Trump’s Interference Invalidates the Presidential Election in Honduras

by John Perry | Dec 10, 2025 | 

An extraordinary catalog of US interference – amounting to an electoral coup – may have destroyed what was already a struggling democracy in Honduras. Trump has succeeded in closing the door to progressive government and in all likelihood his preferred neoliberal candidate – previously trailing in many opinion polls – will be declared president when the count eventually finishes.

While Washington’s aversion to foreign interference in its domestic elections verges on paranoia, the gross hypocrisy which runs through its foreign policy leaves it free of any compunction when meddling in other countries’ elections, especially in Latin America. Perhaps no country has greater recent experience of this than Honduras. Although most accounts of this meddling begin in 2009 with the ousting by army officers of its democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya, in truth US dominance of the country has a much longer history, as I described at the time.

The US refused to designate Zelaya’s toppling as a “military coup” or to back international calls for his rapid return to office. Washington then backed all the post-coup governments, including those established by Juan Orlando Hernández when his National Party “won” two highly manipulated elections. Rampant corruption by him and his predecessors ensured that Honduras became a “narcostate.” Nevertheless, US administrations embraced Hernández as a prime ally in the war on drugs up until the point when he left office, was extradited and committed to 45 years in a US prison. Only the large majority won by the Libre party’s Xiomara Castro in the 2021 election, and the fact that Hernández had become a liability, temporarily frustrated Washington’s customary ability to get the Honduran president that best suited its interests.

Castro’s government only partly fulfilled its progressive aims, not least because of the continuing power wielded by Honduras’s often corrupt elite, a judicial and security system still strongly subject to US influence, and social media campaigns which often originated in Washington. Opinion polls showed that Castro’s chosen successor as Libre Party candidate, Rixi Moncada, would be in a close race with the right-wing candidates of the two traditional parties, the Liberals’ Salvador Nasralla and the National Party’s Nasry Asfura. Trump favored Asfura, effectively the successor to Juan Orlando Hernández, as the candidate most attuned to his policies.

The fact that the November 30 election took place at the height of the US military build-up in the Caribbean was itself a crucial ingredient in determining the outcome. Both right-wing candidates were able to warn Hondurans that a vote for Libre would be an invitation to the US military to turns its guns on them. Trump emboldened them by asking on Truth Social, “Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?” According to him, a vote for Asfura would ensure that Honduras did not face the same potential fate as Venezuela. “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists,” he added. “I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists.” Nor, apparently, could he even trust Nasralla, whom he described as “borderline communist.”

The president then trumped this statement by declaring that only if Asfura won would US aid for Honduras continue. “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” he said. When Nasralla appeared to have edged ahead of Asfura, in a close count, Trump said that it “looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,” adding, “If they do, there will be hell to pay!” Then, in a night “marked by technical failures and tension in the results system,” the count suddenly gave the lead to Asfura. The International Observation Mission of the American Association of Jurists asserted that Trump’s intervention “has placed the legitimacy of the democratic process in crisis.”

In an even more extraordinary move, Trump announced that he would be pardoning the disgraced former president Hernández, who has indeed since walked free from prison. A move that might have harmed the National Party appears instead to have been an astute boost to Asfura’s campaign, given that many of his supporters still idolize Hernández and regard Asfura as an inferior leader. However, Mike Vigil, a former senior official in the US Drug Enforcement Agency, told the Guardian that pardoning Hernández “shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade.” Activist and author Dana Frank told the Guardian that “his repressive, thieving, dictatorial history, backed by the United States year after year, has evaporated from the story.”

Another, very effective but little publicized intervention appears to have taken place, if Rixi Moncada’s claim in an interview with Telesur is correct. According to her, huge numbers of the 2.5 million Hondurans who receive remittances from family members in the US were warned that, if Libre won, they would not receive their December payments. The magnitude of the threat (whether or not it could have been carried out in practice) is indicated by the fact that remittances account for a quarter of Honduras’s GDP. It seems possible that many poor households’ votes, which might have gone to Libre, didn’t – because of text messages sent directly to their phones.

That electoral fraud would again favor the US-supported candidate was indicated in the run up to November 30 by leaked audios implicating the National Party’s representative on the national election council. The council’s Libre representative, Marlon Ochoa, who denounced that planned fraud, has now published a detailed account of irregularities since counting started, which he claims invalidate 86 per cent of polling returns. Indeed, at the time of writing, following a week of technical problems in vote counting, there is still no official winner.

Rixi Moncada harshly questioned the silence of the electoral observation missions from the Organization of America States and European Union, which she accused of deliberately omitting any reference to Trump’s interference in their bulletins on the conduct of the election. “So far they have not commented on the intervention of the U.S. president in their reports,” Moncada claimed, noting their attitude “borders on complacency.” New York Times interviews with Hondurans showed clearly that Trump’s comments influenced their votes. Mark Weisbrot, of the US Center for Economic and Policy Research, pointed out that his interventions were “a violation of Article 19 of the Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the United States is a signatory.”

Emboldened by his apparent success in defeating “communism,” even if (at the time of writing) he may not yet have secured the victory of his preferred neoliberal candidate, Trump has gone on to publish his own “corollary” to the century-old Monroe Doctrine, endorsing its claims to a unique US sphere of influence covering the whole region. Echoing the 1904 corollary to the doctrine issued by President Roosevelt, which declared that the US would be a “hemispheric police power,” Trump says he is “proudly reasserting” control over “our hemisphere,” guarding the American continents “against communism, fascism, and foreign infringement.”

Nothing could be a clearer manifestation of what has been called the “Donroe Doctrine” than the military build-up in the Caribbean, which provided the threatening backdrop to the final weeks of the Honduran election campaign. As Roger Harris and I noted in a recent article, the deployment of one-fifth of US maritime power is aimed not just at Venezuela, but at starting a wider domino effect in the Caribbean basin. In the aftermath of November’s election night in Honduras, the first domino appears to have fallen.

Nicaragua-based John Perry is with the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition and writes for MR Online, the London Review of Books, FAIR and CovertAction, among others.

 

When the World Yields to the Self: The Politics of Individualism in Stranger Things

by Yanis Iqbal / December 6th, 2025

The finale of Volume 1 in Season 5 of Stranger Things turns on a single charged image: Will, cornered by Vecna, suddenly awakening to powers that had supposedly lived inside him all along. A rush of home-movie memories flows through his mind, scenes of friendship, queer attachment, and family care, and almost instantly this inward turn converts into outward force as he freezes and shatters the Demogorgons. Power arrives through self-recognition. Robin’s earlier insistence that the answers already live inside, once fear loosens its grip, completes the logic that governs the scene. The battle stops being about an encounter with an alien world and becomes a story about the completion of an inner journey. What might have unfolded as a violent collision with something truly other, the hive, the swarm, Vecna as inhuman intelligence, instead becomes the stage on which a long prepared self finally steps into view.

During Vecna’s return through the militarized gate and his seizure of Will, there is a promise of a dense convergence of antagonistic vectors: state violence failing at its perimeter, the villain staging a metaphysical coup over childhood, the dispersed terror of soldiers, friends, and abducted children all compressed into a single spatial crisis. Yet this conflictual multiplicity contracts almost immediately into the interior drama of Will’s self-actualization. The world halts so that his psychic itinerary can complete itself. Vecna’s grand project of planetary refashioning, the military’s tactical collapse, the children’s abduction, even the accumulated horror of the Upside Down all become subordinate to the timing of Will’s inner resolution.

The visual grammar enforces this hierarchy. As Will’s eyes whiten and his hand turns upward in a gesture of extraction, the swarm freezes, danger suspends itself, and historical contingency yields to the secure procession of a destined capacity moving toward expression. The scene thereby converts what could have unfolded as an unpredictable clash among heterogeneous forces into the ceremonial verification of a single subject’s latent power. Worldhood itself becomes a derivative of Will’s achieved identity: once he accepts who he is, the world organizes to receive that truth as operational law. In this way, the sequence relinquishes the openness of worlding, where meaning arises from unstable encounters among bodies, institutions, and inhuman agencies, and installs instead a metaphysics of guaranteed potentiality, in which the individual secures the cosmos by realizing what the narrative had already insured as his own.

The long accumulation of hints and fan theorization around Will’s supposed powers intensifies this problem. The parallels with Eleven that viewers painstakingly assembled – shared void space, flickering lights, telepathic communication, Dungeons & Dragons class alignments – already mapped out an arc in which Will would eventually manifest some form of supernatural capacity. When the Duffer brothers retroactively affirm that they had “always” spoken about Will gaining powers, they make that anticipatory grid almost diegetic. The revelation in Volume 1 of season 5 therefore carries the structure of confirmation: the world of the show catches up with a possibility that both creators and engaged audience had already posited and rehearsed. This produces a peculiar flattening of time. Rather than a future that genuinely surprises and disorganizes prior schemata, the future arrives as the orderly realization of what had been projected in advance, both inside the fiction and in its para-textual ecosystem of interviews, comics, and fandom speculation.

From the standpoint of film form, this ethic of self-realization reshapes the sequence’s affect. The camera language around Will’s emergence mirrors earlier framings of Eleven: the close-up on the face, the nosebleed, the deliberate bodily gesture that translates psychic force into visible impact. These echoes tie Will’s breakthrough to a recognizable grammar of “power moments,” which carries a heavy load of narrative reassurance. Viewers understand immediately that this is the payoff – the scene that ratifies seasons of foreshadowing, the queer counterpart to Eleven’s iconic set-pieces. The battlefield freezes while the film yields itself to this interior drama, structured as an ascent from shame and fear toward self-acceptance. Rather than a chaotic field where multiple lines of action and danger collide, the space becomes a pedestal for the hero’s self-disclosure. Explosivity in cinema usually arises when images introduce an excess that overwhelms established codes. Here, by contrast, each choice in framing, montage, and performance tightens the alignment between event and expectation.

In the staging of Will’s breakthrough, queerness also undergoes a striking temporal and narrative straightening, where its meaning locks itself to instrumental service within a teleology of war. The emotional arc that runs from secrecy and shame to avowal and power aligns his queerness with punctual usefulness: it reaches legibility at the precise moment when the plot requires a new weapon against Vecna. Rather than unfolding across everyday life in Hawkins through diffuse attachments, awkward dissent, misfires of desire, and social friction, it condenses into a catalytic switch that activates combat efficacy.

The pep talk, the memory montage of childhood bonds, and the sudden access to hive power fuse queerness to a grammar of heroic function. Its value becomes calibrated by what it delivers to the battle, rather than by how it disturbs family structures, peer hierarchies, masculinities, or the banal rhythms of small town life. In this alignment, queerness loses its capacity to remain excessive to purpose. It no longer collides messily with friendship, fear, class, authority, and violence as a lived social force. It matures cleanly into narrative utility, where self-acceptance synchronizes with strategic necessity. The result is a form of temporal discipline in which queer becoming advances along the same straight line as the war plot itself, moving from repression to activation to decisive contribution, as if desire requires the sanction of apocalypse to assume narrative weight.

This ethic also reconfigures the relation between horror and subjectivity. Earlier seasons drew considerable intensity from the sense that the Upside Down, the Mind Flayer, and later Vecna exceeded the kids’ psyches, even as they exploited trauma and fear. Material forces from elsewhere invaded the small-town lifeworld, forcing new alliances and improvisations that characters could barely anticipate. In Volume 1’s climax, the ontological direction reverses: the hive mind becomes something that Will “channels,” an extension of his capacity once he manages to claim his identity, particularly his queer desire, without shame. Vecna’s power, once figured as an inhuman totality, is now available as resource for the very subject he tormented. This translation of cosmic horror into an unlockable skill makes monstrosity legible as latent instrument of the self. World-shattering force folds back into the biography of a single character whose problem, for most of the runtime, is self-relation.

Viewed within this framework, the season’s central twist feels curiously bloodless, despite the carnage in the diegesis. The sequence of Will lifting his head, wiping the blood from his nose, and staring into the distance signals resolve rather than crisis. The narrative no longer stages a collision between incompatible logics – human finitude against incomprehensible dimension, friendship and care against militarized rationality – but organizes everything around the serene inevitability of personal potential achieving articulation. Once the battle becomes the stage for such a trajectory, cinematic time closes in on itself. Futures arise only as the flowering of what had already been inscribed: in Will’s childhood memories, in earlier seasons’ iconography, in the separate archive of official tie-in material and fan exegesis. The image ceases to carry the promise of an unforeseen break and instead delivers the satisfaction of a debt long acknowledged. In that sense, the ethic of self-realization converts a world that once harbored genuine menace into a curriculum for fulfilling pre-encoded possibilities.

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Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. Read other articles by Yanis.

Go Tell It on the Mountain: Genocide is Wrong

While Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues, the Israeli government  paves the way for a ‘Gazafication’ of the West Bank

by Kathy Kelly / December 6th, 2025

Israel and its partners continue waging genocide against Palestinian people. Those who, so far, have survived the hideous attacks since October 7, 2023, now face ongoing jeopardy. Hemmed in by yet another military border, over two million Palestinians in “East Gaza” live amid rubble, unexploded ordnance, decaying corpses, starvation conditions, and the uncertainties of inhabiting makeshift homes without sewage, sanitation, clean water, or protection against harsh winter weather. A saddening certainty was hammered home on November 17, 2025, when not a single country stood up for them at the United Nations. The Security Council resolved to accept President Trump’s plan for Gaza’s future, a proposal which makes no effort to hold Israel and the U.S. accountable, in the near term, for war crimes and relentless ethnic cleansing.

Anticipating what some call the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, human rights groups are calling on the Israeli military to cease their attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods and  refugee camps. Most recently, the Israeli Defense Forces raided homes in the governorate of Tubas after expelling more than twenty families from the besieged Al Far’a refugee camp.

Throughout the world, nations continue trading with Israel, perpetuating a status quo that flaunts international law. While the U.S. sanctions International Criminal Court judges for ruling against Israeli settlers who illegally occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank, the settlers have intensified their brutality, descending on Bedouin communities, villagers grazing their flocks, and Palestinians aiming to harvest olive tree crops.

Using jeeps, bulldozers, ATVs, rifles, and other equipment supplied by the Israeli government and military, settlers beat civilians with clubs, torch vehicles, steal livestock, and demolish homes.

This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it is ethnic cleansing aimed at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities. The Israeli military throws up its hands at settler violence, but many of the settlers are Israeli military who commit vigilante actions, return to their homes, don Israeli military uniforms, and go back to the very places they have attacked to arrest the victims, blaming them for causing the unrest or for unrelated alleged violations of Israeli law. Fear of imprisonment and torture adds another layer of violence to entrap Palestinians refusing to leave their land.

Those Israeli outposts and settlements already constructed occupy vast stretches of land, akin to suburbs in the United States. They monopolize the best land and the readiest supplies of water for drinking or farming. They connect with segregated highways, designated for use only by Israelis. Settlers and their government leaders fully intend to expand further, accomplishing “Greater Israel.”

Amid the grotesque injustices in Israel, a Palestinian youngster can be sentenced to three years in prison for picking up a rock, while an Israeli youngster in trouble with his school or community or both can be sentenced to a settler outpost where extremist leaders will urge him to attack defenseless villagers, all in the name of racial supremacy and fulfillment of  divine command. Israel gives itself a little quiet from youth delinquency by shipping troubled youth wholesale off to the West Bank. There, they can turn their rage upon Palestinians and international observers.

In 1999, Ariel Sharon, as Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, avowed Israel would seize all the hilltops in Palestine. Named for Ariel Sharon’s infamous call to turn strategic heights i not “facts on the ground,” the “Hilltop Youth” are bent on creating new facts: demolished homes, seized lands, ground turned black from fire or red from blood.

Why is there no accountability for settler terrorism? The UN office of the High Commission for Human Rights calls the settler attacks abhorrent. “Permanently displacing the Palestinian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer, which is a war crime,” says a November 14, 2025, press briefing from the UNHCR. “The transfer by Israel of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies also amounts to a war crime.”

Yet, the Hilltop Youth can point to Israeli right-wing leaders in the highest echelons of government who urge continued assaults against non-Jews, regarding them as sub-human.

“The ruling order in Palestine doesn’t see settler terror as a crime,” writes an independent journalist, Andrey X, who has spent three years with unarmed civilian protectors in the West Bank. “Settler terror is an essential part of the state project,”  he adds, regarding the Hilltop Youth as Israel’s frontline soldiers.  In encouraging these young militants, some of whom are underage, the Israeli leadership is condoning what could be deemed the use of child soldiers.

Activists with various unarmed civilian protection groups witness and record local offenses, at great personal risk. One activist who, for security reasons, cannot be named, is trained to look assailants in the eye while deescalating (or attempting to deescalate) confrontations, in part to keep tabs on which personalities have newly arrived to repress Palestinian neighbors.

During Israel’s most recent Rosh Hashanah celebration, near an outpost about a kilometer up the mountain, Jonas was assailed by an angered youth apparently visiting for the holiday. Gingerly backing away up a rocky incline as the young lad hurled stones at him, Jonas remembers keeping eye contact and gently remonstrating with him. “You know,” he said, “You don’t have to do this … Did anyone ever teach you to attack old men?”  One expertly hurled rock (“he could have been a good shortstop,” Jonas told me later) hit so close to the bone that Jonas had to be hospitalized for a hematoma.

Nevertheless, Jonas is quite privileged compared to Palestinians who wouldn’t have access to similar health care or a passport that enables departure.

Jonas says one person in local Palestinian communities usually serves as a point of contact, on a WhatsApp line, for the entire village. In the event of an Israeli incursion, people contact him and when he contacts the international observers, they quickly send a team. Any of the villagers’ watch dogs will most likely have already been shot. At least six days a week, young settlers will drive their goats and sheep down the hill from the outpost into the villagers’ yards and try, behind the shelter of guns, to drive the sheep and goats into the villagers’ living quarters. While kids are getting ready for school and households rise, going about their regular life, the settlers drive their sheep and goats directly into the houses, sometimes entering also into the sheep and goat pens of the villagers. Then, settlers claim all the livestock as their own, stealing the villagers’ livelihoods, as they herd the animals out of the village and back to their settlement. An international team may help prevent the pernicious process.

Unarmed westerners accompanying villagers risk deportation if they make an official complaint. Israelis on other teams can make complaints, but with zero observable effect. Even the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), were they inclined to, would have little impact on the settlers: one of Jonas’s friends heard of a settler who claimed, “I have automatic weapons in my house, and they’re for the IDF if they try to move me out.”

Lest we forget, the Israeli government has basically told the world that it has nuclear weapons inside their Negev desert facilities, and they could use these annihilatory weapons against anyone that tries to stop Israel from establishing an ever-increasing apartheid state.

The current Trump-ordained quiet, so far from being a peace, appears doomed. Since October 10, Israel has violated the terms of the agreement more than 500 times.

In Gaza there is no peace: the brief quiet, punctuated as ever by Israeli gunfire and aerial attacks, is the quiet of a mass grave that cannot begin to be unearthed until Israel allows the land-moving equipment in.

Jonas, who has spent decades as an international activist in conflict and war zones, says he has never before seen the systemic cruelty perpetrated by Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.

But, the violence may come home to the UN General Assembly members choosing quiet observation. And, if we take the new dispensation as reason to fall silent, we may end up being silent for a long, long time.

A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive Magazine website.

UN Info-Graphic: West Bank, Violence, Destruction and Displacement  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1785qhm0ppP-4FDTHVN1sa2X21A7MoS9LmLSyr5lkw2A/edit?usp=sharing

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Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is the board president of World BEYOND War (worldbeyondwar.org) and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. (merchantsofdeath.org). Read other articles by Kathy.

 

NDP Takes Orwellian World View to Deny My Candidacy

by Yves Engler / December 10th, 2025

Up is down. Right is left. International law is whatever empire says it is. Democracy is following our rules.

The audacity, chauvinism and absurdity of the NDP vetting committee is a sight to behold. To justify denying party members the right to choose whether they want me to lead the party, the three-person backroom committee is citing “democracy”.

In their evidence rejecting my candidacy they claimed, “Many of your public positions contradict the NDP’s core commitments to democracy, international law, and solidarity with oppressed peoples”. Leaving aside the ridiculousness of ‘vetters’ claiming the mantle of democracy, I have done as much as any other to challenge Canada’s role in overthrowing elected governments. I co-authored a book about the 2004 coup in Haiti and have discussed Canada’s role in ousting Patrice Lumumba, Mohammed Mossadegh and Salvador Allende. My latest (co-authored) book, Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy, details Ottawa’s role in 20 US-backed coups.

As I detailed in Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada, the NDP ignored Canada’s role in ousting Mossadegh. Even more the party effectively backed Canada’s contribution to overthrowing democracy in Congo in 1960 and seeking to do so in Venezuela in 2019.

Claiming that my positions contradict “solidarity with oppressed peoples” is a grotesque mischaracterization. I’ve written books about Canada’s role in subjugating people in Africa, Haiti and Palestine. My activism has aggressively challenged Canada’s role in the holocaust in Gaza.

As part of these efforts, I’ve repeatedly pointed out how the NDP has failed to offer “solidarity with oppressed people”. The party formally backed the racist Core Group in Haiti and until recently participated in the pro-apartheid Canada Israel Interparliamentary Group.

Claiming that my positions contradict international law is also absurd. In fact, over the past two decades, few have criticized Canada’s violations of international law more.

Among other things, I have written about how Canadian sanctions often violate international law. In 2020 I wrote “Do Canada’s unilateral sanctions violate international law?” and have supported various initiatives questioning the legality of Canadian sanctions. For its part, the NDP has repeatedly backed Ottawa imposing unilateral sanctions and seems to have entirely ignored whether unilateral sanctions violate international law.

I’ve written about how Canada’s support for Israeli and US policy has enabled those countries’ to violate international law. Too often the NDP has been silent in these violations of international law.

I have also written about how Canada’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which wasn’t sanctioned by the UN Security Council, contravened international law. The NDP backed Canada’s significant contribution to NATO’s 78-day bombing, only turning critical over a month after it began.

Unlike Yugoslavia, the Security Council sanctioned intervention in Libya through resolutions 1970 and 1973. Still, the scope of the Canadian-led NATO bombing violated those resolutions. Additionally, Canadian special forces and private security firm GardaWorld’s presence in Libya directly contravened the UN resolutions.

The NDP voted twice in Parliament to attack Libya. Party interim leader Nycole Turmel also applauded the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, which was a war crime and part of NATO’s violation of resolutions 1970 and 1973.

During the first official NDP leadership debate on November 27 not a single question about international affairs or Mark Carney’s radical militarism was asked. The NDP has no lessons to give on international law or solidarity with oppressed people. Blocking party members from choosing a candidate in the name of upholding “democracy” is simply Orwellian.

Please email the NDP Federal Council and urge them to overturn this anti-democratic decision and allow Yves Engler to run.

• See also “The Highest Form of Democracy: The Grassroots Campaign of Yves Engler.”

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Yves Engler is the author of 13 books. His latest book coauthored with Owen Schalk is Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy. Read other articles by Yves.

Cañada Must Arrest Israeli War Criminals

by Karin Brothers / December 8th, 2025

Prime Minister Carney:

It is time for Canada to display some integrity in upholding international law, particularly when it comes to the most flagrant international scofflaw, Israel.

Up until now, Canada seems to have been supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians with supplies of weaponry and Israel’s criminal apartheid of Palestinians, along with its documented torture, rape, and organ theft with political cover and a refusal to condemn the most heinous crimes.

I believe I am speaking for the majority of Canadians who are appalled by Canada’s shameful support of Israeli criminals and, by its refusal to follow its obligations, making international law meaningless.  Canada has legal obligations under many agreements of international law, including the Convention against Genocide and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Fourth Geneva Convention guarantees basic human rights to civilians under military occupation by putting signatories (including Canada) under a contractual legal obligation to arrest and ensure that those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity against those civilians are held accountable.  Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni were responsible for crimes against Palestinians in the horrific Cast Lead attacks in Gaza: they must be made accountable.

Canada must respect the key laws that protect everyone’s most basic human rights; ignoring them is criminal.

Karin Brothers, Toronto

Hind Rajab Foundation files complaint in Canada demanding arrest of ex-Israeli officials over Gaza war crimes
Pro-Palestine rights groups are urging Ottawa to detain Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act

3 December 2025

The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), the Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights (CLAIHR), and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) have formally petitioned Canadian authorities to detain former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni upon their arrival in Toronto on 3 December….

The organizations say Canada is obliged to investigate suspects who enter its jurisdiction and are calling for police to open a case and issue warrants for both officials…

Gaza families receive mutilated remains of loved ones as Israel withholds forensic records
The UN has determined Israel maintains a ‘de facto state policy of organized torture’ as Gaza officials say bodies returned by the occupation army are often bound, stitched open, or missing organs

4 December 2025

(Photo credit: Mahmoud Issa/Reuters)

Palestinian families searching for closure say the bodies returned by Israel over recent months arrived in Gaza in such disfigured condition that many could barely be identified, deepening their grief and raising fears about what happened to their relatives in custody, Palestinians revealed to the Middle East Eye (MEE) on 3 December.

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, staff received hundreds of bodies that were “frozen, numbered, and silent,” with many bearing severed fingers, missing toes, long stitched incisions, and, in several cases, signs of restraint and blunt-force trauma….

Gaza’s Government Media Office formally accused Israel of stealing organs from Palestinians after 120 mutilated bodies were returned during the recent ceasefire, saying many arrived blindfolded, bound, crushed, or missing corneas, livers, and limbs. Officials in Gaza called for an international investigation, warning that the scale and condition of the remains pointed to systematic abuse….

Israel has confirmed that in the 1990s, its state forensic institute harvested corneas, skin, bones, and heart valves from Palestinians and others without family approval.

*****

The Hamas actions on Oct. 7, 2023, in context, were “justifiable and long overdue”.
— Richard Falk Professor Emeritus of International Law and former UN Special Rapporteur for the oPt

“If Hamas loses, we all lose.”
— Former U.N. senior human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber noting Hamas’s support for international law.

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Karin Brothers is a freelance writer. Read other articles by Karin.