Hundreds of Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent days have described scenes of systematic torture, starvation, and humiliation.

Their accounts, gathered by The Guardian, TRT, Al-Mayadeen, Quds News Network, and Palestine Online, among others, offer a rare glimpse into what human rights organisations call a “policy of abuse” targeting Palestinian detainees.

According to the reports, many of the freed prisoners returned to Gaza emaciated, injured, and traumatised, some learning only after their release that their families had been killed during Israel’s war on the besieged Strip.

In testimony published by The Guardian, 33-year-old Naseem al-Radee recalled the moment Israeli prison guards “gave him a farewell gift” before his release.

“They bound his hands, placed him on the ground and beat him without mercy,” the report said, describing how Radee’s first sight of Gaza after nearly two years was “blurry,” the result of a boot to the eye.

Radee, a government employee from Beit Lahia, was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers at a displacement shelter in Gaza in December 2023. He spent 22 months in detention, including 100 days in an underground cell, before being released alongside 1700 other Palestinians this week under the ceasefire agreement.

A freed Palestinian prisoner speaks in pain about the horrors and inhumane treatment inside Israeli occupation prisons. pic.twitter.com/KqNJjX2mza

— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 13, 2025

“They used teargas and rubber bullets to intimidate us, in addition to constant verbal abuse and insults,” The Guardian cited Radee as saying regarding his time in Nafha prison in the Naqab desert.

“They had a strict system of repression; the electronic gate of the section would open when the soldiers entered, and they would come in with their dogs, shouting ‘on your stomach, on your stomach,’ and start beating us mercilessly”, the testimony continued.

According to the report, cramped and unsanitary cells, fungal infections, starvation, and routine beatings defined his captivity. Upon release, Radee tried to call his wife, only to learn that she and all but one of his children had been killed during his detention.

“I was very happy to be released because the date coincided with my youngest daughter Saba’s third birthday,” he said.

“I tried to find some joy in being released on this day, but sadly, Saba went with my family, and my joy went with her.”

Sound torture
Also speaking to The Guardian, 22-year-old university student Mohammed al-Asaliya described contracting scabies in prison and being denied treatment.

“There was no medical care,” he said. “We tried to treat ourselves by using floor disinfectant on our wounds, but it only made them worse. The mattresses were filthy, the environment unhealthy, our immunity weak, and the food contaminated.”

He recalled an area “they called ‘the disco,’ where they played loud music nonstop for two days straight.”

The sound torture, he said, was combined with physical abuse: “They also hung us on walls, sprayed us with cold air and water, and sometimes threw chilli powder on detainees.”

By the time of his release, Asaliya’s weight had dropped from 75 kg to 42 kg.

‘We died a thousand times a day’
In testimony recorded by Palestine Online, journalist and former detainee Shadi Abu Sido described what he called “unimaginable torture”.

“They used to say: ‘Take, eat.’ But I didn’t want anything for myself. About 1800 of us were released, and thousands are still inside,” Abu Sido recounted.

“If you die once a day, we have died a thousand times a day, each day. We didn’t know the day, the hour, or even the date.

“We forgot what sleep feels like, how food tastes. In the middle of the night, they would splash water on us, in our cells.”

In another video posted by Palestine Online, Abu Sido added:

“They torture and abuse us in every possible way, physically and psychologically. We don’t sleep; they threaten us about our children. ‘We killed your children, we killed your children. There is no Gaza’.”

“I entered Gaza and I found a scene from the Day of Judgment,” he said.

‘I made this for my daughter’
In a video published by Al-Mayadeen, another recently freed detainee collapsed in tears as he learned that his entire family had been killed. Holding a handmade toy he crafted in prison, he said:

“My children are dead. I made this for my daughter. Her birthday was on October 18; my daughter was two years old. Bara is eight years old.

“My beloved ones have been killed.”

‘They amputated my leg’
Speaking to TRT World, Palestinian prisoner Jibril al-Safadi described the brutality that cost him his leg:

“My leg was amputated in prison due to severe torture. The situation was tough: relentless suffering. There were savage beatings and horrible torture,” he said. “They transferred me to Sde Teiman.

“There was no medical care. They amputated my right leg.

We faced everything you can expect, even the dogs’ raping, torturing of detainees. Killing men is usual, like it’s an ordinary thing.”

A system of abuse
The Guardian report cited Palestinian medical officials in Gaza who confirmed that many detainees arrived “in poor physical health,” bearing “bruises, fractures, wounds, and marks from restraints that had bound their hands tightly.”

Eyad Qaddih, the director of public relations at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, reportedly said many of the released prisoners had to be transferred to the emergency room.

“The signs of beating and torture were clearly visible,” he told The Guardian.

The report cited the Israeli NGO Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), as saying that about 2800 Palestinians from Gaza remain in Israeli prisons without charge.

Most were detained under emergency laws amended after October 7, 2023, allowing for indefinite administrative detention of anyone deemed an “unlawful combatant”.

PCATI’s executive director, Tal Steiner, said that “the amount and scale of torture and abuse in Israeli prisons and military camps has skyrocketed since October 7.”

She described the escalation as “part of a policy led by Israeli decision-makers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and others.”

Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, has repeatedly bragged about providing Palestinian prisoners with “the minimum of the minimum” food and supplies.

The Guardian reports: In total, 88 Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons and sent to the occupied West Bank on Monday – the other nearly 2000, a number that includes about 1700 Palestinians seized from Gaza during the war and held without charge, were sent back to Gaza, where a minority would travel on to neighbouring countries.

Before Monday’s release, 11,056 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisons, according to statistics from the Israeli NGO HaMoked in October 2025. At least 3500 of those were held in administrative detention without trial. An Israeli military database has indicated that only a quarter of those detained in Gaza were classified as fighters.

Republished with permission from The Palestine Chronicle

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.

For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.

That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.

That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.

That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.

While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.

Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.

In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.

Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.

These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.

Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.

In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.

Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.

In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.

One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.

What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.

CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”

Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.

After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”

Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.

Banned from Gaza
Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.

This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.

Don’t hold your breath.

Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.

Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.

That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.

Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.

The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.

The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.

In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.

But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.

The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.

After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.

The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.

Censoring Palestinians
Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.

An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.

Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.

Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.

That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.

As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”

Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.

Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.

According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.

Whistleblowing journalists
Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.

Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.

According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.

She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.

Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.

Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.

An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.

Upside-down values
These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.

Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.

For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”

Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.

It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.

With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.

Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.

And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.

But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.

Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.

It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.

It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.

Crushing dissent
Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.

Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.

Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.

Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.

The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.

Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.

Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.

Their electronic devices were seized too.

Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.

It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.

The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.

The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.

This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.

Once again the world is being turned upside down.

Echoes from history
The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.

This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.

His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.

Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.

The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.

Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.

A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.

Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.

The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.

The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.

That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

An Australian advocacy group supporting West Papuan self-determination has appealed to Foreign Minister Penny Wong to press Indonesia to halt all military operations in the region following new allegations of Indonesian atrocities reported in The Guardian newspaper.

In a letter to the senator yesterday, the Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) protested against the report of torture and killing of civilians in West Papua.

According to an investigative report by Mani Cordell in The Guardian on Monday, Indonesian security forces tortured and burned to death a 17-year-old high school student, Wity Unue.

Quoting Raga Kogeya, a West Papuan human rights activist, the report said:

“Wity had been interrogated and detained along with three other boys and two young men under suspicion of being part of the troubled region’s rebel army.

“They were taken by special forces soldiers who rampaged through the West Papuan village of Kuyawage, burning down houses and a church and terrorising locals.

“Transported by helicopter to the regional military headquarters 100km away, the group were beaten and burnt so badly by their captors that they no longer looked human.

“Kogeya says Wity died a painful death in custody. The other five were only released after human rights advocates tipped off the local media.

“‘The kids had all been tortured and they’d been tied up and then burned,’ says Kogeya, who saw the surviving boys’ injuries first-hand on the day of their release.”

The AWPA letter by spokesperson Joe Collins said: “Numerous reports have documented the ongoing human rights abuses in West Papua, the burning of villages during military operations and the targeting of civilians including children.”

The most recent cited report was by Human Rights Monitor titled “Destroy them first… discuss human rights later” (August 2023), “brings to attention the shocking abuses that are ongoing in West Papua and should be of concern to the Australian government”.

Quoting from that report, the letter stated:

“This report provides detailed information on a series of security force raids in the Kiwirok District, Pegunungan Bintang Regency, Papua Pegunungan Province (until 2022 Papua Province) between 13 September and late October 2021.

“Indonesian security forces repeatedly attacked eight indigenous villages in the Kiwirok District, using helicopters and spy drones. The helicopters reportedly dropped mortar grenades on civilian homes and church buildings while firing indiscriminately at civilians.

“Ground forces set public buildings as well as residential houses on fire and killed the villagers’ livestock.”

The AWPA said Indonesian security force operations had also created thousands of internal refugees who have fled to the forests to escape the Indonesian military.

“It has been estimated that there are up to 60,000 IDPs in the highlands living in remote shelters in the forest and they lacking access to food, sanitation, medical treatment, and education,” the letter stated.

In light of the ongoing human rights abuses in the territory, the AWPA called on Senator Wong to:

• urge Jakarta to immediately halt all military operations in West Papua;
• urge Jakarta to supply aid and health care to the West Papuan internal refugees by human rights and health care organisations trusted by the local people; and to
• rethink Australia cooperation with the Indonesian military until the Indonesian military is of a standard acceptable to the Australian people who care about human rights.

A New Zealand advocacy group has also called for an immediate government response to the allegations of torture of children in West Papua.

“The New Zealand government must speak out urgently and strongly against this child torture and the state killing of children by Indonesian forces in West Papua this week,” said the West Papua Action Aotearoa network spokesperson Catherine Delahunty.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Former Kiribati President Anote Tong suspects a major agreement is “cooking” between Beijing and Tarawa after the country’s decision to quit the Pacific Islands Forum.

Kiribati President Taneti Maamau’s “surprise” announcement to abandon its membership from the region’s premier policy and political body at the 51st Forum Leaders’ meeting this week has heightened concerns the Micronesian nation is moving closer to China.

“I know they are cooking something with China,” Tong, who led the atoll island nation from 2003 to 2016, said.

“I think it would have started with the reopening of the Phoenix Island Protected Area.”

The Phoenix Islands Protected Area is the largest designated marine protected area in the world, spanning almost 400,000 sq km in the South Pacific Ocean, midway between Australia and Hawai’i.

Sources have told RNZ Pacific that a possible deal may include exclusive access to Chinese vessels to the Protected Area.

Tong believed the move by the Maamau government suggested that it hoped to “gain from being isolated from the region” by striking a deal directly with China.

‘Totally unexpected’
“It’s totally unexpected. I did not think it was in our nature, in our character, to do something quite so radical like that,” he said.

The Kiribati government is under financial pressure due to the economic impacts of covid-19 and the current drought.

“I know that the government is in a serious problem with the escalating budget which is not sustainable,” Tong said.

He said it should not come as a surprise if the government was talking about a deal directly with the Chinese about the Phoenix Islands.

“I have seen expressions in the past in which the president [Maamau] confirmed China was going to assist in the development of Canton Islands … a former US military base and it was in closer proximity to Hawaii. So, we are very strategically located,” he said.

“It is the reason why Kiribati may have withdrawn from the Pacific Island Forum.”

Blamed on China
Meanwhile, Kiribati’s opposition leader Tessie Lambourne is blaming Kiribati’s decision to withdraw from the Forum on pressure exerted by China.

The former diplomat told The Guardian she was “shocked and extremely disappointed” by the government’s move.

Lambourne said she believed the decision was influenced by China, and that the Maamau administration was weak, vulnerable and greatly indebted to Beijing.

She said someone seemed to be telling the Kiribati government that the country did not need regional solidarity.

“I’m embarrassed because what we are saying is that we are not in the fold … we are outside,” she told The Guardian.

“And why are we outside? I think it’s us who keep ourselves out … because we are not engaged or engaging.”

China brushes off claims
China, however, has denied allegations that it has anything to do Kiribati’s decision, saying it “does not interfere in the internal affairs of Pacific Islands countries”.

Kiribati said it did not feel its concerns over the leadership rift had been listened to following the special meeting hosted by the forum chair Fiji in June, and as a consequence it had no other alternative but to leave.

Federated States of Micronesia President David Panuelo said that while it was not known if China was exerting its influence to force Kiribati out of the forum “we hope to find out soon”.

Panuelo said there was a lot of work put into the Suva Agreement to achieve a reform package which would see that the forum was “much strengthened”.

“Our aim is to open the doors and continue to invite Kiribati because when one member is not on board, it is not quite over yet,” he said.

Tong said he “completely disagrees” with Maamau’s reasoning.

“I am not so sure that it really provides the justification for the kind of reaction to just withdraw like that,” he said.

“There should have been a lot of room to manoeuvre the discussions in Suva. There is so much at stake in losing membership of the forum. I cannot imagine how Kiribati would win by having taken that step.”

Tong also raised concerns about the recent visit by China’s foreign minister to Tarawa.

“The Chinese foreign minister went through here for a few hours last month and there was a deal signed,” he said.

“Nobody knows what that deal is. And so that is maybe part of the whole process.”

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned a media blackout imposed on events during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s 10-day tour of Pacific island countries.

Wang is today in Papua New Guinea at the end of an eight-country tour that began on May 26, but a “Chinese state media reporter is so far the only journalist to be allowed to ask him a question”, says the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog.

On the second day of his two days in Fiji this week, “the media briefing itself was run by the visiting government [and] the press passes were issued by the Chinese government,” Fiji journalist Lice Movono told The Guardian.

Movono and her cameraman, and a crew with the Australian TV broadcaster ABC, were prevented from filming a meeting between Wang and the Pacific Islands Forum’s secretary-general shortly after Wang’s arrival in Fiji the day before, although they all had accreditation.

She also observed several attempts by Chinese officials to restrict journalists’ ability to cover the event.

“From the very beginning there was a lot of secrecy, no transparency, no access given,” Movono said.

During Wang’s first stop in the Solomon Islands on May 26, covid restrictions were cited as grounds for allowing only a limited number of media outlets to attend the press conference and only two questions were allowed ­– one to the Solomon Islands’ foreign minister by a local reporter and one to Wang by a Chinese media outlet.

No interaction with the media was allowed during his next two stops in Kiribati and Samoa.

Resist Chinese pressure
“The total opacity surrounding the events organised by the Chinese delegation with several Pacific island states clearly contravenes the democratic principles of the region’s countries,” said Daniel Bastard, head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“We call on officials preparing to meet Wang Yi to resist Chinese pressure by allowing local journalists and international organisations to cover these events, which are of major public interest.”

Following the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Samoa and Fiji, Wang visited Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste with the same aim of signing free trade and security agreements.

RSF has previously condemned the Chinese delegation’s discrimination against local and international media during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit held in November 2018 in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, with President Xi Jinping attending.

China is among the world’s worst countries for media freedom, ranked 175th out of 180 nations in the 2022 RSF World Press Freedom Index.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

 By John Pilger in London

THE GLIMPSE of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage.

Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

This article is republished from John Pilger’s blog with his permission.

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