Iranian news outlet Press TV called the detention of its West Bank correspondent Naqaa Hamed by the Israeli forces an “aggressive terrorist operation” aimed at silencing the truth about its occupation and genocide of Palestinians. It demanded the immediate intervention of the international community for her release.
“The desperate attempt by the Zionist war and security machine to block the flow of free news and boycott structured crimes in the West Bank is clear evidence of the occupier’s fear of independent” reporters “who expose widespread human right violations,” the Press TV statement, published on Thursday, September 17, said.
Naqaa Hamed was abducted by the Israeli armed forces from a checkpoint at Tuqu, near Bethlehem, in the occupied Palestinian territory on September 15.
She, along with her cameraman, were returning after reporting about rising Israeli settler violence on Palestinians in Masafer Yatta.
One eyewitness, a TRT journalist accompanying Hamed in her car, claimed that they were detained at the checkpoint and made to sit on the ground for 45 minutes while Hamed was taken alone for interrogation.
After the interrogation, cameraman and TRT journalists were let go but Hamed was arrested and sent to an unknown location.
Later it was reported that her detention has been extended until September 23 by an Israeli court.
Though no official confirmation has come forward about the charges against Hamed, Israeli media quoted unidentified military sources claiming her arrest was linked to her alleged cooperation with “the enemy entity,” presumably Iran, and espionage.
Hamed (38), a Palestinian-American and mother of three children, has been subjected to repeated physical attacks by Israeli forces in the last few months. She has also been subjected to a smear campaign on social media.
According to Press TV, rubber bullets were fired at her when she was reporting near Qalandia camp in December 2025. She was injured again in August this year by an Israeli stun grenade and tear gas fire.
The intimidation and smear campaigns on social media, started by pages affiliated with the Israeli occupation regime, targeted Hamed by questioning her credibility and calling her a part of the “Iranian propaganda machine.”
Israel has one of the worst records when it comes to killing and arresting journalists. Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have been either killed or arrested by the Israeli occupation forces since the beginning of the war and genocide in Gaza.
According to various sources Israel has killed over 250 journalists and media workers in the West Bank and Gaza since October 2023.
According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, currently nearly 40 Palestinian journalists are in Israeli detention, including five women. Almost half of these journalists are kept in prison under the draconian provision of Administrative Detention, which allows the authorities to keep them in jail for an indefinite period without any formal charges or trial.
The Iranian media channel Press TV underlined that Hamed’s arrest by Israeli forces violates international laws about immunity to journalists in war zones. It demanded the UN, its High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other international human rights groups to come out of their “shell of inaction and meaningful silence” and take measures to end Israel’s impunity.
“As long as responsible institutions remain in the shell of silence and inaction, Naqaa Hamed will not be the first, nor the last journalist to be targeted by the illegal actions of the Zionist regime,” the Press TV statement said.
Health is always a prominent topic at Belgium’s ManiFiesta, a two-day festival organized by the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) in the beginning of September. Discussions range from the organization of health services or workshops led by progressive health organizations like Medics for the People (MPLP-GVHV) and Viva Salud. This September, the program covered local priorities such as health coverage and hospital reform – along with Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza’s healthcare system and the threat of militarization across Europe.
Addressing the question of why health workers should be concerned by Europe’s armament drive, Juliette Mattijsen of the People’s Health Movement (PHM), Nadja Rakowitz of the Association of Democratic Doctors (vdää*) in Germany, and Tim Joye of Medics for the People emphasized the different ways hospitals, health centers, and medical studies are being reshaped.
Not only are governments imposing cuts on health budgets to enable increased defense spending, as Mattijsen illustrated – some are structurally changing what the health system is supposed to be about.
As the Merz administration in Germany rushes to build Europe’s mightiest army, Rakowitz explained, it is tabling plans for underground hospitals and an overhaul of triage systems. The goal of these reforms is supposedly to ensure wounded soldiers – from a battlefield that still only exists in the imagination of regional politicians – are cared for swiftly and returned to combat as soon as possible. In Belgium, Joye added, plans are being circulated to introduce war medicine into medical school curricula, and professional congresses have made this their topic of choice.
If European governments have their way, the speakers warned, health systems in the region will increasingly lose their focus on patients and add further strain on service provision. To prevent this, the panel suggested, health workers themselves – nurses, doctors, dentists, and others – must mobilize and actively oppose this dangerous trend.
At another panel hosted by Viva Salud, the focus shifted to Palestine. Gaza’s health services have been militarized by the Israeli occupation, which has turned health infrastructure and workers into direct targets.
Sama Jaber of the Awda Association and Hanne Bosselaers, a Medics for the People general practitioner who participated in the 2025 solidarity flotillas to Gaza, focused their interventions on the relevance of organizing and providing healthcare under occupation.
In Palestine, Jaber pointed out, the formation of medical practitioners is a collective feat. By persevering in their work during a genocide, health workers in Gaza are now giving back to the communities who accompanied them along the way. “Being a health worker in Palestine today means sharing genocide conditions, but also upholding the right to health,” she said.
For Bosselaers, the steadfastness of Palestinian comrades has been an inspiration since her first visits to Gaza approximately 15 years ago and the twinning process she supported with a health center in Beit Hanoun. Today, she emphasized, Israeli attacks have leveled Beit Hanoun to the ground – yet health workers have not given up their work.
Doctors and other health workers in Europe need to recognize this unbreakable spirit, Bosselaers said, and support their peers by joining movements at home. This should mean standing by Palestinians’ demands for liberation, she added, but also joining networks struggling against other forms of attack on healthcare: opposing commercialization, austerity, and militarization.
Health workers around the world should direct their efforts into directly supporting the health system in Palestine, the panelists pointed out. This does not mean replacing hospitals with large international NGO operations or flying in and taking over, Bosselaers insisted, as is often seen in humanitarian medicine. Instead, she and Jaber suggested, the priority should be mobilizing against the occupation and campaigning for an end to Israel’s impunity.
In this, they echoed Palestinian physician and political leader Mustafa Barghouti, who addressed the panel through a video message. Barghouti invited health workers in Europe to stand firm in their support of Gaza, particularly by supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns. By doing so, he said, they will also recognize the efforts of their peers in Palestine, who are doing more than healthcare today, “helping people persevere in their steadfastness.”
As the genocide continues, Barghouti insisted, health workers in occupied Palestine know their efforts are directed at supporting people in remaining on their land – starting from the most common health procedures. “If you help a woman safely deliver a baby,” he said, “you’re helping her stay in Palestine.”
People’s Health Dispatch is a monthly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.
Latin America and the Caribbean countries are being re-colonized. This time it is not by Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Portugal, but by the United States.
At a period of time the United States had an anti-colonial position and had advocated for the ending of colonialism. That was one of the features of the Monroe Doctrine that has become somewhat obscured since the US became so bellicose.
Today, in a de facto way it has become a super colonial power. It is imposing its will on regions and countries. Those that stand up for their rights are sanctioned, destabilized and sometimes physically removed.
The fact that it used its military might to kidnap a sitting president, President Maduro of Venezuela, is a clear indication that the United States has decided to ignore international law and to get its own way.
Strikingly, only the President of Brazil protested vigorously. Our Caribbean leaders have generally been tight lipped.
The United States has gone even further. They have, using the guise of fighting drugs, established a strong military presence in the region. They have been murdering hundreds of persons traveling in small boats in the Caribbean. Without producing a scintilla of evidence, without attempting to board the boats and get evidence, the US just killed the occupants. We may never know if any were really involved in drug trafficking.
There has been a deafening silence from Latin America and the Caribbean leaders to those atrocities. As if these events were not enough, many of the governments in the region are, on the request/orders from the United States, acting against their countries’ best interests. The ending of the cooperation in health with Cuba which was in place for more than fifty years and which benefited millions of the region’s citizens, is a case in point.
That has left a massive gap in the health sector of the region. The US has not provided any assistance to help with the dislocation and shortage of technical personnel created by their insistence to remove Cubans.
The US is now also pressing regional governments to stop doing business with China. Many governments are beginning to comply with those orders as we see more big contracts going to US companies, despite some of those companies having poor performance records.
If some newspaper stories are to be believed, (and they have not been countered) in some cases Chinese contractors won bids for certain projects, but they were not given the jobs, they went to US firms instead.
The US and other Western countries have ignored us and kept us in a state of underdevelopment since independence. Now that we are getting assistance from China to build important and much needed infrastructure to facilitate socio-economic progress we are getting push back from the US.
It appears that they want to keep us in a state of perpetual underdevelopment and in poverty.
We see the open intention to super exploit our natural resources and labor for the benefit of big business in the US. They are mainly interested in our natural resources. They do not add value in the region nor establish any type of manufacturing. Those are reserved for the rich, developed countries.
The recent “deal” with Venezuela is worse than highway robbery. Venezuela has to provide oil and gas to US companies at cost for one hundred years. This is barefaced robbery and has demonstrated that Venezuela is now a de facto colony of the US. This will not benefit the poor in the US. It is designed to enrich the huge corporations.
Venezuela was forced to abandon its long and well-known principle of standing in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine. It is now forced to recognise the Fascist, Apartheid Israeli regime that continues to bomb defenseless civilians in makeshift camps in Gaza, the West Bank (where ethnic cleansing is taking place) and in East Jerusalem.
Today the sovereignty of our countries is already severely compromised. If we don’t stand up now it would be completely lost.
Donald Ramotar is a former President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (2011-2015).
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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