分类： politics

Manila, the Philippines — A chaotic eruption of gunfire inside the Philippine Senate this week has plunged the country’s already fractured political landscape into open crisis, capping a weeks-long standoff over an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for a close ally of former president Rodrigo Duterte and exposing the deepening rift between the country’s two most powerful political dynasties.

The crisis centers on Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, one of Duterte’s most loyal long-time associates. As chief of the Philippine National Police from 2016 to 2018, dela Rosa served as the public face of Duterte’s brutal nationwide war on drugs, a campaign that left thousands of suspected drug users and small-scale dealers dead. Human rights organizations have documented hundreds of cases of extrajudicial summary executions during the crackdown, leading the ICC to open a crimes against humanity investigation into the campaign.

The ICC unsealed its arrest warrant for dela Rosa on Monday this week, coinciding with the senator’s first appearance on the Senate floor after months of unexplained absence from public life. The development came months after Duterte himself was taken into custody and transferred to The Hague in March 2025 to face his own ICC charges connected to the drug war. Though Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the ICC during his presidency in 2019, the tribunal has maintained it retains jurisdiction over crimes committed before the withdrawal, including thousands of drug war deaths that dated back to Duterte’s time as mayor of Davao City.

Within days of the warrant being made public, dela Rosa sought protective refuge within the Senate, filing a petition with the Philippine Supreme Court to block local authorities from executing the ICC’s order. On Wednesday, the high court rejected his request for an immediate temporary restraining order, giving President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s administration 72 hours to submit its official response to the petition.

Hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling, dela Rosa took to Facebook Live to issue a public appeal, warning supporters he had received intelligence that authorities were en route to arrest him. “I am calling for your help: let us not have another Filipino brought to The Hague like President Duterte,” he told viewers. Roughly 60 minutes later, multiple gunshots rang out on the Senate’s second floor, triggering panic across the complex.

Chaotic scenes unfolded live on national television: journalists and legislative staff scrambled for cover, the entire Senate building was placed under immediate lockdown, and heavily armed security personnel in flak jackets cordoned off the entire premises. Initial conflicting accounts emerged over the source of the gunfire: Senate Secretary Mark Llandro Mendoza told local reporters that agents from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) had attempted to enter the building and fired shots while retreating. But NBI director denied the claim, stating no agents had been deployed to the Senate that day.

Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla later entered the building to meet with legislative leaders, and emerged alongside newly installed Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano to confirm no injuries were reported. The pair confirmed shots had been fired but declined to name potential perpetrators, noting an official investigation was still ongoing. By the following morning, police announced they had detained at least one person in connection with the shooting. President Marcos addressed the nation in a YouTube video shortly after the incident, calling for calm and promising a full probe. “We will get to the bottom of this… Was this encounter part of destabilisation? We will need to know,” he said.

The gunfire incident is the most visible escalation of a rapidly worsening political power struggle between the Marcos and Duterte political clans, an alliance that collapsed spectacularly after the two groups won the 2022 national election in a landslide. Just this week, the House of Representatives — where Marcos allies hold a majority — voted to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte, Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter and Marcos’ top political rival, over allegations of corruption and plots to assassinate the president. The articles of impeachment were formally transmitted to the Senate on the same day the shooting occurred, and the chamber will now act as an impeachment court with the power to remove Sara Duterte from office and bar her from running for president in the 2028 election.

Dela Rosa’s surprise return to the Senate this week also upended the chamber’s power balance: his presence helped secure enough votes to install Cayetano — a former Duterte foreign minister and vice presidential running mate — as the new Senate president. The 24-member Senate is now controlled by a majority bloc composed of dela Rosa and other Duterte allies, leaving Marcos-aligned senators in the minority. The overlapping crises of the ICC arrest standoff, impeachment trial, and now the Senate shooting have brought long-simmering tensions between the two dynasties to a head, leaving the Philippines facing one of its most unstable political periods in recent history.

In a development that overlaps with a high-stakes diplomatic visit to China by former U.S. President Donald Trump, multiple vessels connected to China passed through the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz within a 24-hour window this week, adding a new layer of complexity to already tense global discussions around the ongoing Iran conflict. The most closely monitored of these vessels is a Chinese-owned supertanker loaded with two million barrels of Iraqi crude oil. Ship tracking data confirms the tanker completed its passage through the strait on Wednesday, before disabling its automatic identification system transponder while navigating the Gulf of Oman — a move that has drawn heightened international attention to its movements.

The Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important chokepoint for global oil and gas trade, has emerged as the central flashpoint in escalating tensions between Iran and the United States. In a bid to assert full territorial authority over the waterway, Iran has moved to impose transit tolls on commercial vessels passing through the strait, while the U.S. has enforced a sweeping blockade banning any vessels with ties to Iran — or ships that have paid Iran the required transit fee — from global shipping markets. Open-source intelligence analysts, working with publicly available maritime tracking data, confirmed that a total of six other Chinese-linked vessels completed their transit of the strait just one day before the supertanker’s passage. That group included five oil tankers and one vessel carrying liquefied petroleum gas. As of this reporting, there is no public confirmation confirming whether any of the Chinese-linked vessels paid the required toll to Iran, though Iranian authorities have previously publicly confirmed they accept Chinese yuan as a valid form of payment for transit fees.

The timing of these transits coincides with Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday, kicking off a two-day official visit to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. While negotiations over bilateral business and trade agreements between the world’s two largest economies top the official agenda, the escalating conflict over Iran and the status of the Strait of Hormuz are expected to dominate behind-the-scenes discussions. Speaking to reporters ahead of his departure for Beijing, Trump acknowledged that Iran would feature prominently in his talks with Xi, even as he downplayed the need for Chinese cooperation to reach a favorable deal for the U.S. with the Iranian government. “We have a lot of things to discuss. I wouldn’t say Iran is one of them, to be honest with you, because we have Iran very much under control,” Trump told reporters ahead of the trip.

U.S.-China relations are already defined by broad systemic competition, with the two global powers vying for influence in areas ranging from artificial intelligence innovation to critical mineral supply chains and cross-strait relations around Taiwan. U.S. policy has failed to force Iran into submission on nuclear and regional security issues, a development that has been quietly welcomed by Beijing, but China has not remained a passive bystander to the conflict. According to exclusive reporting from Middle East Eye, the first outlet to break the story, China supplied advanced air defense systems to Iran in the aftermath of the June 2025 conflict between Iran and Israel, which concluded with U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure. MEE further reported that on the eve of a planned February 2026 attack, China delivered kamikaze drones to Iranian forces. These reports were later corroborated by The New York Times, which confirmed shipments of Chinese shoulder-fired air defense systems arrived in Iran this past April. The Financial Times has also reported that Iranian forces used a sophisticated Chinese surveillance satellite to target U.S. military bases stationed across the Gulf region.

Despite its military and logistical support for Iran, experts note that Beijing’s core strategic goal remains a negotiated resolution to the conflict that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to full commercial traffic, a move critical to stabilizing global energy markets on which China’s economy depends. “China and the US are aligned in opposing Iran having a nuclear weapons and seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened,” Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow at Chatham House and head of the China Studies research unit at the Emirates Policy Center, told Middle East Eye.

This aligns with recent public diplomatic moves from Beijing. Chinese state media confirmed on Wednesday that China’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, urged Pakistan to expand its mediation efforts between Iran and the United States in a call with Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar on Tuesday. Wang emphasized the need to resolve the issue of the strait’s reopening “properly”, adding that “China will continue to support Pakistan’s mediation efforts and make its own contribution toward this end,” according to China’s official state news agency Xinhua.

A groundbreaking new report released by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) has leveled serious allegations against Israel, claiming the country operates a far-reaching, deeply rooted covert influence campaign across Canada – and that the Canadian federal government has so far declined to classify these activities as foreign interference. The advocacy group has put forward a slate of urgent policy recommendations, urging Ottawa to formally name Israel as a high-priority foreign threat actor on par with nations like China and India, expel Israeli diplomatic personnel, and impose a full ban on Israeli-manufactured spyware.

In the 187-page report, CJPME argues that while cross-national lobbying in pursuit of national interest is a standard global practice, Israeli activities in Canada cross critical ethical and legal lines due to their consistent lack of public disclosure. The report lays out five detailed, documented case studies of covert operations, all structured to reshape Canadian public opinion, bend regulatory policy, and manipulate media narratives through hidden local intermediaries. CJPME’s findings draw on corroborating reporting from respected Canadian and international outlets, including Canadian investigative newsroom The Breach, left-leaning investigative site Press Progress, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Israeli outlet Haaretz, and The New York Times.

The first documented incident centers on undisclosed polling conducted in the weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on southern Israel. According to the report, Toronto-based public relations firm Aurora Strategies carried out the poll on behalf of the Israeli consulate, without disclosing the Israeli government’s funding or involvement. The poll used intentionally biased framing to skew results in support of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and Liberal Party insiders reportedly discussed sharing the unpublished results directly with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office before its public release.

A second case dates back to a 2019 Canadian Federal Court ruling that labeled “Product of Israel” labeling for goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as misleading to consumers. The report confirms that Israel’s Ministry of Justice quietly contracted a Toronto-based law firm to intervene in the legal proceedings, with firm staff even drafting pre-written talking points for Canadian federal officials to use on the issue. The covert effort was designed to pressure the Canadian government to appeal the ruling and preserve the labeling system that benefits Israeli settlement producers.

Third, the report details so-called “propaganda junkets” organized by the Israeli government, which use Canadian domestic groups as unacknowledged proxies to fly Canadian politicians and other influential public figures to Israel on all-expense-paid trips. CJPME emphasizes that the lack of transparency around these trips enables hidden influence-building, noting that many unelected influential participants face no mandatory disclosure requirements comparable to elected lawmakers. The report draws a parallel to the 1985 ban on paid trips to Apartheid-era South Africa implemented by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, arguing that even full transparency would not erase the ethical harm of these covert trips – even as some Conservative MPs defied Mulroney’s voluntary ban decades ago.

The fourth case focuses on a large-scale disinformation operation uncovered in 2024, run by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs targeting Canadian audiences. According to the report, the Israeli government hired a Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm to build fake English-language websites – including one platform branded “United Citizens for Canada” – alongside hundreds of artificial intelligence-powered fake social media accounts generated using ChatGPT. These accounts spread anti-Muslim racist messaging framed as pro-Israel content, portraying Muslim communities as a threat to Western society as part of a broader Israeli strategy to suppress global pro-Palestinian advocacy beyond its borders. At the time the operation was uncovered, Canadian officials confirmed that they viewed the fake platforms as foreign interference and validated core elements of the allegations when raising concerns with Israeli authorities, but no public accountability measures have ever been implemented.

The final case outlined is what CJPME terms a campaign of transnational repression targeting Canadian activists who publicly criticize Israeli policy. The report documents that this campaign includes coordinated surveillance, ideological profiling, and doxxing – the public release of private personal information – of Palestinian solidarity organizers in Canada. In recent months, the report notes, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has pushed a narrative framing all opposition to Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza as tied to a conspiracy organized by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, has publicly called on the Canadian government to restrict specific civil liberties related to pro-Palestinian advocacy, which CJPME describes as open lobbying to curtail core Canadian democratic rights. To counter this surveillance effort, the report recommends a full ban on the purchase and use of Israeli spyware tools including NSO Group’s Pegasus, Cytrox’s Predator, and Paragon Solution’s Graphite, all of which have been used to track and target government critics globally.

Beyond the spyware ban, CJPME’s full set of recommendations calls on the Canadian government to leverage its existing legal and diplomatic tools to counter foreign interference, including expelling Israel’s ambassador to Canada and other implicated diplomatic staff, and imposing targeted sanctions on all actors involved in the covert influence campaigns. “A holistic approach to countering illicit Israeli influence will require holding Israeli state officials accountable while finding ways to discourage Canadian participation in these schemes,” the report concludes.

A coordinated smear campaign targeting high-profile British photographer and Southbank Centre chair Misan Harriman by right-wing UK news outlets has triggered an unprecedented wave of public complaints to the nation’s media regulator, shattering all previous records for public pushback against inaccurate press coverage.

The public complaint drive, organized by media accountability platform NewsCord, crossed the 50,000-submission mark in just 48 hours after launching, and has now collected more than 80,000 signatures demanding regulatory action. This total triples the earlier all-time high of roughly 25,000 complaints submitted to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) over Jeremy Clarkson’s 2022 defamatory column about Meghan Markle in *The Sun*, marking a historic moment for public demands for press accountability in the UK.

The campaign against Harriman, an Oscar-nominated photographer, long-time social justice activist and prominent pro-Palestine voice, erupted after he posted two pieces of content to social media earlier this month. First, he raised a factual question after a late April stabbing attack in London’s Golders Green: why had both police and most mainstream media outlets failed to mention that the attack included a third victim, a Muslim man, when coverage uniformly focused only on the two Jewish men stabbed later the same day? Second, he shared a short video reflecting on Reform UK’s strong local election performance, which included a contextual quote from iconic Jewish-American writer Susan Sontag about human behavior and political extremism.

Right-wing outlets distorted both posts to manufacture false accusations against Harriman. They labeled his factual observation about the unreported third victim a baseless “conspiracy theory,” despite clear evidence backing his claim: the Metropolitan Police’s official public statement about the attack only referenced two victims, and major outlets including Sky News, Channel 5 and the BBC all omitted the Muslim victim from their initial headlines. Outlets then took Sontag’s quote, pulled from Harriman’s video completely out of context, and falsely claimed he had compared Reform voters to Nazis.

Within a single week, four major right-wing outlets – *The Telegraph*, the Daily Mail, GB News and the Daily Express – published near-identical hit pieces repeating these false claims, with Reform UK MP Robert Jenrick publicly calling for Harriman to be removed from his post as chair of the publicly funded Southbank Centre.

The smear campaign has sparked widespread backlash across British public life. More than 250 high-profile celebrities have signed an open letter organized by the non-profit Good Law Project backing Harriman, with signatories including Gary Lineker, Louis Theroux, Annie Lennox, Greta Thunberg and Mark Ruffalo. As of press time, the open letter has gathered more than 15,000 total signatures from members of the public.

The open letter condemns the campaign as “entirely without foundation in fact,” noting its core goal is to “traduce and marginalise Misan” and send a warning to other public figures that speaking out on contentious issues will result in targeted harassment. It adds: “We believe that safeguarding freedom of expression is essential to a healthy democracy. And that trying to silence critics of Israel by smearing them as antisemitic does not protect Britain’s Jewish community.”

A separate cross-party group of 20 UK parliamentarians has also written to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to denounce the coordinated attack. The lawmakers note that outlets selectively edited Harriman’s words to “whipping up a furore to engineer an ever-growing environment of cancel culture,” adding that the campaign, led by right-wing media and backed by right-wing politicians, aims to close open debate and further marginalize minority communities. Signatories of the parliamentary letter include crossbench peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Labour MPs John McDonnell and Naz Shah, and Green Party co-leaders Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer. The letter also raises alarms about a growing trend of pressuring public institutions to cut ties with figures engaging in legitimate political discourse, a practice that deepens social division rather than fostering cohesion.

Nima Akram, founder of NewsCord, told Middle East Eye that the coordinated nature of the hit pieces is no accident: the outlets share a common political project focused on “weakening publicly-funded culture, attacking pro-Palestine voices, and using cultural figures as proxies for pressuring Labour into right-wing policy.” Akram stressed that Ipso has a clear responsibility to investigate the campaign, arguing that if the regulator cannot enforce its own accuracy rules against a misinformation drive of this scale, UK press regulation is effectively meaningless. If outlets are allowed to get away with defaming a Black pro-Palestine activist for asking a factually correct question and quoting a well-known writer, Akram said, it will set a dangerous precedent that creates a playbook for silencing all dissenting voices in public life.

For his part, Harriman pushed back against the smears, saying: “We have reached the point where truth itself is being crushed by the very institutions that are supposed to uphold it. I will never whisper about the oppressed. I stand with truth, I stand by my right to use my voice to help others.” A veteran social justice advocate, Harriman serves as an ambassador for Save the Children, was nominated for Amnesty UK’s People’s Human Rights Champion award, and has long advocated against genocide in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gaza. He is also widely known for his photography of pro-Palestine ceasefire marches, including a viral 2024 image of a Muslim man and a Jewish man holding a joint ceasefire sign that was auctioned to raise funds for Palestinian aid.

NewsCord is formally calling on Ipso to launch a full investigation into all four outlets involved in the smear campaign, and to require the outlets to issue public acknowledgements and corrections of their misleading reporting.