17/06/2024
Keep writing to your elected officials! Don’t stop! Every letter makes a difference.
Feel free to use excerpts or the entirety of my recent letter to Christopher Luxon if it's helpful: posted below. There are also email templates you can use from Humanti Project
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Kia ora Christopher Luxon,
My name is Katherine Wyeth and I am a theatre and film practitioner based in Wellington, NZ.
I am reaching out to you to implore you to take meaningful action to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
I have just learned that this month the NZDF will be training with the IDF in Hawai’i. I am utterly appalled by this. Israel is actively committing mass slaughter of the civilian population of Gaza. And NZ is going to participate in training with the soldiers who are currently committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Here are some of the documented actions of the IDF soldiers:
Children as young as 5 years old shot in the head and chest: deliberately targeted by IDF snipers…
Chris McGreal for the Guardian: “Doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war
IDF soldiers grotesquely posing in the underwear of murdered and displaced Palestinian women… posing riding the toy bikes of murdered and displaced Palestinian children…
Times of India: “Soldiers pose with lingerie”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjN95U2QPRE
This is horrific and utterly unacceptable. Please do not allow NZDF soldiers to be tainted by association with IDF as they actively commit genocide.
Do you realise that every humanitarian organisation on this planet concurs that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people?
Do you remember Hind Rajab: the little 6 year old child who managed to call the Red Crescent to beg for help before she was killed by the IDF? “I’m so scared. Please come and take me” she sobbed. A defenceless 6 year old child. Unarmed. Alone. Terrified. Surrounded by her murdered family. Slaughtered by the IDF, along with the brave Red Crescent paramedics who rushed to try and rescue her.
This is the recording of Hind’s final phone call. Please listen to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGh9fqcty0g
Can you bear it? Hearing this little girl’s pleas? My son is 6 years old: the same age as Hind was when she was murdered. Hind could be my child. All of Gaza’s thousands of murdered children could be my children. They could be yours. Aside from the death toll, 19,000 children have been orphaned. Each of these children lie each night bereft, crying for their mama, their papa - whose embrace they will never know again. There are over 17,000 children in Gaza who are totally unaccompanied. Many have lost every member of their family. Little children - displaced and homeless, living in tents, many grievously wounded, many with missing limbs: Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees in the World.
Israel commits war crime after war crime and is completely unchecked by political leaders worldwide:
Untold numbers of massacres of displaced civilian refugees sheltering in tents: burnt to ashes by targeted rocket strikes : 2000 pound bombs dropped on tents.
Deliberate targeting of hospitals. War crime. Israel has entirely destroyed every hospital in Gaza and brought the medical system to its knees. Children undergo amputations without anaesthesia in filthy conditions. It is hell on earth.
Please watch American surgeon Dr Samer Atter’s account of 2 weeks volunteering at a hospital in Northern Gaza:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/opinion/gaza-hospital-collapse.html
The multiple mass graves found in the ruins of the destroyed hospitals of Gaza: each one holding hundreds of corpses - medical workers, patients, children - some with their arms tied behind their backs with zip ties, others shot in the head, others burned. Executed civilians in mass graves…
Aljazeera: “Evidence of torture as nearly 400 bodies found in Gaza in mass graves”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/25/signs-of-torture-as-nearly-400-bodies-found-at-gaza-hospitals-mass-graves
Starvation as a weapon of war. War crime. Israel has been ordered to allow aid to flow in order to prevent genocide - a binding ruling by the ICJ, as they investigate the ‘plausible’ claim brought by South Africa that Israel is commiting genocide. But, Israel flagrantly ignores this order under international law and continues to deliberately block the flow of aid into Gaza, as they have done for 8 months - causing the fastest decline in the nutritional status of a population ever recorded. Half the population of Gaza: 1 million people, most of them children, face death by starvation by mid July this year. Hundreds of children have already died of malnutrition. This is a war against children.
Megan Stack for the New York Times: Starvation is Stalking Gaza’s children:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/gaza-israel-palestinians-starvation.html #
Will you stand by and do nothing as 1 million children starve? How do you think History will judge you for that?
Israel claims to want their hostages back - that the war will end with the return of the hostages. But this is a lie. Israel has rejected 12 ceasefire deals that would have guaranteed the return of their hostages, in exchange for a permanent ceasefire and the return of Palestinian hostages detained inside Israel. Israel does not care about getting their hostages back. Israel only cares about continuing their genocidal campaign to obliterate Palestine. Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinian children are held as hostages inside Israel: detained without charge, and often subject to violence and sexual torture.
Please read this extensive report by Save the Children on Palestinian children and what they experience inside Israel’s military detention system:
https://www.savethechildren.org.nz/assets/Files/Reports/INJUSTICE-Palestinian-childrens-experience-of-the-Israeli-military-detention-system-SC-July-2023.pdf
Sde Teiman for CNN: “Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html
NZ is a signatory to the Genocide convention and has a legal obligation under international law to prevent genocide. But you, our leader are in fact aiding and abetting genocide.
Christopher Luxon, you cannot plead ignorance in the years to come. You know that this is genocide. You have known from the beginning. The people know that you know.
Owen Jones - The Guardian: “As the ICC seeks arrests, I ask those who facilitated the Gaza slaughter: what were you thinking?”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/22/international-criminal-court-seeks-arrests-israel-hamas-gaza
Here are my questions for you and the NZ government:
Why are NZDF soldiers participating in training with IDF soldiers in Hawai’i this month, despite incontrovertible evidence that IDF soldiers have been and are engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity?
Why hasn’t the NZ government investigated Rakon? It has been attested that NZ company Rakon makes weapons components that are sent to Israel to be used in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. When are you going to investigate these claims?
What are NZ troops doing in the Red Sea? Are they protecting the shipping routes that allow the flow of weapons to Israel: weapons that are being used in an active and ongoing genocide? If this is the case you do realise that this makes NZ actively complicit in genocide and therefore guilty of severe crimes under international law?
Why hasn’t the NZ government granted humanitarian visas for families of NZ citizens? When National were in opposition they criticised Labour for failing to grant humanitarian visas to the families trapped in Ukraine who were related to NZ citizens after 14 days of Russia's invasion into Ukraine. We are over 8 months into Israel’s invasion and genocide in Gaza and National have not granted humanitarian visas to the families trapped in Gaza who are related to NZ citizens. What a shocking double standard.
Why hasn’t NZ joined South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ?
When will Winston Peters announce an increase in funding to UNRWA?
Why hasn’t the NZ government placed sanctions on Israel?
Why hasn’t the NZ government expelled the Israeli ambassador?
Why hasn’t the NZ government called on the US to stop arming Israel?
Why don’t you agree with international experts such as Raz Segal: Israeli Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, Stockholm University, who are calling this a textbook case of genocide?
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/16/raz_segal_textbook_case_of_genocide
Why don’t you take meaningful action to prevent this horrific genocide, Christopher Luxon? Do you fear being accused of anti-semitism? I am Jewish myself. I have many Jewish relatives and Jewish ancestors. There is nothing Jewish about seeking to exterminate the Palestinian people. This is utterly antithetical to Jewish principles: as millions of Jewish peace activists around the World will attest.
Alongside my grief and horror at the unimaginable suffering of the Palestinian people, I also feel enormous sadness and anger at what I see as the erasure of Jewish identity, Jewish virtue and Jewish resilience. It is an abhorrent subversion of victimhood and a cynical weaponisation of the symbolic historical oppression of Jews - where people are so fearful of seeming to be anti semitic that they are willing to be apologists for and also literally aid and abet a genocide. Do not be brow beaten by the depraved lie that it is anti-semetic to decry the monstrous actions of the State of Israel.
It is an aberration to commit genocide in the name of a people who have suffered genocide - and a terrible, deep insult and moral injury to the survivors of the holocaust - and indeed to the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered by the Third Reich.
We must use all leverage and power to demand a permanent ceasefire and a free Palestine. Recognise the State of Palestine. Divest from all trade ties with Israel. Sanction Israel. Call this nightmare what it is. This is genocide.
Please don’t look away. Please take action immediately. 1 million children are starving to Death in Gaza. Man-made starvation. You can help to prevent their suffering and death. There is no time to wait.
Yours Sincerely,
Katherine Wyeth
Psna Palmerston North Justice for Palestine Palestinian Youth Aotearoa Aotearoa Healthcare Workers for Palestine
