Wyre Davies Middle East correspondent@WyreDavies

Reporting from Damascus Gate, Jerusalem

Ruth Comerford BBC News

caption: Israeli police remove a right-wing activist in Jerusalem's Old City

Crowds of far-right Israelis chanted insults and assaulted Palestinians during an annual parade for Jerusalem Day on Monday.

Chants of "death to Arabs" and nationalistic slogans were repeated during the event, which commemorates Israeli forces taking Palestinian-majority East Jerusalem during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Violence broke out as ultranationalist Jews streamed into Palestinian areas of Jerusalem's walled Old City.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said the event had become a festival of "hatred and racism", adding it was "a disgrace and an insult to Judaism".

caption: Right-wing activists hold a banner saying "67 - Jerusalem in our hands; 2025 - Gaza in our hands"

Israeli police were deployed as violence broke out in the walled Old City of Occupied East Jerusalem shortly after midday.

Thousands of nationalist Israelis descended to Damascus Gate, one of the main entrances. Right-wing activists held banners that read "67 - Jerusalem in our hands; 2025 - Gaza in our hands".

Arab traders in the Muslim Quarter who had yet to close their shops were harassed by young Israeli men, witnesses said.

Chants of "May your village burn" and "Your home will be ours" were heard throughout the march.

Aggressive marchers were detained and removed from the Old City by Israeli police.

National security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, of the Jewish Power party, called for the death penalty for "terrorists" in an address to the crowds.

Gvir also visited the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam and known by Jews as the Temple Mount. Jews revere it as the location of two Biblical Temples and it is the holiest site in Judaism.

The compound is administered by a Jordanian Islamic trust. Jews are allowed to visit but not pray there.

A spokesman for the Palestinian presidency, based in the West Bank, condemned the march and Ben Gvir's visit to Al-Aqsa.

Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, "repeated incursions into the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and provocative acts such as raising the Israeli flag in occupied Jerusalem threaten the stability of the entire region," Nabil Abu Rudeineh said in a statement.

In a cabinet meeting on Monday morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to keep Jerusalem "united, whole, and under Israeli sovereignty".

caption: Israeli police detain an Israeli man near the the Al-Aqsa mosque

Left-wing opposition leader Yair Golan described images of violence in the Old City as "shocking".

"This is what hatred, racism and bullying look like," he said in a statement on X.

"We will fight for Jerusalem for all of us, Jews, Christians and Muslims, secular and religious.

"Jerusalem belongs to all those who love her. We will fight for her and restore her as a city for us all."

Lapid, another opposition leader, added: "There is nothing Jewish about this violence. The government ministers who remain silent in the face of these events are complicit in this disgrace."

Every year thousands of Israelis march a route through Jerusalem and the annexed Old City, ending at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray in Jerusalem. On Sunday, a large Israeli flag was unfurled at the Western Wall plaza.

The parade marks Israel's capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 war and the "unification" of a city that the Israeli government says is their eternal capital.

Palestinians also want Jerusalem as their future capital and much of the international community regards East Jerusalem as Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.

This year's Flag March again coincided with the war in Gaza and escalating Israeli military operations against Palestinian militants in the West Bank.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas's cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Fifty-seven are still being held, about 20 of whom are assumed to be alive.

At least 53,939 people, including at least 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory's health ministry.

caption: Israelis celebrate Jerusalem Day at Damascus Gate

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Young girl escapes burning Gaza school after Israeli attack

Writing Spotify, I was told by a member of their customer service team that the metadata for the album had changed, and that I should contact the album's distributor to see what happened.  The album is distributed for streaming by a company called CDBaby, and in my section of their website, everything appears to be in order, including Notes from a Holocaust and all of my other albums being listed for global distribution, with no restrictions.

I'm looking into this further and hoping there might be a way to get the album back up.  I was never notified that the album was being taken down, nor was I ever provided with an explanation when I wasn't notified.  Is it now illegal somewhere for the word "holocaust" to be in an album's name?  Did one of the song titles on the album violate the law somewhere?  Was it some of the lyrics?  Who knows, we're told nothing.

This unannounced album removal comes in the wake of what can only be called the active, ongoing suppression of my career on Facebook.  Presumably a practice instituted by Facebook management at some level, with or without instructions from who knows what possible government agency, for many months now my use of the "Invite" function has been basically disabled.  That is, it works about 3% of the time I try to use it.  But otherwise, regardless of what device I'm using, I am being systematically prevented from using this function to invite people to my concerts.

The impact that this is having would be hard to overstate.  I know Facebook is totally passe and nobody talks about it much anymore, but this horrible corporate monstrosity is still the biggest social media platform on the planet, and is still used actively by billions of people.  Around the world, most gig organizers that I work with still rely on Facebook Event pages as a principal element in their publicity efforts.  Before I was blacklisted from inviting people to my gigs on Facebook, this often worked well.  It's one of the only features on Facebook that's truly useful for promoting local events, and now it's no longer either useful or useable by me.  There is no question in my mind that audiences at some gigs have been smaller in recent months as a direct consequence of this suppression of my ability to use Facebook effectively.

Are Spotify and Facebook being told to do these things by someone, or are they blacklisting political artists and suppressing our careers because of some other motivation?

All that is obvious is someone somewhere is actively trying to suppress my work and its reach, both with regards to finding music online and with regards to finding my shows in the real world.  Whatever actor(s) are involved here, whether it's the corporate leaders of Spotify and Facebook, or people with the skills and access to systems to be able to do things like delete albums from my discography and prevent me from using the "Invite" function, the net result is the ongoing suppression of my career.

"It's a sign that you're doing something right," many people will say.  Yes, this is no doubt the case, and that is not the least bit consoling.  The reality is, not a single press outlet on the planet outside of the Arab world has taken any interest in the obvious and ongoing efforts by nefarious forces to suppress my career, so I'm left to blog about it myself -- one more shout into the void.

Posting about Spotify's removal of the album on various platforms, on Facebook the screen shot of the deleted album has gotten virtually no notice.  As usual, the only platform where me posting about anything has gotten seen by more than a tiny handful of people is X.

As I live through the experience of being constantly targeted for cancelation and suppression in so many different forms, far beyond what I've been describing thus far, I feel like I'm living through a more online version of the kind of experience artists had who were targeted to be "neutralized" by Cointelpro in decades past.

Again, there is no consolation in this, no feeling that it's a sign of me accomplishing anything.  I know too much to feel that way.  Cointelpro targeted a massively broad swath of the population -- you didn't need to be very special to be on their lists of targets for dirty tricks, suppression, disinformation, and cancelation.

What is most concerning to me about this kind of targeting, whether it's the targeting I'm experiencing, or that of other people, is what such revelations generate is generally nothing more than a little flurry of discussion among friends and comrades and reposts on X, and then the status quo of an artist being silenced continues.

That is to say, the fantasy I used to have that being targeted for suppression in obvious ways like this would always be a stupid thing for the powers-that-be to do because it would backfire, and get me or another artist lots more attention than we might otherwise have gotten, is just a fantasy.  It's not what's happening -- quite the opposite, in fact.

I have seen other artists get loads of press attention and grow their fanbase significantly as a direct consequence of getting attacked by rightwing media or having gigs canceled by such elements.  But that's not what has ever happened with me, and I suspect the reason for this has to do with what I'm singing about, and what most of them are not singing about -- Palestine.

But who knows, maybe I'm just paranoid.

You might think that pop music has lost the ability to generate real political controversies in its Anglo-American heartlands. The idea of a mainstream monoculture into which underground rock or rap artists can cross over has given way to a fractured landscape where even the biggest stars have to fight for people’s attention.

Instead of watching bands perform on Top of the Pops or MTV, everyone can generate their own customized playlist on Spotify or YouTube, ranging across time and space as they please. It’s hard to imagine the Sex Pistols or Public Enemy having the same impact in a digital age.

But the British political establishment has now demonstrated that you can still attract national attention by taking a stand, if that stand is against genocide in Gaza. Trumped-up charges of “supporting terrorism” against a member of Kneecap, the Irish-language rap group from Belfast, are a transparent attempt to punish Kneecap for defending the right of Palestinians to exist.

This exercise in lawfare comes just as the British government is trying to distance itself from the horrors that Israel has been inflicting upon the people of Gaza. A joint statement from the leaders of Britain, France, and Canada threatened “concrete actions” if Israel does not call off its murderous rampage in Gaza and allow humanitarian aid to enter.

The “abhorrent language” and “egregious actions” to which the statement refers have been defining characteristics of the Israeli attack on Gaza from the very start. The only people in British public life who can speak with any moral authority are the ones who have consistently opposed one of the century’s great crimes.

Keeping Your Head Down

There was a time when pop stars could oppose horrifying campaigns of mass murder without facing an orchestrated backlash. In 1995, U2 released one of their best songs, “Miss Sarajevo,” a collaboration with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti that was intended to draw people’s attention to the destruction of Bosnia by Serb nationalist forces. The lyrics began with a set of rhetorical questions:

Is there a time for keeping your distance?

A time to turn your eyes away?

Is there a time for keeping your head down?

For getting on with your day?

What might Bono have said about a globally popular musician who went to Belgrade to receive an award from Slobodan Milošević while Sarajevo was still under siege? Would that have been morally worse than “keeping your head down” or “getting on with your day”?

The U2 singer made a trip of his own to Washington in January this year so that Joe Biden could give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the dying days of his administration. The relationship between Biden and the Israeli forces responsible for mass killing in Palestine was, if anything, more intimate and legally actionable than the relationship between Milošević and the Republika Srpska forces responsible for mass killing in Bosnia. That did not deter Ireland’s most famous rockstar from accepting Biden’s endorsement.

In an article for the Atlantic to mark the occasion, Bono briefly referred to “an obscene leveling of civilian life” in Gaza — a strange choice of verb, more commonly associated with the destruction of buildings than the death of human beings, and without the straightforward legal implications of “killing,” let alone “murdering.” Having identified “Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs” as the menace facing the people of Ukraine, Bono’s article refrained from mentioning the US-made guns and bombs that Israel’s military has been using to “level” Palestinians for the best part of two years. In any case, there was no talk of Gaza, however imprecise, when he received his bauble in the White House.

There was no talk of Gaza, however imprecise, when Bono received his bauble from Joe Biden in the White House.

In 1995, the author of “Miss Sarajevo” would probably have found it hard to imagine a UK tour involving a Serbian musician who had recently performed for his countrymen taking part in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. The Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood did his best to deliver a contemporary equivalent by arranging a series of concerts with the Israeli singer Dudu Tassa. In December 2023, when there was no room for doubt about the deliberate mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Tassa played to Israeli soldiers to help boost their morale before they returned to Gaza for another bout of war crimes.

When British venues canceled the Greenwood–Tassa gigs under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, the two musicians put out a statement presenting themselves as victims of “censorship and silencing,” displaying the kind of all-encompassing narcissism that might swallow a planet whole. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian reported on their complaints without bothering to mention Tassa’s service as a busker for genocide.

Unlike Bono or Greenwood, the members of Kneecap have not acquired vast personal fortunes from their time in the music industry, and the chances are they never will. The internet has transformed the economics of the business beyond recognition since the release of mega-selling albums like Achtung Baby and OK Computer. Besides, the market for an Irish-language hip-hop group with a sharp political edge is always going to be more limited than the audience for Anglophone stadium rock was during the 1980s and ’90s.

In other words, they have much more to lose if they’re prevented from touring and building on their (relatively modest) success to date. Those considerations didn’t stop the group from projecting the following message on a big screen during their set at the Coachella festival a month ago:

Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people: It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes.

Fuck Israel. Free Palestine.

The response they have faced on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in a police investigation, is an attempt to punish them for stating the facts about Israel’s conduct in Gaza with the appropriate degree of anger.

Playground Insults

In the wake of the Coachella display, supporters of Israel combed through Kneecap’s back catalogue of performances in search of something they could use to attack the band without having to acknowledge the charge of genocide, against which there is no credible defense. London’s Metropolitan Police have now accused Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who goes by the name “Mo Chara” (“my friend”) when performing, of waving a Hezbollah flag during a gig last November “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation.”

The members of the band have vowed to contest the charge in court: “We deny this ‘offense’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.” As such, they need to choose their words carefully and deal with the law as it is and not as they would like it to be. Others can speak more bluntly and point out that the entire premise of the case is a travesty. The British state has no moral standing to put anyone on trial for “supporting terrorism.”

In the lexicon of British politics, ‘terrorist’ is a playground insult with no objective meaning.

It shouldn’t matter if Ó hAnnaidh had expressed clear, enthusiastic support for Hezbollah, speaking at length in a way that left no room for misunderstanding. There should be no legal consequences whatsoever for speech of that kind, let alone for waving a flag. In the lexicon of British politics, “terrorist” is a playground insult with no objective meaning. It certainly has nothing to do with violence against noncombatants, since British governments have been happy to entertain Israeli politicians who are responsible for the mass killing of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

The people of West Belfast, the community that produced Kneecap, repeatedly elected Gerry Adams as their MP at a time when the British establishment considered him to be the physical embodiment of terrorism. During the same period, Britain’s state security forces were systematically collaborating with loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of sectarian killings.

Government ministers like the current Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn are still fighting to prevent the truth about state collusion from coming out, long after the Irish Republican Army ended its campaign and Adams became a regular guest at Downing Street and the White House. When British politicians and media commentators engage in strident moralizing about the evils of terrorism, the response of most people in West Belfast is to roll their eyes in contempt.

Every Second House

The week before the Metropolitan Police charged Ó hAnnaidh, London’s British Museum hosted a private party to celebrate the seventy-seventh anniversary of Israel’s foundation. The guests included Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage of Reform UK, and the Labour politician Maria Eagle, who was there to represent Keir Starmer’s government.

Eagle boasted that the Royal Air Force has been running surveillance flights over Gaza to assist the Israeli military. She claimed that this was “in support of hostage rescue efforts,” knowing perfectly well that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government couldn’t care less about the hostages in Gaza.

If a normal country had appointed Tzipi Hotovely as its representative, it would have been a public relations catastrophe.

The keynote speech at the event came from Netanyahu’s ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Hotovely is a boorish racist with no diplomatic skills whatsoever who has always denied the right of Palestine to exist. She once told an interviewer that Israel would have to destroy “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza. If a normal country had appointed her as its representative, it would have been a public relations catastrophe.

But this is Israel we are talking about, so the British political class has continued to fawn over her, no matter how many times she lashes out abusively at its own members. Her most recent gaffe was to accuse the London mayor Sadiq Khan of “spouting Hamas propaganda” when he noted that more than fifty thousand Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza. Khan did not even point the finger directly at the guilty parties, but his reference to “the appalling suffering and killing that continues in Sudan and Palestine” was too much for Hotovely to bear.

This would have been the clumsiest intervention of the month from Israel’s local auxiliaries were it not for the comments of Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, who claimed that starving the people of Gaza might be an act of kindness that leads to reduced obesity levels. Turner, whose group took legal action against the Starmer government when it imposed partial limitations on the supply of weapons to Israel, will certainly not be investigated by the Metropolitan Police for “supporting terrorism.”

Meanwhile, a coalition of human rights organizations has brought a case before the High Court in London to challenge the ongoing transfer of British-made components for F-35 warplanes that Israel is using to drop bombs on Gaza. Government lawyers claimed to have seen no evidence that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting civilians.

The court has heard testimony from Mark Perlmutter, a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza. Perlmutter reported having seen many dead or injured children whose wounds indicated that Israeli soldiers had carefully picked them out as targets:

For example, I evaluated two children that were snipered twice each. Both received central chest wounds and side of the head wounds which meant the child was shot a second time after they died and probably were already on the ground. These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately.

This is the “war” that the British state has been supporting with every tool in its kit, including the criminalization of domestic dissenters.

“He Could Not Keep Quiet”

The legal move against Kneecap came just days after the BBC shunted Gary Lineker out of his job as a TV presenter because he was too outspoken about the slaughter in Gaza. Lineker’s experience speaks volumes about the state of British public discourse when it comes to Israel, for two main reasons.

First of all, Lineker is the most congenial front man you could possibly imagine for a pro-Palestinian viewpoint. Those unfamiliar with his role in British culture might care to picture a cross between Tom Hanks and Michael Jordan. He famously went through his entire career as one of England’s greatest soccer players without acquiring a single booking for disciplinary infractions. After retirement, he became the jovial face of BBC sports coverage for the best part of thirty years.

Before Lineker started talking about Palestine, the most controversial incident in his whole career was probably the time when he honored a pledge to present Match of the Day in his underwear after Leicester City’s unlikely Premier League victory in 2016. None of this sufficed to protect him from sustained vilification as he made the abrupt shift from national treasure to hate figure of the right-wing press.

Secondly, Lineker is a useful case study because he is a liberal who does not make his living from the world of politics. Of course, Britain is full of people like that, but most of them do not have a national profile that brings their perspective to the attention of millions. Politicians, newspaper columnists, and the like tend to prefer the argument of power to the power of argument, so they are extremely reluctant to apply basic liberal principles to Israel’s track record for fear that it would lead them to the same conclusions as Lineker.

The pretext that BBC managers used for finally ousting Lineker would not even qualify as a fig leaf in a more serious public sphere. On his Instagram account, he shared a post that featured a short video of Canadian-Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu explaining what the Zionist state-building project has entailed for Palestinians. There was nothing remotely objectionable in what Buttu said. The account that reposted the video had placed a small emoji of a rodent outside the frame — it was easy to miss, even if the intention behind it was to conjure up old antisemitic imagery depicting Jews as rats, which was far from clear.

Gary Lineker is the most congenial front man you could possibly imagine for a pro-Palestinian viewpoint.

Lineker faced a barrage of criticism from detractors who accused him of circulating Nazi-style propaganda. He deleted the post and recorded a video apologizing for it, explaining that he had not seen the offending emoji, which was far more than he needed to do under the circumstances. As we have seen in so many similar cases, from Ilhan Omar to Jeremy Corbyn, Lineker’s critics merely banked the apology as a confession of guilt to the most extravagant charges while continuing to attack him.

There was a palpable sense of relief among senior BBC officials that they could now speed up Lineker’s departure while generating headlines that contained the term “antisemitism.” Articles discussing the end of Lineker’s BBC career studiously avoided mentioning the actual reason for it, which was understood by all. A sleazy, mendacious hit job from the BBC’s own media editor inadvertently stumbled upon the truth as it sought to present Lineker as the author of his own downfall: “He could not keep quiet. In the end, it brought him down.”

While pontificating about the urgent need for “impartiality,” even on the part of sports presenters as they speak in a personal capacity, the people who run the BBC have inflicted lasting damage on its reputation for producing serious journalism. Managers have given a single, egregiously partisan editor license to micromanage stories about Palestine for the world’s most popular news website.

Of course, the real issue here is not the bias of one person — it is the organizational structure that has allowed them to become so influential. At time of writing, the BBC is still refusing to broadcast a film it commissioned about the experience of medical workers in Gaza. Other British broadcasters have followed in the BBC’s footsteps, taking their line from a political class that has provided material support for genocide.

The Wrong Side of Justice

After Starmer issued his joint statement with Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney earlier this week, Netanyahu responded with a typically petulant and deceitful whine: “When mass murderers,removeds, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” It was a telling point, though not in the way that Netanyahu intended.

Since October 2023, he has unleashed a gang of sadistic killers on the people of Gaza, inciting them to commit horrific crimes. The main “concrete action” Western leaders should be discussing at this point in time is how to bring the Israeli leader to justice and ensure that he spends the rest of his life in a prison cell.

When a man like Netanyahu has good reason to thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice and the wrong side of history. Starmer and his allies will never be able to wash away the stain of complicity after what they have done.

"I was going to the market and asked Kyung-ha, 'Aren't you coming?' But she told me, 'No, I'm going to play with my friends'," recalled Ms Han.

"When I came back, she was gone."

Ms Han would not see her daughter again for more than four decades. When they reunited, Kyung-ha was almost unrecognisable as a middle-aged American woman named Laurie Bender.

Kyung-ha had been kidnapped near her home, brought to an orphanage, then sent illegally to the US to be raised by another family, alleges Ms Han, who is now suing the South Korean government for failing to prevent her daughter's adoption.

She is among the hundreds of people who have come forward in recent years with damning allegations of fraud, illegal adoptions, kidnapping and human trafficking in South Korea's controversial overseas adoption programme.

No other country has sent as many children abroad for adoption, and for so long, as South Korea. Since the programme began in the 1950s, about 170,000 to 200,000 children have been adopted overseas - most of them in the West.

In March, a landmark inquiry found that successive governments had committed human rights violations with their lack of oversight, allowing private agencies to "mass export" children for profit on an industrial scale.

Experts say the findings could open the door to more lawsuits against the government. Ms Han's is set to go to court next month.

It is one of two landmark cases. Ms Han is the first biological parent of an overseas adoptee seeking damages from the government, while in 2019, a man who was adopted in the US was the first adoptee to sue.

A government spokesman told the BBC that it "deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of individuals and families who could not find each other for a long time".

It added that it considered Ms Han's case with "deep regret" and that it would take "necessary actions" based on the outcome of the trial.

Ms Han, 71, told the BBC she is determined the government takes responsibility.

"I spent 44 years ruining my body and mind searching for [my daughter]. But in all that time, has anyone ever apologised to me? No one. Not once."

For decades, she and her husband visited police stations and orphanages, put up flyers, and went on television appealing for information. Ms Han said she spent all day pounding the streets looking for her daughter "till all 10 of my toenails fell out".

Over the years she thought she came close. In 1990, after one of her TV appeals, Ms Han met a woman who she believed could be Kyung-ha, and even took her in to live with her family for a while. But the woman eventually confessed she was not her daughter.

A breakthrough finally happened in 2019 when Ms Han signed up with 325 Kamra, a group that connects overseas Korean adoptees with their birth parents by matching their DNA.

They soon reported a match - Laurie Bender, a nurse in California. After several phone calls, she flew over to Seoul to meet Ms Han, where the two had a tearful reunion at the airport.

News1

Ms Han met her daughter again at Seoul's airport in 2019

News1

Ms Han ran her hands through her daughter's hair at their first reunion

As they embraced, Ms Han ran her fingers through Kyung-ha's hair. "I've been a hairdresser for 30 years. I can quickly tell if it's my daughter just by feeling her hair. I had mistakenly thought I found her before, so I had to touch and feel the hair to confirm it," she said.

The first thing she told her daughter was "I'm so sorry".

"I felt guilty because she couldn't find her way home when she was a child. I kept thinking about how much she must have searched for her mother… Meeting her after all those years made me realise how much she must have longed for her mother, and it broke my heart."

"It's like a hole in your heart has been healed, you finally feel like a complete person," Kyung-ha said about their reunion in an earlier interview with the Associated Press. She did not respond to the BBC's requests for an interview.

The pair eventually pieced together what happened on that day in May 1975.

Kyung-ha, who was six years old at the time, was playing near her home when she was approached by a strange woman claiming to know her mother. Kyung-ha was told her mother "didn't need" her any more and was taken to a train station.

After taking a train ride with the woman, Kyung-ha was abandoned at the final stop, where she was eventually picked up by police officers and placed in an orphanage. Soon, she was flown to the US to be adopted by a couple in Virginia.

Years later, checks revealed she was given false papers stating she was an abandoned orphan whose parents were unknown.

"It's like you've been living a fake life and everything you know is not true," Kyung-ha said previously.

Her case was far from an isolated one.

A 'trade in children' from Asia to the West

South Korea's overseas adoption programme began in the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War, when it was a deeply impoverished country with an estimated 100,000 orphaned and displaced children.

At that time, few families were willing to adopt non-biological children, and the government began an overseas adoption programme, billed as a humanitarian effort.

The programme was handled entirely by private adoption agencies. While they were under government oversight, over time these agencies gained significant autonomy through laws.

As their power grew, so did the number of children being sent abroad, rising in the 1970s and peaking in the 1980s. In 1985 alone, more than 8,800 children were sent overseas.

There was a massive demand from the West - with declining birth rates and fewer babies to adopt at home, families began seeking children elsewhere.

Photos from that era show planes heading to Western countries filled with Korean children, with swaddled babies strapped to seats – what the truth and reconciliation commission's inquiry called the "mass transportation of children like cargo".

The report alleges little care was taken of these children during these long flights. In one case it cited from 1974, a lactose-intolerant child was fed milk in transit and subsequently died upon arrival in Denmark.

Critics of the programme have long questioned why so many children needed to be sent overseas at a time when South Korea was already experiencing rapid economic growth.

A 1976 BBC Panorama documentary, which featured South Korea as one of several Asian countries sending children to the West, quoted an observer describing the situation as "out of control" and "almost like a trade in children… flowing from Asia into Europe and North America".

According to the truth and reconciliation report, foreign adoption agencies set quotas for children, which Korean agencies willingly fulfilled.

It was a profitable business - the lack of government regulation allowed the Korean agencies to charge large amounts and demand hidden fees termed as "donations".

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The commission's report included this photo of babies strapped into plane seats obtained from a Danish adoption centre's 1984 annual report

Some of these children may have been obtained by unscrupulous means, with parents like Ms Han alleging their children were kidnapped. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of homeless or unattended children were rounded up and put in orphanages or welfare centres as part of a national campaign to "clean up the streets" of South Korea.

Other parents were told their babies had fallen sick and died, when they were actually alive and taken to adoption agencies. Agencies also did not obtain proper consent from birth mothers to take their children for adoption, according to the truth and reconciliation report.

The report also stated that adoption agencies deliberately falsified information in adoption records to cut corners and quickly meet the demand for children.

Lost children who were found without any identity documents would be made to appear, in paperwork, as if they had been abandoned and put up for adoption.

If a child intended for adoption had died or was reclaimed by their birth parents, another child would be swapped in and assigned the original child's identity. This allowed agencies to avoid refunding adoption fees and expedite the adoption process.

Decades on, this has created immense difficulties for many overseas adoptees trying to track down their biological parents.

Some have wrong or missing information in their adoption records, while others have discovered they were given entirely false identities.

"We are victims of state violence but there is no trace of this - literally. This lack of documents must not make us victims for the second time," said Han Boon-young, co-founder of an overseas adoptee rights group campaigning for greater access to birth information.

"This is a human rights issue. There were kidnappings, falsified documents - all of which were examples of violations committed during the inter-country adoption process.

"It is really necessary to move towards reconciliation, that we recognise these experiences, and that the people who committed these violations be held responsible."

But some of the key players continue to stay silent or deny wrongdoing.

The BBC contacted Bu Chung-ha, who in the 1970s served as chairman of Holt International, South Korea's largest adoption agency.

Holt is at the centre of numerous allegations of fraud and illegal adoptions, and the subject of two lawsuits so far, including Ms Han's.

In a brief reply, Mr Bu denied that the agency had sent abroad any children wrongly identified as orphans during his tenure. Any parents alleging their children were kidnapped "did not lose their children, they abandoned them", he said.

The current management of Holt International has yet to respond to the BBC's request for comment.

'The government was the captain, the agencies rowed the boat'

Experts say the responsibility lay not only with the private agencies but also with the state.

"Adoption agencies exploited the system, and the government turned a blind eye - allowing illegal practices to take root," said Dr Lee Kyung-eun, an international law scholar at Seoul National University.

"The government was the captain, and the agencies rowed the boat," said Shin Pil-sik, a researcher on transnational adoption at Seokyeong University, who added that this structure enabled both sides to deflect accountability.

Dr Shin said the state was not a passive observer- it actively shaped adoption policy, setting annual quotas for overseas placements and even on occasion halted some adoptions.

An Associated Press news investigation last year found successive Korean governments had rewritten laws to remove minimal safeguards and judicial oversight, fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable, and allowed foreign families to adopt Korean children quickly without ever visiting the country.

While the government billed the programme as a humanitarian effort, observers say it also served to strengthen ties with Western countries.

A 1984 government document obtained by the BBC stated that the official goals of the adoption policy included not only the welfare of children but also "the promotion of future national strength and people-to-people diplomacy".

When asked about the state's role in past adoption practices, South Korea's health and welfare ministry said they were "continuing efforts to strengthen state responsibility" in the system and that it plans to promote adoptions that comply with international standards.

In 2012, the government revised adoption laws to tighten screening of potential adoptive parents, and to track birthparent data and birth information better.

It has also enacted reforms to the adoption system ensuring that overseas adoptions are minimised and that all adoptions would be handled by the government instead of private agencies. The changes will take effect in July.

Meanwhile, overseas adoptions have declined. In the late 1980s, overseas adoptions dropped sharply, before stabilising in the 1990s and dropping again in the 2010s. Only 79 children were adopted abroad in 2023, according to the latest available data.

But as South Korea begins to address this dark chapter in its past, adoptees and birth parents like Ms Han continue to struggle with their trauma.

BBC Korean

Ms Han spends hours every day practising her English so she can better communicate with her daughter

BBC Korean

Ms Han has been practising the phrases "I'm so sorry" and "confused"

After their initial reunion, Ms Han and Kyung-ha have struggled to maintain a close connection.

Not only do they live on opposite sides of the world, her daughter has forgotten most of her Korean while Ms Han knows little English.

They keep in touch over texts occasionally, and Ms Han spends two hours every day practising her English by writing phrases in an exercise book.

But it isn't enough for Ms Han.

"Even though I have found my daughter, it doesn't feel like I've truly found her. All I know is where she is, but what good is that, if we can't even communicate?

"My entire life has been ruined… no amount of money will ever make up for what I've lost."

• Lost to science for more than a century, the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit has been confirmed by scientists to be alive and hopping in southern Mexico.
• The species was rediscovered via interviews with local communities and footage from camera traps intended to photograph jaguars.
• Sierra Madre del Sur in the state of Guerrero is the only place in the world where the Omiltemi cottontail is known to exist.
• Satellite data show continued forest loss within its known range, while hunting for food by local communities remains another threat to the species.

Footage captured in 2024 of a small rabbit hopping about in front of a camera trap had scientists baffled. The juvenile, with gray-brown fur and a black tail, didn’t resemble any known species in the Sierra Madre del Sur, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.

Biologist Fernando Ruiz-Gutiérrez anxiously searched his records and consulted with colleagues to confirm his hypothesis. A few kilometers away, ecologist José Alberto Almazán-Catalán had the answer: having captured an adult specimen years earlier and conducted a series of studies, he now had irrefutable proof that the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus insonus), believed to be extinct for the past 120 years, was still alive.

The last time scientists knowingly encountered the Omiltemi cottontail was in 1904, when U.S. naturalist Edward William Nelson described it for the first time. Habitat loss, poaching and subsistence hunting have been the biggest threats to the species throughout its existence, which is why it took more than a century to rediscover the elusive rabbit, hidden in the forest.

“It was very exciting to pin down an animal that we not only believed to be extinct but that also has an almost mythical quality, because the furs we have in Mexico are not as precise as we would like since they were not taken by a mammalogist but donated by campesinos [small-scale farmers],” says Almazán-Catalán, president of the Institute for the Management and Conservation of Biodiversity (INMACOB), a Mexican NGO.

“We really weren’t sure this rabbit existed. It could’ve been an anomaly. Finding it was alive and that there were healthy populations was a great relief,” says Almazán-Catalán, who led a five-year investigation to discover the continued existence of the species.

The Omiltemi cottontail rabbit is endemic to the state of Guerrero. Its previously known distribution was restricted to the area around the village of Omiltemi, in the municipality of Chilpancingo. An elusive species with nocturnal habits and low population densities, it’s classified as endangered by Semarnat, Mexico’s environment ministry, and very little is known about its distribution, ecology and biology.

Ruiz-Gutiérrez, who led a team that helped rediscover the Omiltemi cottontail, calls it the most endangered rabbit in the world, saying the species was even considered to be an example of modern-day extinction.

Members of a research team walk through a pine-oak forest, one of the habitats in which they carried out monitoring activities. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

Like other rabbits, Omiltemi cottontails live in warrens, and primarily inhabit coniferous forests, but can also be found in some deciduous forests, at elevations ranging from 7,000-10,000 feet (about 2,100-3,000 meters).

“They are rich and generally very diverse territories, with a wide variety of plants and animals. This mountainous region is well preserved, with forests that haven’t been disturbed for many years, which still have primary forest cover and haven’t been greatly impacted by human activity,” Ruiz-Gutiérrez says.

“We’ve found areas with beautiful, pristine rivers, with an impressive quantity of crystal-clear water, with areas of very dense forest which are difficult to access and other areas where there is human intervention, but not very often. It’s in these places that we’ve had sightings of the Omiltemi rabbit,” Ruiz-Gutiérrez says.

The mountains of Guerrero are made up of rugged and varied landscapes that support a rich diversity of species. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

The Omiltemi cottontail is reddish-brown in color, and its body and ears are smaller than those of other rabbits that inhabit the area. But Almazán-Catalán says that the most obvious feature that distinguishes the species from the closely related Mexican cottontail (S. cunicularius), which inhabits the same area, is its small black tail.

“It’s difficult to see it in a camera trap, but with a good photo you might be able to recognize that it’s a different rabbit,” Almazán-Catalán says. “The first clear photo of the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit is from 2009, taken by photographer Stephen John Davies, from the United Kingdom, who came to Puerto del Gallo and created a controversy [about the rabbit’s continued existence] on the iNaturalistMX website, which is where the first debate about what animal it was took place.”

Photograph of an Omiltemi cottontail rabbit taken in 2009 by photographer Stephen John Davies, in Guerrero. Image courtesy of Stephen John Davies/iNaturalistMX.

Field crew members install and test a camera trap. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

The rediscovery of the Omiltemi cottontail after more than a century was accidental. Ruiz-Gutiérrez and his team had been setting up camera traps along wildlife trails to monitor jaguars (Panthera onca) in the central portion of the Sierra Madre del Sur as part of the National Jaguar Census (Cenjaguar).

“We use the camera trap to identify the presence of jaguars, but also any associated fauna, that is, its potential prey and other felines with which they cohabit,” Ruiz-Gutiérrez says. “From this we can generate estimates of species richness and biodiversity in general, and, in particular, population aspects of the jaguar in this region, which are then extrapolated to a state and national level, giving us the data we use for Cenjaguar.”

And then, one day in May 2024, a mysterious young rabbit appeared in front of a camera trap set up in the forest near the village of Jaleaca de Catalán.

“It really caught our attention because, when you compare it to other animals in footage from the same camera, the rabbit is tiny. We got a photo of a squirrel just opposite the place where the rabbit was and, when we put them next to each other, they were the same size,” Ruiz-Gutiérrez says. “So we began to talk about it seriously with Dr. Gerardo Ceballos, director of Cenjaguar; I sent him all the evidence and with it we were able to ascertain that it really was the mythical Omiltemi cottontail rabbit, and we began to get excited about this important discovery.”

A composite image showing a squirrel and the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

When Ruiz-Gutiérrez and his team went over archive camera-trap footage from the past 11 years, they found additional photos and videos of Omiltemi cottontails captured in the municipalities of Atoyac, Chilpancingo and Técpan de Galeana. This footage indicates the distribution of the species extends 111 kilometers (69 miles) beyond what was previously known, from Omiltemi to the Técpan de Galeana mountains.

“We were delighted to be able to rediscover the presence of this species, to confirm that it’s still alive and continues to have small populations in the Guerrero mountains,” Ruiz-Gutiérrez says. “We need to redouble our efforts to conserve it in the medium and long term, working with communities on conservation strategies that will help us to protect it so that it won’t yet disappear from the face of the Earth.”

By analyzing their camera-trap footage more closely, Ruiz-Gutiérrez and his team were able to glean information about the behavior of the Omiltemi cottontail. For example, 68% of sightings were at night, indicating the species may be largely nocturnal.

Most images captured were of single individuals, suggesting the species is mostly solitary. There were sightings of juvenile individuals, or kits, in May and December, which indicates breeding activity may take place twice a year.

An Omiltemi cottontail rabbit foraging with its back to the camera trap. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

While camera-trap footage indicate the distribution of the Omiltemi cottontail is broader than previously expected, the threats facing the species — habitat loss driven by fires and agricultural clearing — still persist, and little is known about the impact of hunting by local communities, according to the research team.

Portions of the rabbit’s range fall within several protected areas, including the new Sierra Tecuani Biosphere Reserve. However, satellite data from Global Forest Watch show ongoing forest loss in the reserve, and there were “no special conservation measures to protect the species” as of January 2025, according to conservation NGO Re:wild.

Community technician Pascual Ramírez and Wild Felids Conservation México biologist Gricell Villegas install a camera trap. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

“It’s a huge opportunity for us to be able to contribute to the conservation of such an enigmatic species,” Ruiz-Gutiérrez says. “All this work has been thanks to conservation of the jaguar, which was the flagship species that opened the door to us beginning to study and protect it, but most of the conservation work we can do must be done together with the ejidos [community-managed farmland] and communities.”

The Omiltemi cottontail is the 13th species rediscovered as part of Re:wild’s “Search for Lost Species,” a project aiming to find and protect plant, animal and fungi species that have been lost to science for years but not yet been declared extinct.

When Almazán-Catalán and his team began searching for the rabbit in 2019 in the forests of Chilpancingo, they didn’t find any sign of the species. So from 2020-2022, they refocused their search to high-altitude coniferous forests. There, in the Filo Mayor region, they consulted with local communities where they suspected the Omiltemi cottontail and another rabbit species were hunted for food by community members.

“The campesinos had three specimens of S. insonus in their possession and gave them to us for scientific purposes when we explained why we wanted the fur and their tissues,” Almazán-Catalán says. “They had the animals for personal consumption and donated them to the investigation. The community weren’t to blame; they simply didn’t know it was Sylvilagus insonus.”

• The Wild Felids Conservation México technical team and the Jaleaca de Catalán community team, who participated in the fieldwork that led to the rediscovery of the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

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When the research team compared the communities’ rabbits with the furs available in collections and descriptions in the scientific literature, their morphological characteristics matched those of the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit first described by Nelson in 1904.

“This finding suggests that we still have a lot of fieldwork to do because although we think we have all the species documented, this really isn’t the case. We need to get more people involved, more specialists in this area,” Almazán-Catalán says. “It was a joy to behold this small animal and to discover that it’s there, alive, that it’s still hopping about, and we hope that there will be many more sightings and that it will continue to inhabit this region of the Guerrero mountains.”

Banner image: Omiltemi cottontail rabbit foraging in front of a camera trap. Image courtesy of Wild Felids Conservation México.

This story was first published here in Spanish on April 5, 2025.

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