, including Joyce Msuya, the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who points out how half a million people face “starvation, destitution, and death”.

‘Moral failure’ over Gaza
A study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet points to the “moral failure” as 1-2 million people live in the most extreme food insecurity level (phase 5 or catastrophe famine) according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

This famine unfolds as shameless journalists make food vlogs kilometres away.

The facts are clear. At least 63,000 people have been killed and 150,000 injured, with women and children making up a significant portion of the casualties. The UN has also reported that nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population (around 1.9 million people) has been displaced.

Widespread destruction has left over 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, including more than 94 percent of hospitals either damaged or destroyed. No amount of narrative spin or “complexity” can sanitise this genocide.

As we celebrate National Press Freedom Day, I implore friends in the press to not fall for the lies of the murderous Zionist regime.

It would be tragic for journalists to provide cover for a regime that has murdered at least 240 of their peers.

Filipino journalists must shed the unhealthy culture of silence and non-intervention, and not hesitate to criticise errant colleagues.

They must make it clear that these recipients of Zionist gold are a disgrace to Philippine journalism. The Philippine government must look into the activities of the Israeli Embassy and their manipulation of local media narratives to sanitise their genocide.

Filipino journalists must stand in solidarity with their slain colleagues abroad, not with their killers.

Walden Bello is a Filipino academic and analyst of Global South issues who was awarded Amnesty International Philippines’ Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights Award in 2023. He has also served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

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Together with former Irish president Mary Robinson, Clark visited the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Palestinian territory this week.

The two former world leaders are part of The Elders, an independent, non-government organisation of global leaders working together for peace, justice, human rights and sustainability.

The group has regularly spoken out about the situation in Gaza since Israel announced war on Hamas in October 2023.

“A significant proportion of manifested trucks are turned away with vital supplies. The world needs to know… This has to stop.”

Mary Robinson and @HelenClarkNZ witness the devastating reality at the closed Rafah border with Gaza. pic.twitter.com/ocDlg5lUfa

— The Elders (@TheElders) August 12, 2025

Their joint statement said they saw evidence of food and medical aid being denied entry to Gaza, “causing mass starvation to spread”.

“What we saw and heard underlines our personal conviction that there is not only an unfolding, human-caused famine in Gaza, there is an unfolding genocide,” the statement said.

“The deliberate destruction of health facilities in Gaza means children facing acute malnutrition cannot be treated effectively.”

At least 36 Palestinian children starved to death last month, they said.

Israel has repeatedly denied famine and genocide were happening in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week that if his army had a policy of starvation “no one would be alive two years into the war”.

Figures disputed
Israel also disputed the figures provided by authorities in the Palestinian territory, but had not provided its own.

No shelter materials had entered Gaza since March this year, the statement said, leaving families already displaced multiple times without protection.

“Many new mothers are unable to feed themselves or their new-born babies adequately, and the health system is collapsing,” Clark said.

“All of this threatens the very survival of an entire generation,” she said.

‘Truth matters’
“The uncomfortable truth is that many states are prioritising their own economic and security interests, even as the world is reeling from the images of Gazan children starving to death,” Robinson said.

“Political leaders have the power and the legal obligation to apply measures to pressure this Israeli government to end its atrocity crimes.”

“This is all the more urgent in light of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Gaza City takeover plan. President Trump has the leverage to compel a change of course. He must use it now,” she said.

Hamas authorities said Israeli air attacks had increased in recent days as the Israel Defence Force (IDF) prepared to take over Gaza City, home to some one million Palestinians.

Netanyahu had defended his plan, saying the best option to defeat Hamas was to take the city by force.

The plan has been heavily criticised by Israelis, Palestinians, international organisations and other countries.

‘Re-engage’ ceasefire talks
Robinson and Clark urged Hamas and Israel to re-engage in ceasefire talks and immediately release Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinian prisoners, and for Israel to immediately open all border crossings into Gaza.

They also called for states to suspend existing and future trade agreements with Israel, as well as the transfer of arms and weapons to Israel, urging the world to follow the lead of Germany and Norway.

Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund divested from Israeli firms linked to violations of international law this week, while Germany’s chancellor suspended exports of arms to Israel.

“We call for recognition of the State of Palestine by at least 20 more states by September, including G7 members, EU member states and others,” their joint statement said.

Australia was the latest to announce it would made the decree at a UN General Assembly next month if its conditions were met, following in the footsteps of Canada, France and the UK.

At least 20 countries had on Wednesday called for aid to urgently be released into Gaza, saying suffering in the Palestinian territory had reached “unimaginable” levels.

New Zealand was not among them, and had not yet made any pledge to recognise a Palestinian state, but the government said it was a matter of “when not if” it would.

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

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The UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza on Monday — and for the first time since the beginning of the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians, the United States abstained rather than vetoing it.

Security Council resolutions are legally binding, despite the Biden administration claiming that they are not.

But it is up to the Palestine solidarity movement to ensure the US government enforces it.

The resolution demands an immediate ceasefire that leads to a “lasting” and “sustainable” ceasefire, demands the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” and emphasises “expand[ing] the flow of humanitarian assistance.”

The resolution also contains several weaknesses, reflected in its intentionally vague, watered-down language, which obscures member states’ responsibilities to enforce the ceasefire.

Concerningly, the resolution only demands a ceasefire “for the month of Ramadan,” which ends in two weeks. US diplomats also lobbied for concessions until the last minute, leading to replacing the call for a“permanent ceasefire” with the much weaker “lasting ceasefire.”

The resolution demands the release of all hostages, but it fails to explicitly name the tens of thousands of Palestinians held illegally in Israeli detention and subject to systematic abuse, instead referring ambiguously to both parties complying with “their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain.”

Essential clause ‘buried’
And although the resolution does “reiterate its demand for the lifting of all barriers to provision of humanitarian aid at scale” — in a clear message to the Israeli government — this essential clause is buried at the end of a longer sentence that merely emphasises the need to expand the flow of humanitarian aid.

As JVP international advisor Phyllis Bennis puts it, “in UN diplo-speak… ‘emphasising’ something ain’t even close to ‘demanding’ that it happen.”

Nevertheless, the US’s decision to abstain on the vote has inflamed tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who immediately announced that he had cancelled a high-level Israeli delegation bound for Washington.

President Biden had explicitly requested the meeting to raise concerns about Israel’s potential ground invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are currently sheltering.

Biden has insisted on a plan to evacuate civilians, however impossible that may be, and has called the planned ground invasion a “red line.”

That a ceasefire resolution was finally achieved is in large part due to the massive pressure being exerted by the Palestine solidarity movement. It is a reminder that pressure works, and that now is not the time to let up.

That it took this long, however, shows us how far we have to go.

US vetoed four times
The US vetoed four previous UNSC ceasefire resolutions while the Israeli military slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children, even after the World Court found South Africa’s claim that Israel was committing genocide to be “plausible.”

Gaza is now a shell of its former self, its entire landscape rendered unrecognisable by the Israeli military’s months-long genocidal onslaught.

Over 32,000 Palestinians have been killed. Full-blown famine is imminent, and half of Gaza’s entire population — 1.1 million people — are facing starvation.

Yet the Biden administration remains intent on continuing to arm the Israeli military.

Immediately following the passage of the resolution, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was already undermining it by claiming that UN Security Council resolutions are not legally binding.

This is patently false — and it tells us that the Biden administration is fully prepared to skirt any and all responsibility to enforce this resolution, which would necessitate cutting off the flow of US weapons to the Israeli military.

$3.8 billion for Israeli military
Last week, Biden signed off on a spending bill that would provide $3.8 billion in funding to the Israeli military.

The bill will also ban funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) through March 2025.

Meanwhile, the US military continues to conduct aid airdrops in Gaza — a public relations manoeuvre intended to diffuse pressure on the US government.

These aid drops will not prevent a famine, and they do not absolve the United States government of its complicity in this genocide. They are also dangerous, expensive, and inefficient.

Republished from JVP

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The Elders chair Mary Robinson has highlighted the unique leverage that the United States has with Israel and called on the Biden administration to stop giving it military assistance for its assault on the Gaza Strip.

Robinson, the former president of Ireland, conducted an on-camera interview with Irish public broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann just before her country’s Prime Minister, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, was due to meet US President Joe Biden on Friday at the White House.

“Yes the humanitarian situation is utterly catastrophic and dire, reducing a people to famine, undermining all our values, but the message I want to deliver on behalf of the Elders is a direct message to our Taoiseach Leo Varadkar,” Robinson said.

“We need a ceasefire and we need the opening up of Gaza with every avenue . . .  for aid to get in.”

In his meeting with Biden, Varadkar “should not spend too much time on the dire humanitarian situation, and the ships, and the rest of it,” she said.

“He has the opportunity to deliver a political message in a very direct way. The United States can influence Israel by not continuing to provide arms. It has provided a lot of the arms . . . that have been used on the Palestinian people.”

Elders’ Chair Mary Robinson says President Biden should not continue to provide arms to Israel.

“The United States can influence Israel by not continuing to provide arms… The Government of Prime Minister Netanyahu is on the wrong side of history, completely. It’s making the… pic.twitter.com/fN3ptMjktz

— The Elders (@TheElders) March 15, 2024

More than 31,490 killed
Since Israel declared war in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7, Israeli forces have killed at least 31,490 people in Gaza — including people seeking food aid — and wounded another 73,439. The assault has also devastated civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques, and displaced the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents.

Israel is also restricting desperately needed humanitarian aid into the Hamas-governed territory, and Palestinians have begun starving to death — which people around the world point to as further proof that the Israeli government is defying an International Court of Justice (ICJ) order to prevent genocidal acts as the South Africa-led case moves forward at The Hague.

The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid, and since October 7, Biden — who faces a genocide complicity case in federal court — has fought for another $14.3 billion while his administration has repeatedly bypassed Congress to arm Israeli forces.

Critics, including some lawmakers, argue that continuing to send weapons to Israel violates US law.

The far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is on the wrong side of history, completely — is making the United States complicit in reducing a people to famine, making the world complicit,” Robinson told RTÉ. “We’re all watching. It is absolutely horrific what is happening.”

“So Leo Varadkar has access today to President Biden,” she said. “He must use this completely politically at all levels with the speaker of the House, with everyone, to make it clear that Israel depends on the United States for military aid and for money. That’s what will change everything.”

“We need a ceasefire and we need the opening up of Gaza with every avenue . . .  for aid to get in, because the situation’s so bad, and we need the political way forward, which is the two-state solution,” she added.

‘Only US can put pressure’
“So we need an Israeli government agreeing to that, and only the United States can put the pressure [on Israel].”

Robinson, who spent five years as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights after her presidency ended in 1997, has been part of the Elders since Nelson Mandela, the late anti-apartheid South African president, announced the group in 2007.

She has made multiple statements during the five-month Israeli assault on Gaza, including calling on Israel to comply with the ICJ’s January ruling and warning Biden the previous month that his “support for Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is losing him respect all over the world.”

“The US is increasingly isolated, with allies like Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and Poland switching their votes in the UN General Assembly to support an immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” she said in December.

“The destruction of Gaza is making Israel less safe. President Biden’s continuing support for Israel’s actions is also making the world less safe, the Security Council less effective, and US leadership less respected. It is time to stop the killing.”

Speaking to press at the Oval Office alongside Biden on Friday, Varadkar said that he was “keen to talk about the situation in Gaza,” and noted his view “that we need to have a ceasefire as soon as possible to get food and medicine in” to the besieged territory.

“On Sunday, the taoiseach will also gift Mr Biden a bowl of shamrock as part of an annual tradition to mark St Patrick’s Day,” RTÉ reported. “Mr Varadkar started the trip on Monday, and since then has spoken several times . . .  about how he will use the special platform of the St Patrick’s Day visit to press Mr Biden to back a ceasefire in the Gaza, while also thanking the US for leadership in support for Ukraine.”

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and writer for Common Dreams, an independent progressive nonprofit news service. Republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence.

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