“It is among the strongest language the New Zealand leader has used against Netanyahu and comes amid reports of intense aerial attacks on Gaza after Israel’s decision to launch a fresh military operation.”

These are the opening two paragraphs of The New Zealand Herald coverage by political reporter Jamie Ensor of Prime Minister Luxon’s public declaration that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lost the plot.

His comment was in the context of the Israeli government’ genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and their increasing persecution on the Israeli occupied West Bank (August 13): Netanyahu lost the plot says Luxon.

Spectrum of NZ government’s response to genocide
The New Zealand government’s response to this ethnic cleansing by genocide strategy in Gaza has ranged on a spectrum between pathetically weak to callous disregard.

Previously I’ve described this spectrum as between limp and deplorable; both have their own validity.

Consequently, the many New Zealanders who were appalled by this response might have been somewhat relieved by Luxon’s frankness.

Perhaps a long overdue change of direction towards humanitarianism? In the interests of confusion avoidance this is a rhetorical question.

However, there is a big problem with Luxon’s conclusion. Quite simply, he is wrong; there is a plot and it is based on a perverse biblical origin.

Why NZ Prime Minister Luxon got it wrong.        Video: RNZ

Just over three weeks from the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack across the border in the Israeli occupied former Palestinian land, Netanyahu made the following broadcast,  including on You Tube (October 30): Netanyahu’s biblical justification.

The ‘”war criminal” is explicit that there is a plot behind the ethnic cleansing through genocide strategy in Gaza. It is a dogmatically blood thirsty and historically inaccurate biblical centred plot.

In his own words:

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — and we do remember. And we are fighting — our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza, or around Gaza, and in all other regions in Israel, are joining this chain of Jewish heroes — a chain that started 3000 years ago, from Joshua until the heroes of the Six-Day War in 1948 [sic], the 1973 October War, and all other wars in this country.

“Our heroic troops — they have only one supreme goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country.”

Netanyahu was referring to the Book of 1 Samuel (Chapter 15, Verse 3) which states:

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Samuel was a prophet through who the Jewish God Yahweh commanded one Saul to conduct a total war of annihilation against the Amalekites.

The Amalekites were a biblical nation who, so biblical history goes, had attacked the Israelites during their “Exodus” from Egypt.

From apartheid to ethnic cleansing to recognition of Palestine
Previously I have published four posts on the Gaza genocide. The first (March 15) discussed it in the context of the apartheid in the South Africa of the past and apartheid as continuing defining feature in Israel since its creation in 1948: When apartheid met Zionism.

The second (May 28) discussed what underpins the Zionist support for ethnic cleansing through genocide: Reasons for supporting ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

This theme was followed through in the third (June 4) in the context of recognising the state of Palestine: Ethnic cleansing, genocide and Palestine recognition.

From Netanyahu to Zelda
In the context of the truer number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, my fourth previous post (July 2) was more directly closer to the theme of this post: How to biblically justify 400,000 Palestinian deaths.

I quoted a genocide supporter going by the name of “Zelda” justifying Israel’s war in similar vein to Bejamin Netanyahu:

“Gaza belongs to Israel! This is not just a political claim; it is a sacred, unbreakable decree from Almighty God Himself. If any government from around the world recognises Palestine, the United States needs to declare it part of the Axis of Evil

“The land was promised by divine covenant to the people of Israel, chosen by God to be His light in the darkness. No enemy, no terrorist, no foreign power can wrest it away. Those who reject this truth stand against God’s will and will face His judgment.

“If Palestinians want aid and peace, they must recognise Israel’s God-given right and leave Gaza forever. Only under God’s blessing can this land flourish, and all who defy His plan will be cast down.”

From Zelda to Alfred
On July 4, I received the following email from a reader called Alfred. In his words (be warned, at the very least this is a mind-boggling read):

“Accidentally I came across your blog on ‘How To Justify 400,000 Palestinian Deaths In Gaza: Ask ‘Zelda’ (Thursday, 3 July 2025). It was an interesting read.
With all due respect, I would like to place before you my ‘two cents’
Consider this history Mr Ian:
1) Before the modern state of Israel there was the British mandate, Not a Palestinian state.
2) Before the British mandate there was the Ottoman empire, Not a Palestinian state.
3) Before the Ottoman empire there was the Islamic mamluk sultanate of Egypt, Not a Palestinian state.
4)Before the Islamic mamluk sultanate of Egypt there was the Ayyubid dynasty, Not a Palestinian state. Godfrey of Bouillon conquered it in 1099.
5) Before the Ayyubid dynasty there was the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, Not a Palestinian state.
6) Before the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem there was the Fatimid caliphate, Not a Palestinian state.
7) Before the Fatimid caliphate there was the byzantine empire, Not a Palestinian state. 8. Before the Byzantine empire there was the Roman empire, Not a Palestinian state.
9) Before the Roman empire there was the Hasmonaean dynasty, Not a Palestinian state. 10) Before the Hasmonean dynasty there was the Seleucid empire, Not a Palestinian state.
11) Before the Seleucid empire there was the empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon, Not a Palestinian state.
12) Before the empire of Alexander, the 3rd of Macedon there was the Persian empire, Not a Palestinian state.
13) Before the Persian empire there was the Babylonian empire, Not a Palestinian state.
14) Before the Babylonian empire there was the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, Not a Palestinian state.
15) Before the kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the kingdom of Israel, Not a Palestinian state.
16) Before the kingdom of Israel there was the theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel, Not a Palestinian state.
17) Before the theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel there was the individual state of Canaan, Not a Palestinian state.
In fact, in that corner of the earth there was everything but a Palestinian state!
Interesting history isn’t it?
Yes, I agree with Zelda’s statement that …
‘The land was promised by divine covenant to the people of Israel, chosen by God to be His light in the darkness.’
Mr Ian, if you go back to the Bible to read the Old Testament history, we see that God declares time and again that they (Israelites) are His chosen people, and He will bring them back to land of Israel. (Which has started to happen, as you observe world events). He also condemns His own chosen that if they turn away from Him, he will turn away His face. And that was what He did to the 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel. They were wiped out. And the sort of genocide that we see today in Gaza, was prevalent in that time, when Gentile nations were even wiped out if they stood between the Israelites and the ‘promised land’ (Israel). Even the lives of His own chosen people were not valuable to Him, and was at stake (holocaust recently) when they turned away from Him, as those many of their enemies (or opponents)!

8000-year-old history is repeating itself now in Gaza, I believe.
Alfred

Mapping the success of Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The views of both Zelda and Alfred are not off the planet in terms of supporting Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through genocide.

They are thoroughly consistent with Netanyahu’s well-thought out plot. Both are part of his “echo chamber”.

Who has really lost the plot?
The genocide towards Palestinians will not end in Gaza. All the evidence is that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are next.

Gaza the precursor to West Bank Palestinians.

There the ethnic cleansing is continuing in the form of persecution and repression, including imprisonment (hostage-taking by another name).

But it is escalating and, unless there is a change in direction, it is only a matter of time before persecution and repression morph into genocide.

Benjamin Netanyahu has not lost the plot. However, Christopher Luxon has. His criticism of Netanyahu is a flimsy attempt to avoid doing what a humanitarian government with a “plot” should do. This includes:

1. Recognising the Palestinian Territories as an official independent state;
2. Sanctioning Israeli Defence Force (IDF) visitors;
3. Close the Israel Embassy;
4. Impose trade and bilateral sanctions; and
5. Suspend Israel from the United Nations.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A prominent academic has criticised the New Zealand coalition government for compromising the country’s traditional commitment to upholding an international rules-based order due to a “desire not to offend” the Trump administration.

Professor Robert Patman, an inaugural sesquicentennial distinguished chair and a specialist in international relations at the University of Otago, has argued in a contributed article to The Spinoff that while distant in geographic terms, “brutal violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Iran marks the latest stage in the unravelling of an international rules-based order on which New Zealand depends for its prosperity and security”.

Dr Patman wrote that New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, emphasised partnership and cooperation at home, and, after 1945, helped inspire a New Zealand worldview enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism.

“In the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, the National-led coalition government has in principle emphasised its support for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote.

However, Dr Patman said, in practice this New Zealand stance had not translated into firm diplomatic opposition to the Netanyahu government’s quest to control Gaza and annex the West Bank.

“Nor has it been a condemnation of the Trump administration for prioritising its support for Israel’s security goals over international law,” he said.

Foreign minister Winston Peters had described the situation in Gaza as “simply intolerable” but the National-led coalition had little specific to say as the Netanyahu government “resumed its cruel blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza in March and restarted military operations there”.

Silence on Trump’s ‘Gaza ownership’
“Even more striking was the government’s silence on President Trump’s proposal to own Gaza with a view to evicting two million Palestinian residents from the territory and the US-Israeli venture to start the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in late May in a move which sidelined the UN in aid distribution and has led to the killing of more than 600 Palestinians while seeking food aid,” Dr Patman said.

While New Zealand, along with the UK, Australia, Canada and Norway, had imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli government ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, in June for “inciting extremist violence” against Palestinians — a move that was criticised by the Trump administration — it was arguably a case of very little very late.

“The Hamas terror attacks on October 7 killed around 1200 Israelis, but the Netanyahu government’s retaliation by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) against Hamas has resulted in the deaths of more than 56,000 Palestinians — nearly 70 percent of whom were women or children — in Gaza.

Over the same period, more than 1000 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank as Israel accelerated its programme of illegal settlements there.

‘Strangely ambivalent’
In addition, the responses of the New Zealand government to “pre-emptive attacks” by Israel (13-25 June) and Trump’s United States (June 22) against Iran to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities were strangely ambivalent.

Despite indications from US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran had not produced nuclear weapons, Foreign Minister Peters had said New Zealand was not prepared to take a position on that issue.

Confronted with Trump’s “might is right” approach, the National-led coalition faced stark choices, Dr Patman said.

The New Zealand government could continue to fudge fundamental moral and legal issues in the Middle East and risk complicity in the further weakening of an international rules-based order it purportedly supports, “or it can get off the fence, stand up for the country’s values, and insist that respect for international law must be observed in the region and elsewhere without exception”.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Ismail Haniyeh,  a prominent Palestinian political leader and the head of Hamas’ political bureau, has been assassinated today in an Israeli airstrike on Tehran.

Haniyeh was in the Iranian capital for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Both Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard confirmed his death and announced ongoing investigations into the incident.

Commentators have said this assassination and the “reckless Israeli behaviour” of continuously targeting civilians in Gaza would lead to the region slipping into chaos and undermine the chances of peace.

A Palestinian refugee
Ismail Abdel Salam Ahmed Haniyeh was born on 23 January 1962 in the Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

His family originated from the village of Al-Jura, near the city of Asqalan, which was mostly destroyed and completely ethnically cleansed during the Nakba in 1948.

Haniyeh completed his early education in United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools and graduated from Al-Azhar Institute before earning a BA in Arabic literature from the Islamic University of Gaza in 1987.

During his university years, he was active in the Student Union Council and later held various positions at the Islamic University, eventually becoming its dean in 1992.

Following his release from an Israeli prison in 1997, Haniyeh became the head of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s office.

Political life
Haniyeh’s political experience included multiple arrests by Israeli authorities during the First Intifada, with charges related to his involvement with the Palestinian Resistance movement Hamas.

He was exiled to southern Lebanon in 1992 but returned to Gaza after the Oslo Accords.

Haniyeh led the “Change and Reform List”, which won the majority in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, leading to his appointment as the head of the Palestinian government in February 2006.

Despite being dismissed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2007 after the Hamas military wing took control of Gaza, Haniyeh continued to lead the government in Gaza.

He later played a role in national reconciliation efforts, which led to the formation of a unity government in June 2014.

Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in May 2017.

Al-Aqsa flood
On 7 October 2023, the Al-Qassam Brigades, led by Mohammed Deif, launched the Al-Aqsa Flood operation against Israel.

In the genocidal Israel war that has followed in the past nine months, Haniyeh suffered personal losses, including the killings of several family members due to Israeli airstrikes.

Republished from The Palestine Chronicle with permission. The Chronicle is edited by Palestinian journalist and media consultant Ramzy Baroud, author of The Last Earth: A Palestine Story, who visited New Zealand in 2019.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand has taken another shameful act in its tone deaf approach to Israel’s War on Gaza this week by declaring Hamas a “terrorist entity” at a time when millions are marching worldwide for an immediate ceasefire and a lasting peace founded on an independent state of Palestine.

It would have been more realistic and just to condemn Israel for its genocidal war and five months of atrocities.

Instead, it has been corralled into the Five Eyes clique with an increasingly isolated United States as it continues to support the war with taxpayer funded armaments and providing the cloak of diplomacy.

It was really unwise of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s coalition government to declare the Hamas political wing as terrorist, after already having declared the military wing terrorist in 2010.

Many argue around the world with increasing insistence that actually Israel is a rogue terrorist state.

Also, it is very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu will succeed in his aims of “destroying” the Hamas movement, whatever the final outcome of the war.

As John Minto points out, Palestinian resistance movements have the right under international law to take up arms to fight against their colonial occupiers just as the African National Congress (ANC) had the right to take up arms to fight for freedom in apartheid South Africa.

Hamas represents an ideal, an independent Palestinian state and that can never be defeated.

Factions meet for unity
The various factions of the Palestinian resistance and political movements, including Fatah and Hamas, have been meeting in Moscow this week to settle their differences and stitch together a framework for a “Palestinian government of unity” as a basis for the future political architecture of independence.

Meet Gaza’s 11-year-old war reporter Sumayya Wushah, who says she was inspired by Shireen Abu Akleh to tell Palestine’s stories. pic.twitter.com/a7vB99nkqa

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 27, 2024

The United Nations General Assembly in 1969 — two years after the 1967 Six Day War when Israel seized Gaza from Egypt and Occupied West Bank from Jordan — recognised and reaffirmed “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.

This includes the right to choose their own representatives, including Hamas, a nationalist independence movement defending their illegally occupied territory, not a “terrorist” movement that the US and Israel try to have the world believe.

They are still very likely to be in the post-war line-up ending the status quo after five decades of illegal military occupation of Palestinian lands and the rash of illegal Israeli settlements.

American economist and public policy analyst Professor Jeffrey Sachs summed up the reality over Israel’s colonial settler project in an interview this week by describing the Netanyahu government as a “murderous gang” and “zealots”, warning that “they are not going to stop”.

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved. I am not using an exaggeration.

“I’m talking literally starving a population,” said the director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at New York’s Columbia University.

‘Israel is criminal’
“Israel is a criminal. Israel is in non-stop war crime status. Now, I believe, it is in genocidal status, and it is without shame, without remorse, without truth, without insight into what it is doing.

“But what it is doing is endangering Israel’s fundamental security because it is driving the world to believe that the Israeli state is not legitimate.

“This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not be by any self-control in Israel. There is none in this government.

“This is a murderous gang in government right now. These are zealots. They have some messianic vision of controlling all of today’s Palestinian lands. They are not going to stop.

“They believe in ethnic cleansing, or worse, depending on whatever is needed. And it is, again, the United States, which is the sole support. And it our mumbling, bumbling president and the others that are not stopping this slaughter.”

In addition, to the growing massive protests around the world against the Israeli extremism, a growing number of countries and organisations, inspired by two International Court of Justice cases against Israel — one by South Africa alleging genocide by Israel and the other by the UNGA seeking a ruling on the legality of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine — have introduced lawsuits.

A Dutch court last month ordered the government to block all exports of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel following concern that the country may be violating international laws such as the Genocide Convention.

Follow-up lawsuit
South Africa is preparing a follow-up lawsuit against the US and the UK for “complicity” in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. South African lawyer lawyer Wikus Van Rensburg said: “The United States must now be held accountable for the crimes it committed.”

Nicaragua is suing Germany at the ICJ for funding Israel – its export of weapons and munitions to the country has risen ten-fold since the Hamas deadly attack on Israel last October 7 — and cutting aid to the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), the major humanitarian agency in Gaza.

It has called for emergency measures that would force Germany to cease military aid to Israel, and restart funding to the UNRWA.

Nicaragua lawyers said in their lawsuit that the action was necessary because of Germany’s “participation in the ongoing plausible genocide and serious breaches of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.

Instead of joining the US-led coalition in the Red Sea operation against the Houthis, who are targeting US, UK and Israeli-linked ships to disrupt maritime trade in support of the Palestinians, New Zealand would have been more constructive by joining the South African case against Israel in The Hague.

Principle before profit if New Zealand is really committed to international rules based diplomacy.

Nicaragua lawyers said in their lawsuit that the action was necessary because of Germany’s “participation in the ongoing plausible genocide and serious breaches of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.

No time to be ‘neutral’
This is no time to be “neutral” over the War on Gaza, there are fundamental issues of global justice and human rights at stake. As various global aid officials have been saying, every day that passes without a ceasefire and a step towards an independent Palestine as a long-term solution means more children dying of starvation or from the bombing.

The death toll is already a staggering more than 30,000 — mostly women and children. The war is clearly directed at the people of Gaza, collective punishment.

Australian columnist Caitlin Johnstone warns against neutrality, advice that might have been heeded by New Zealand’s foreign affairs advisers.

“At least be real with yourself that by refusing to pick a position you are licking the boot of a nuclear-armed ethnostate that is backed by the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.”

And that impunity needs to end.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, who led the UN Development Programme which oversees UNRWA, told RNZ Morning Report today it was the biggest platform for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza for a populations that is 85 percent displaced.

People are on the verge on starvation and going without medical supplies, she said.

“If you’re going to defund and destroy this platform, then the misery and suffering of the people under bombardment can only increase and you can only have more deaths.”

Clark said it was “most regrettable that countries have acted in this precipitous way to defund the organisation on the basis of allegations”.

Al Jazeera reports that top Palestinian officials and Hamas have criticised the decision by nearly a dozen Western countries led by the US to suspend funding UNRWA — the UN relief agency for Palestinians — and called for an immediate reversal of the move, which entails “great” risk.

Ireland and Norway have confirmed continued support for UNRWA, saying the agency does crucial work to help Palestinians displaced and in desperate need of assistance in Gaza.

The Norwegian aid agency said the people of Gaza would “starve in the streets” without UNRWA humanitarian assistance.

Hamas’ media office said in a post on Telegram: “We ask the UN and the international organisations to not cave into the threats and blackmail” from Israel.

Defunding ‘not right decision’
Former PM Clark did not deny the allegations made were serious, but said defunding the agency without knowing the outcome of the investigation was not the right decision, RNZ reports.

“I led an organisation that had tens of thousands of people on contracts at any one time. Could I say, hand on heart, people never did anything wrong? No I couldn’t. But what I could say was that any allegations would be fully investigated and results made publicly known,” she said.

UNRWA funding cuts — why Israel is trying to destroy the UN Palestinian aid agency.  Video: Al Jazeera

“That’s exactly what the head of UNRWA has said, it’s what the Secretary-General’s saying, that process is underway, but this is not a time to be just cutting off the funding because a small minority of UNRWA staff face allegations.”

Luxon suggested Clark’s plea would not affect New Zealand’s response.

“I appreciate that, but we’re the government, and they’re serious allegations, they need to be understood and investigated and when the foreign minister [Winston Peters] says that he’s done that and he’s happy for us to contribute and continue to contribute, we’ll do that.”

Clark said people could starve to death or die because they did not receive the medication they needed in the meantime.

Halting aid to Gaza via UNRWA is “deeply twisted and harmful”.
…And Australia has joined in the halt. https://t.co/17gV0AyPaj pic.twitter.com/5b7DU6dOaB

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) January 30, 2024

If major donor countries like the United States and Germany continued to withhold funding, UNRWA would go down and there was no alternative, she said.

Clark did not believe there was any coincidence in the allegations being made known at the same time as the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the situation in Gaza.

According to the BBC, the court ordered Israel to do everything in its power to refrain from killing and injuring Palestinians and do more to “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide. Tel Aviv must report back to the court on its actions within a month.

Clark said the timing of the UNRWA allegations was an attempt to deflect the significant rulings made of the court and dismiss them.

“I think it’s fairly obvious what was happening.”

States must reverse cruel decision to withdraw UNRWA funding ⬇️
https://t.co/JRMfHH9P04

— Amnesty International (@amnesty) January 29, 2024

Israel had provided the agency with information alleging a dozen staff were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters in southern Israel, which left about 1300 dead and about 250 taken as hostages.

More than 26,000 people — mostly women and children — have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a major military operation in response, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

South Africa has accused Israel of “genocidal intent” over its war on the besieged enclave Gaza Strip, and pleaded with judges at the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an interim order demanding Israel halt its military offensive in the embattled territory, reports Middle East Eye.

South African lawyer Adila Hassim told judges at The Hague that “genocides are never declared in advance, but this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies as a plausible claim of genocidal acts”.

“Israel deployed 6000 bombs per week . . . No one is spared. Not even newborns.

UN chiefs have described it as a graveyard for children,” she said told the court on the opening session of the two-day preliminary hearing.

“Nothing will stop the suffering except an order from this court.”

Israel’s ongoing three-month war in Gaza has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, lawyers told the court.

Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been displaced, and an Israeli blockade severely limiting food, fuel and medicine has caused a humanitarian “catastrophe”, according to the UN.

‘Genocidal in character’
South Africa submitted its case against Israel at the ICJ last month and has said Israel’s actions in Gaza are “genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group”.

Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, another South African lawyer and legal scholar at the hearing, said Pretoria was not alone in drawing attention to Israel’s genocidal rhetoric.

He said that at least 15 UN special rapporteurs and 21 members of the UN working groups had warned that what was happening in Gaza reflected a genocide in the making.

Video: Middle East Eye

Ngcukaitobi added that genocidal intent was evident in the way Israel’s military was conducting attacks, including the targeting of family homes and civilian infrastructure.

“Israel’s political leaders, military commanders and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent.”

Ngcukaitobi said the “genocidal rhetoric” had become common within the Israeli Knesset, with several MPs calling for Gaza to be “wiped out, flattened, erased and crushed”.

Israeli defence
On Wednesday, Nissim Vaturi, a member of Israel’s ruling Likud party, said it was a “privilege” for his country to appear at The Hague as he doubled down on earlier remarks where he said there were “no innocent people” in Gaza.

This is the first time Israel is being tried under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention, which was drawn up after the Second World War in light of the atrocities committed against Jews and other persecuted minorities during the Holocaust.

During yesterday’s proceedings, Professor Max du Plessis, another lawyer representing South Africa, said Israel had subjected the Palestinian people to an oppressive and prolonged violation of their rights to self-determination for more than half a century.

Dr Du Plessis added that based on materials shown before the court, the acts of Israel were plausibly characterised as genocidal.

“South Africa’s obligation is motivated by the need to protect Palestinians in Gaza and their absolute rights not to be subjected to genocidal acts.”

Genocide cases, which are notoriously hard to prove, can take years to resolve, but South Africa is asking the court to speedily implement “provisional measures” and “order Israel to cease killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinian people in Gaza”.

Thank you Madiba. Thank you South Africa. 🇿🇦 🇵🇸#ICJ #ICJGenocideConvention pic.twitter.com/9xjdSR40MI

— Dr. Omar Suleiman (@omarsuleiman504) January 11, 2024

Three hour hearing
Yesterday’s hearing consisted of three hours of detailed descriptions detailing what South Africa says is a clear example of genocide. Israel will today have three hours to respond on Friday.

The spokesperson of the Israeli Foreign Affairs, Lior Haiat, hit out at the comments made in the hearing, calling it “one of the greatest shows of hypocrisy,” and demonstrated “false and baseless claims.”

He also accused South Africa of “functioning as the legal arm of the Hamas terrorist organisation”.

As South Africa did in its 84-page legal filing ahead of the case, the country’s Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola repeated that he “unequivocally condemns Hamas” for the October 7 attack on southern Israel.

Republished from Middle East Eye.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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.

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).

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.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In this the eleventh episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning examine how the post-World War II liberal internationalist system is being challenged by a fluid constellation of global and regional powers to influence the shape of an emerging new world order.

And Paul and Selwyn also assess how this massive shift in geopolitic demarcations is forming, relatively quickly, into a world of bipolarity where on one side we have a multipolar constellation of states, and on the other the traditional western liberal democracies.

The catalyst behind this rapidly forming bipolarity is conflict.

And, most recently, it is clear, that the Israel-Hamas war – and the atrocities committed initially by Hamas and more lately by Israel forces – is driving the world toward a transitional moment.

It appears, that what is emerging from the current multipolar system – and think here the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court among many other global bodies – is a situation that is not merely new-and-old Great Powers competing as nation-states.

But rather, what we see are groupings of fluid constellations of powers competing as blocs to influence the shape of what is to come.

In this episode Paul and Selwyn discuss and describe what is now evident, and sketch out what will likely emerge.

Of course, as mentioned, the Israel-Hamas war lays bare any claims of morality and exposes the hypocrisies of all sides in conflicts.

In particular the Hamas-Israel war exposes the west – led by the United States of America, the United Kingdom and various European states – to an argument that the west is morally moribund as it continues its colonial/post colonial attitudes of support of Israel as the latter commits an apparent disproportionate-defence offensive against Palestine’s peoples.

The argument appears to carry weight, especially as this western axis sustains its support for Israel’s war machine even while, on international humanitarian law grounds, the atrocities being committed against Palestine’s civilian population are morally indefensible and potentially legally enforceable as war crimes.

For example; retribution for the atrocities and despicable crimes committed by Hamas against defenceless Israeli citizens does not remove culpability for the State of Israel as it delivers on an apparent intention to annihilate Hamas and all people – children, the elderly, all innocents – who may surround Israel’s targets.

IHL shows how duty of care is not excused even if civilians are used as “human shields”, and at this juncture, it is not clear, whether that cited flawed-justification is founded on truth.

This is the position of what was once an authoritarian axis.

But what has formed is a multipolar-constellation that supports the Palestinian cause on postcolonial, Global South, and solidarity grounds.

The Questions:

So if all of this carnage is the catalyst for a new world order, what comes next?

Will we see the emergence of a parallel global institutional structure that develops as a counter-balance to the west’s post-WWII world order?

Has the west’s leading power lost its moral authority through its support for a war machine that has caused the deaths of over 10,000 people of innocent disposition, while itself refuses to be a signatory member state to the International Criminal Court and its principles of global justice?

And as such, has the west ceded persuasive moral authority to the rising constellation of once authoritarian-states that dominate the opposing bloc?

And does the west, as a consequence, find itself powerless to counter the migration of moderate independent states that are repelled by the immorality of the west’s arguments, laid bare by the Hamas-Israel war?

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

Major media organisations all over the world are copping criticism for the way they’re reporting what’s happening in Gaza and Israel. Mediawatch has asked BBC news boss Jonathan Munro how they’re handling it — even when it’s coming from the UK’s own government.

“Palestinian health officials in Gaza say hundreds of people have been killed in an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. They’re blaming an Israeli strike on the hospital.

“But the Israel DefenCe Forces said an initial investigation shows the explosion was caused by a failed Hamas rocket launch.”

That was how RNZ’s news at 8am last Tuesday reported the single deadliest incident of this conflict so far — and likely to be the deadliest one in all of the five times Israel and Hamas have fought over Gaza so far.

The Israeli Defence Force also singled out Islamic Jihad for the atrocity — but the absence of hard evidence put the media reporting it in a difficult position.

“It’s still absolutely unclear. There are varying bits of information that are coming out for now. I don’t think anybody can quite say . . . it’s most likely to have been Israel,” the BBC Middle East editor Sebastian Usher told RNZ on Wednseday night.

“They said it seems like it might be a misfired rocket,”

Huge anger on streets
“We can’t say for now, but I don’t think  — in terms of the mood in the Arab world and the Middle East — that that really matters. People out on the streets are showing huge anger and they will reject any investigation, any Israeli claim, to say that Israel is not responsible,” he said.

Reporting those claims and counterclaims creates confusion among the audience. It’s also stoked the anger of those objecting to reporters’ choice of words.

CNN’s Clarissa Ward, for example, was criticised heavily on social media for mentioning the Israeli Defense Force claims — and then expressing doubt about them at the same time.

A video showing a pro-Palestinian protester calling Clarissa Ward “a puppet” has gone viral on social media. So did another falsely accusing her of faking a rocket strike.

The longer version of the video of Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zein confronting CNN reporter Clarissa Ward at the Rafah crossing. It’s raw, sincere, and powerful. Much respect for Rahma, she expressed our collective pain at the Western media’s dehumanization of the Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/yfB7zFYPwe

— Amro Ali (@_amroali) October 20, 2023

Her CNN colleague Anderson Cooper was also criticised online for referring to a huge civilian loss of life during the live report from Tel Aviv in Israel and repeating himself, but then without the word “civilian”.

Among those who, alongside expert investigators, tried to sift the available evidence and cut through the information war was Alex Thompson, correspondent for UK broadcaster Channel Four

“Israel and Hamas can tweet what they like. The truth of what happened here requires independent expert investigation — not happening,” was Alex Thompson’s bleak conclusion.

‘A fierce information war’
“Any doubt is due to a fierce information war that in truth matters little to the victims of the Gaza hospital tragedy,” another British correspondent — ITV Jonathan Irvine — said on Newshub at 6 last Tuesday.

At times, broadcasters have used the wrong words and given audiences the wrong idea.

Last week the BBC’s main evening news bulletin made a rapid apology for describing pro-Palestine protests in the UK as “pro-Hamas”.

“We accept that this was poorly-phrased and was a misleading description,” the presenter told viewers just before the end of the bulletin.

And earlier this month, people protested outside the BBC News headquarters in London about the BBC’s long-standing policy of not labeling any group as “terrorists”.

“You don’t seem to be particularly interested. If the BBC seems to refuse to call terrorists even though the British Parliament has legislated them terrorists — that is a question I haven’t heard the BBC answer yet,” UK government Defence Secretary Grant Shapps told the BBC radio flagship news show Today.

“Have you not seen any of the coverage on the BBC of the atrocities, the dead, the injured, the survivors?” the startled presenter asked him.

“How can you say that we’re not interested?” she replied, when Shapps said he had.

An obligation to audiences
The BBC’s deputy chief executive of news Jonathan Munro was at Sydney’s South by Southwest festival this week to talk about how the BBC delivers news from and about conflict zones.

“We’ve already seen journalists lose their lives in this country, working for organisations who are also facing the same dilemmas as we are,” said Munro, who is also the BBC’s director of journalism.

“We’ve got an obligation to audiences to explain what’s going on and that involves lots of people on the ground as witnesses to events, but also the analysis that comes with expert knowledge,” he told Mediawatch.

“Expertise is just invaluable. People like Jeremy Bowen (former Middle East editor and current international editor of BBC News) and our chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and correspondents who are based in that region,” he said.

“But the main story here is the catastrophic loss of life and the appalling conditions that people are living in and that the hostages are being held in — the humanity of that,” he said.

A lot of reporting people will see, hear and read will come from Israel. Reporting from Gaza itself is difficult and dangerous — and access to Gaza at the border is restricted by Israel.

“We have a correspondent in Gaza, but he’s moved from Gaza City to Khan Yunis in the south of the strip, a safer option. But he can’t report 24 hours a day, and he is looking after his family which is paramount.

Need for transparency
“So we do have to add to that [with] reporting from Israel and from London by people who know Gaza very well,” he said.

“We have to be transparent about that and tell the audience and then the audience knows that wherever it’s coming from, and you still hold editorial integrity.”

A lot of what people will be seeing from Gaza is amateur footage and social media content that’s very difficult to verify.

The BBC recently launched BBC Verify, dedicated to checking out this kind of material and vetting its use.

“There’s a huge amount of video out there on social media we can all find at the touch of a button. The brand of BBC Verify is a signpost that the material . . . has been checked by us using methods like geolocation and looking at the metadata,” he said.

Even when verified, there are still ethical dilemmas.

For example, BBC Verify used facial recognition software to analyse images of an individual in the Hamas surprise attacks on October 8. It identified one gunman as a policeman from Gaza.

Independently verifying claims
“It’s case-by-case — but something shouldn’t go out on the BBC without us knowing it’s true. There are occasions we would broadcast something and we would tell the audience that we’ve not been able to independently verify a claim . . . and we need to caveat our coverage of the reaction to it with the fact that we do not have our own verification of source material,” he said.

Major media outfits all over the world are copping criticism for the way they’re reporting what’s happening in Gaza and Israel. Mediawatch asks BBC news boss Jonathan Munro how they’re handling it – even when it’s coming from the UK’s own government https://t.co/gm8Fyv4ar1

— Mediawatch (@MediawatchNZ) October 21, 2023

Even before the Al Ahli hospital catastrophe amplified emotions, intense scrutiny of reporters’ work was adding to the stress of those reporting from the region.

“Every word you say is being scrutinised so closely and is likely to be contested by one side or the other more or both — and that definitely adds to the pressure,” Channel Four correspondent Secunder Kermani told the BBC’s Media Show last week from Gaza.

“In the Israel Gaza situation it is critical. Every word can be checked and rechecked and double checked for any implication which is either inferred or implied by accident.

“Because our job is to be impartial, tell the reality of the story, and most importantly, share the witnessing of that story by our correspondents,” Jonathan Munro told Mediawatch.

“That’s why we’ve got a significant number of correspondents in Israel and back in the newsroom in London are adding explanations and leaning into that scrutiny on language,” he said.

Adjectives ‘can be dangerous’
“We’re using expertise, our knowledge as an organisation and we’re making sure that at every stage of that every sentence, every paragraph is reflective of what we know to be true.

“But adjectives can be dangerous, because they may imply something which is more emotive than we mean. We have to be quite clean in our language in these circumstances,” he said.

“Of course, people can come on the BBC and express their views in language of their choice. All of those things help to keep our coverage straight and honest and ensure that correspondents on the ground aren’t in danger by slips or mistakes that are made in good faith elsewhere in the BBC output.”

Last week at its annual conference, senior members of the Conservative Party — which is in power in the UK — heavily criticised the BBC for alleged bias and elitism. Some — including home secretary Suella Braverman and former prime minister Liz Truss made a point of praising GB News — the new right-wing TV channel backed by billionaire Brexiteers — for disrupting the news.

“The criticism of the BBC from politicians is as old as the BBC itself. Just because they’re habitual critics doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but we’ve got a well developed set of editorial guidelines which have stood the test of time over many, many difficult stories,” Munro told Mediawatch. 

“The editorial guidelines are robust and public. You can go online and look at them. All of our journalism abides by those guidelines and if you have guidelines that you believe in as an organisation, that’s a significant defence to some of the less well-founded attacks that we sometimes find ourselves on the end of,” he said.

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Aotearoa New Zealand government announcement of $5 million in humanitarian aid to “Israel, Gaza and the West Bank” is a cowardly, shameful response to Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The priority for Gaza is not bandages and aspirins — they need loud voices condemning Israeli genocide. They need the bombing and killing to stop.

Early last week Hipkins condemned the killing of civilians in the Hamas attack on Israel but has refused to condemn Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people.

The “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza; the withholding of food, water, electricity and fuel; the intensive massive bombing of densely populated civilian areas of Gaza — these are all war crimes. Genocide is the only name that fits.

More than 700 children have been killed so far by Israeli bombing with civilian casualties of more than 2800.

Green light to orgy of killing
By refusing to condemn these killings, Hipkins is giving Israel the green light to continue its orgy of killing in Gaza.

Hipkins says he is “deeply saddened” by civilians deaths. But not deeply saddened enough to call out the colonial, apartheid state of Israel whose racist policies against Palestinians are the cause of the slaughter in Gaza.

Similarly, when Hipkins says “we call on all parties to respect international humanitarian law, and uphold their obligations to protect civilians, and humanitarian workers, including medical personnel”, it is a meaningless gap-filler in a government media release.

Hipkins’ announcement will be welcomed in Washington and Tel Aviv but will be deplored by decent people around the world who call for human rights for Palestinians and accountabilities for apartheid Israel.

The Prime Minister has our loudest voice — we demand he use it to help end the slaughter of civilians in Gaza by sheeting home blame where it belongs — with the policies of the racist, apartheid state of Israel.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidaity Network Aotearoa.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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.

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).

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.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In the aftermath of Palestinian group Hamas’ terror attack inside Israel on October 7 and the Israeli state’s even more terrifying attacks on Palestinian urban neighbourhoods in Gaza, the media across many parts of Asia tend to take a more neutral stand in comparison with their Western counterparts.

A lot of sympathy is expressed for the plight of the Palestinians who have been under frequent attacks by Israeli forces for decades and have faced ever trauma since the Nakba in 1948 when Zionist militia forced some 750,000 refugees to leave their homeland.

Even India, which has been getting closer to Israel in recent years, and one of Israel’s closest Asian allies, Singapore, have taken a cautious attitude to the latest chapter in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Soon after the Hamas attacks in Israel, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks”.

He added: “We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.” But, soon after, his Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) sought to strike a balance.

Addressing a media briefing on October 12, MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi reiterated New Delhi’s “long-standing and consistent” position on the issue, telling reporters that “India has always advocated the resumption of direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine” living in peace with Israel.

Singapore has also reiterated its support for a two-state solution, with Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam telling Today Daily that it was possible to deplore how Palestinians had been treated over the years while still unequivocally condemning the terrorist attacks carried out in Israel by Hamas.

“These atrocities cannot be justified by any rationale whatsoever, whether of fundamental problems or historical grievances,” he said.

“I think it’s fair to say that any response has to be consistent with international law and international rules of war”.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has blamed the rapidly worsening conflict in the Middle East on a lack of justice for the Palestinian people.

Lack of justice for Palestinians
“The crux of the issue lies in the fact that justice has not been done to the Palestinian people,” Beijing’s top diplomat said in a phone call with Brazil’s Celso Amorim, a special adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, according to Japan’s Nikkei Asia.

The call came just ahead of an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on October 13 to discuss the Israel-Hamas war. Brazil, a non-permanent member, is chairing the council this month.

Indonesian President Jokowi Widodo called for an end to the region’s bloodletting cycle and pro-Palestinian protests have been held in Jakarta.

“Indonesia calls for the war and violence to be stopped immediately to avoid further human casualties and destruction of property because the escalation of the conflict can cause greater humanitarian impact,” he said.

“The root cause of the conflict, which is the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, must be resolved immediately in accordance with the parameters that have been agreed upon by the UN.”

Indonesia, which is home to the world’s largest Muslim population, has supported Palestinian self-determination for a long time and does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

But, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said 275 Indonesians were working in Israel and were making plans to evacuate them.

Sympathy for the Palestinians
Meanwhile, Thailand said that 18 of their citizens have been killed by the terror attacks and 11 abducted.

In the Philippines, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said on October 10 that the safety of thousands of Filipinos living and working in Israel remained a priority for the government.

There are approximately 40,000 Filipinos in Israel, but only 25,000 are legally documented, according to labour and migrant groups, says Benar News, a US-funded Asian news portal.

According to India’s MEA spokesperson Bagchi, there are 18,000 Indians in Israel and about a dozen in the Palestinian territories. India is trying to bring them home, and a first flight evacuating 230 Indians was expected to take place at the weekend, according to the Hindu newspaper.

It is unclear what such large numbers of Asians are doing in Israel. Yet, from media reports in the region, there is deep concern about the plight of civilians caught up in the clashes.

Benar News reported that Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has spoken with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict according to UN-agreed parameters.

Also this week, the Malaysian government announced it would allocate 1 million ringgit (US$211,423) in humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Western view questioned
Sympathy for the Palestinian cause is reflected widely in the Asian media, both in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries. The Western unequivocal support for Israel, particularly by Anglo-American media, has been questioned across Asia.

Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post’s regular columnist Alex Lo challenged Hamas’ “unprovoked” terror attack in Israel, a narrative commonly used in Western media reporting of the latest flare-up.

“It must be pointed out that what Hamas has done is terrorism pure and simple,” notes Lo.

“But such horrors and atrocities are not being committed by Palestinian militants without a background and a context. They did not come out of nowhere as unadulterated and uncaused evil”.

Thus Lo argues, that to claim that the latest terror attacks were “unprovoked” is to whitewash the background and context that constitute the very history of this unending conflict in Palestine.

US media’s ‘morally reprehensible propaganda’
“It’s morally reprehensible propaganda of the worst kind that the mainstream Anglo-American media culture has been guilty of for decades,” he says.

“But the real problem with that is not only with morality but also with the very practical politics of searching for a viable peace settlement”.

He is concerned that “with their unconditional and uncritical support of Israel, the West and the United States in particular have essentially made such a peace impossible”.

Writing in India’s Hindu newspaper, Denmark-based Indian professor of literature Dr Tabish Khair points out that historically, Palestinians have had to indulge in drastic and violent acts to draw attention to their plight and the oppressive policies of Israel.

“The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, used such ‘terrorist’ acts to focus world attention on the Palestinian problem, and without such actions, the West would have looked the other way while the Palestinians were slowly airbrushed out of history,” he argues.

While the PLO fought a secular Palestinian battle for nationhood, which was largely ignored by Western powers, this lead to political Islam’s development in the later part of the 1970s, and Hamas is a product of that.

“Today, we live in a world where political Islam is associated almost entirely with Islam — and almost all Muslims,” he notes.

Palestinian cause still resonates
But, the Palestinian cause still resonates beyond the Muslim communities, as the reactions in Asia reflect.

Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad, writing in Bangladesh’s Daily Star, notes the savagery of the impending war against the Palestinian people will be noted by the global community.

He points out that Hamas was never allowed to function as a voice for the Palestinian people, even after they won a landslide democratic election in Gaza in January 2006.

“The victory of Hamas was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election result,” he points out.

“Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people”.

Prashad points out that when the Palestinians conducted a non-violent march in 2019 for their rights to nationhood, they were met with Israeli bombs that killed 200 people.

“When non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms,” he argues.

Prashad disputes the Western media’s argument that Israel has a “right to defend itself” because the Palestinians are people under occupation. Under the Geneva Convention, Israel has an obligation to protect them.

Under the Geneva Convention, Prashad argues that the Israeli government’s “collective punishment” strategy is a war crime.

“The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but it was not able to move forward even to collect information”.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a correspondent for IDN-InDepthNews, the flagship agency of the non-profit International Press Syndicate (IPS). Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

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 Hizballah 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 paralyze 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.

Indeed, speaking last month to the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map that showed both the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of Israel.

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.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The weekend’s surprise and brutal attack on Israel by Hamas fighters has the potential to reshape the Middle East – and will only further increase global geopolitical instability. As of Sunday night NZT, the initial 24 hours of the assault by Hamas on Israel had already taken at least 250 Israeli lives – easily making it the bloodiest day for Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In addition, dozens of Israelis have been kidnapped and taken back to Gaza to be used as bargaining chips. While there will be a range of motivations for why Hamas chose to act in the way it did now, the symbolic timing of Hamas’ assault – almost 50 years to the day after Yom Kippur – is unlikely to be a coincidence.

In recent years, Western countries such as New Zealand have largely taken their eye off the region to focus on the war in Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific. A staple of New Zealand’s world news diet in decades past, of late the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only rarely made the headlines. When it has, New Zealand has preferred not to become involved to any real extent beyond expressing sympathy with the victims. For example, when conflict broke out over Gaza in 2021, Jacinda Ardern cut an image that resembled more that of an observer or commentator, rather than of a participant in international affairs.

The new Hamas assault is a reminder of the continued power of the Middle East to shock and surprise. While it is too early to tell how the conflict will exactly unfold, one of the most concerning aspects will be the extent to which other nation-states become involved – particularly Iran, a close supporter of Hamas. The risk is that the war could spiral out of control and become a wider conflict with an even greater global impact, in an echo (or, potentially, an even more dangerous version) of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Determining New Zealand’s response to the new war in the Middle East will be one of the new New Zealand government’s first challenges – and as shown by the fierce reaction to the initial lack of direct condemnation of the Hamas assault by Nanaia Mahuta, it will not be an easy path to navigate. A sustainable and durable two-state solution is the only long-term answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with Israel now defending itself against a vicious and horrific attack by Hamas, and planning a new ground invasion of Gaza, this will not be on the table in the near future.

However, New Zealand should resist the temptation to lose hope or to see the war as simply someone else’s problem. As a small democracy far from the epicentre of the conflict, New Zealand could eventually play a role in peacemaking efforts – if it wanted to. We should not forget that as horrific as the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was, the Camp David Accords came just five years later in 1978. These led to Egypt signing a peace treaty with Israel, a settlement that has endured. The darkest moment can sometimes come before the dawn. There will absolutely be a need for de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy in the days, weeks, months and years ahead – and countries will be sorely needed to lead and support these efforts.

For now, these ambitions may seem like a pipe dream. But as the war in Ukraine has shown, even distant wars can have an outsized impact, even half a world away. Crude oil prices have already risen sharply this year – and combined with a strengthening US dollar, these have caused New Zealand petrol prices to head back up to levels last seen in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The pain caused by rising inflation and the cost-of-living crisis – the number one issue of the election campaign – may not be over yet.

Geoffrey Miller is the Democracy Project’s geopolitical analyst and writes on current New Zealand foreign policy and related geopolitical issues. He has lived in Germany and the Middle East and is a learner of Arabic and Russian. He is currently working on a PhD on New Zealand’s relations with the Gulf states.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. To subscriber, please visit the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz).

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”.

The worst comes from the BBC which is dutifully reposted by Radio New Zealand.

As we said in a commentary earlier this year the systemic anti-Palestinian in reporting from the Middle East includes:

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.

“Occupied” is the status these territories have under international law, United Nations resolutions and NZ government policy and should be consistently reported as such.

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.

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

— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 8, 2023

Our government policy needs to change.

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.

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 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

— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 8, 2023

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz