U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim

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Dissent Grows Inside Biden Administration over Gaza Policy as Blinken Holds Talks in Middle East
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 06, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/6/b ... transcript

Secretary of State Tony Blinken is on his fifth trip to the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, reportedly pushing for a pause to Israel’s assault on Gaza and for Hamas to release all remaining hostages. Blinken’s trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank comes in the wake of U.S. strikes in Syria, Iraq and Yemen against militant groups across the region. “There’s not a lot of goodwill or faith right now for the U.S.,” says Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, who lays out where diplomatic negotiations stand today in the Middle East. “The longer there’s a delay here, the more it seems that this deal isn’t achieving what the Palestinians or Hamas might really want.” Ahmed also reports on the different position of Arab states on Palestine, the “culture of impunity” Washington grants Israel, and why the Biden administration is insulated from growing U.S. dissent on Gaza.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, joined by Amy Goodman. Hi, Amy!

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Nermeen. And welcome to all our listeners and our viewers around the country and around the world. Well, I’m not a NOVID anymore. For four years I somehow avoided getting COVID, but I ended up getting it. Asymptomatic. I’m at the tail end of it. I just have to go from positive to negative. It’s not exactly in my nature to go negative, but I’m really working on it. Until then, Nermeen is there, and I am here. And most importantly, on with the show.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We look forward to having you back, Amy.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken is heading to Qatar and then to Israel and the West Bank, after holding talks in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This comes as Israel threatens to launch a ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where over half of all residents of Gaza have sought refuge. Palestinian health officials say Israeli attacks killed 107 Palestinians over the past day, bringing the Palestinian death toll to over 27,500, including over 11,500 children.

This is Blinken’s fifth trip to the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. The State Department says Blinken is pushing for a pause to Israel’s assault and for Hamas to release all remaining hostages seized nearly four months ago.

On Monday, Blinken met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, where they discussed a potential deal involving Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel in exchange for Israel agreeing to a pathway for a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia is also seeking a new military pact with the United States and U.S. assistance with its nuclear program. This comes as Hamas is reportedly reviewing a truce and hostage deal negotiated in part by mediators from Egypt and Qatar.

Blinken’s trip comes just days after the United States bombed 85 targets in Syria and Iraq in retaliation for a recent drone strike by Iran-backed militants on a base in Jordan that killed three U.S. troops. The U.S. has also repeatedly bombed Yemen over the past two weeks, targeting sites controlled by Houthi forces who have been targeting ships linked to Israel and the United States to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza.

We begin today’s show with Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost based in Washington, D.C.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Akbar. We are very happy to have you here. If you could first respond — tell us what’s most important about the meetings that Blinken had already with the crown prince and his meetings today in Egypt. What’s at stake?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Thanks for having me, Nermeen.

Secretary Blinken is hoping that Arab officials will finally believe the U.S. is serious about an end to the carnage in Gaza. It’s a hard ask, because a lot of Arab diplomats, a lot of regional diplomats who are worried about the spiraling conflict feel the Biden administration has no real interest in pressuring Israel to stop. And you’ve got repeated comments from Israeli officials, most recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just yesterday, saying, “We want to see Hamas leaders killed. We want to see months more of war, if not a year,” and ideas for a resettlement of Gaza — extremely controversial proposals.

So, Blinken, on the one hand, is dealing with Israelis who are not saying what Arab diplomats and the U.S. want to hear, he’s representing a president who has a policy of near-total support for Israel, and he’s getting flak from Arab diplomats. Blinken is, of course, a skilled foreign policy official, a skilled mediator, but it’s a very hard task for him, Nermeen, because there’s not a lot of goodwill or faith right now for the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: Akbar, if you can talk more about what you think took place before the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and Blinken, and the significance of what exactly Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel are proposing? The Hamas attack on October 7th took place just around the time that Saudi Arabia was going to normalize relations with Israel. Talk about what that would mean and exactly what these proposals are and how possible you think they are.

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Absolutely, Amy. So, prior to the October 7th attack, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Israel were talking about this kind of tripartite deal that would involve the Saudis giving Israel recognition from Saudi Arabia, which is a huge win for Israel, right? After many years of conflict, feeling threatened by its Arab neighbors, this would be the biggest, most important Muslim-majority country in the world, essentially, saying, “We recognize Israel,” and, importantly, without Israel having to make significant concessions on the Palestinian file.

So, that’s where this whole process, while it’s been beneficial for the U.S., for Saudi, for Israel, the Palestinians and their advocates have been saying, “Where are we in this conversation?” So, prior to October 7th, there was already huge anxiety about these talks. There was dissatisfaction. And then the attacks happened. And, you know, no one less than President Biden has said they see that U.S.-Israel-Saudi process as part of the reason for the October 7th attacks, right? It was a way, in part, for Palestinians to kind of bring this issue back on the negotiating table. However, since then, what we’ve seen, four months into this war, is that rather than considering, “Well, maybe this approach got us to conflict,” the Biden administration has doubled down on the U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal. So they’ve taken the Gaza war, and they’ve tied it to what they were doing before the Gaza war.

Their new proposal is we’ll rebuild Gaza using Saudi money. This will be part of the whole package that will get the Israelis to make some significant concessions to Palestinians. It’ll get the Saudis to have the American commitments they want. But in terms of feasibility, it’s quite, I would say, at best, contentious, right? The U.S. officials I talked to within the government, one described this as, quote, “delusionally optimistic.” You’ve got so many parties involved. You do not have a serious commitment from the U.S. to get Palestine anything major — right? — beyond economic guarantees or the reconstruction of Gaza. And then you’ve got what you referenced earlier, Nermeen, the strikes by Iran-backed militias. There are a lot of what’s called spoilers, a lot of other forces around the region who don’t like this deal, who certainly see the deal, especially between Saudi, Israel and the U.S., opponents of Iran, as very risky for Iran and its network.

So, in terms of the actual feasibility of something being approved, I’m skeptical. And it’s important to remember there’s a very short runway now prior to the election. And if the Biden administration wants to get a security treaty with Saudi Arabia through the Senate while they still have control of the Senate, I mean, they’ve only got six months to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, can you talk about what’s happening today with Tony Blinken in Cairo and Qatar before going to Israel and then the occupied West Bank?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Absolutely. So, the Egyptians and the Qataris are critical mediators, because the U.S. does not speak directly to Hamas, which the U.S. lists as a terror organization. So any messages from the U.S. have to go through Qatar and Egypt. And Israel also doesn’t really like directly dealing with Hamas. So, Blinken is in Cairo, and he was in Doha, kind of hoping to get those governments to pressure Hamas.

Now the “yes” is on Hamas’s side. Israel has kind of tacitly agreed to a truce and hostage release. But the longer there’s a delay here, the more it seems that this deal isn’t achieving what the Palestinians or Hamas might really want, right? So, you’ve seen Prime Minister Netanyahu come out and say, “I want to kill Hamas leadership.” That raises the stakes for Hamas, if they’re saying, “Why would we agree to a two-week deal if, after that, you’re just going to come back, invade Rafah, kill our leadership?” So, I think there’s — the prospects of a deal, to me, seem low right now.

Some of the other important sticking points are, of course, there’s broad agreement that the hostages, particularly civilians, particularly older people and children, should be released. That’s kind of generally agreed upon. But the question is: How many Palestinian political prisoners is Israel willing to release in return? There’s a certain Palestinian leader called Marwan Barghouti, really seen as a unifying Palestinian figure, and Hamas has said they want him out of jail. Now, for a lot of Israelis who don’t want to see a kind of unified Palestinian movement, that’s a no-go.

So there are a lot of sticking points here. And it’s up to Secretary Blinken to kind of push everyone towards a median. I think the Qataris can certainly play a very helpful role here with Hamas, but any indication of U.S. seriousness is what’s needed, and we haven’t yet had that, certainly not from President Biden.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Akbar, I mean, as you said, the issue of the release of Palestinian prisoners is something that Netanyahu, at least, has ruled out, as well as the creation of a Palestinian state. So it’s unclear how, you know, these positions can be reconciled, because there’s no incentive for Hamas to go along with this. But I wanted to ask: I mean, Saudi Arabia is also pushing minimally for the minimal condition of the creation of a Palestinian state, but where do other Arab states stand, including Egypt and Qatar, who are the negotiators, as you said, the mediators? Where else do Arab states stand on this? And is it important at all?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: You know, it’s critical. I love how you phrase it, Nermeen, because the Saudis certainly want us to think they are pushing for the creation of a Palestinian state, but the language is sort of shifting, right? Sometimes they say “creating a Palestinian state.” Sometimes they say “a pathway towards a Palestinian state” or “irreversible steps.” So, that goalpost is shifting all the time. And I think for the Saudis, in particular, who have, especially under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, really expressed disdain for the Palestinian cause in recent years and the sense that it’s been a burden for the Arab world, and a deep enthusiasm for relations with Israel, for the Saudis, I’d say, kind of limited Palestinian concessions would be acceptable, if they can get some kind of Palestinian window dressing of approval. And I’ve heard from my sources that there are quite conversations going on between the Saudis and maybe some friendly Palestinians who might be willing to bless whatever the Saudis can get.

In terms of other states, Qatar is one of the firmest in terms of wanting to see a resolution here. I think for a lot of states that maybe were not taking the strongest position earlier — so, think about the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Arab countries that have made deals with Israel — I think, after this war and after the spiraling tensions — right? — the risk of a huge Middle East war, those countries are feeling more and more we need a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That is meaningful.

For Egypt, I think that desire is there, particularly because, because of the strikes you mentioned by the Houthi movement in Yemen, shipping is not going through the Suez Canal as much, and for Egypt, that’s an economic lifeline, right? So they want the war over so the Houthis stop attacking shipping. At the same time, it’s really critical to remember Egypt helped Israel with its blockade of Gaza — right? — for the last 16 years. Egypt has not, for years, wanted to see a strong, independent Palestinian presence. So I think they’ll be weighing that quite cautiously, and they won’t necessarily be such firm advocates for serious Palestinian statehood.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Akbar, you’ve written extensively — at the moment, we see Netanyahu being, you know, singled out as the person who is responsible for the present situation. He certainly hasn’t made it any easier and, arguably, of course, much more brutal. Although as you point out, it’s important to look at the long-term context in Israel and, in particular, U.S. support for Israeli policies, whatever form they’ve taken. So, if you could elaborate on that and what distinctions you see between Netanyahu and his predecessors on the question of Gaza?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Absolutely. So, Netanyahu is an easy bogeyman from a U.S. political standpoint. You’re already seeing Democrats who are kind of struggling, scrambling to defend President Biden’s policy here. They’re saying, “Well, it’s not really about Biden. It’s about Netanyahu.” And given that Netanyahu was so close to former President Trump, opposed President Barack Obama so vocally, for Democratic voters, yes, Netanyahu is an easy bogeyman.

But, absolutely, we have to look at the context. And for the first three years of the Biden administration, two of those years they did not have a Prime Minister Netanyahu. They had a different Israeli government, slightly more moderate, certainly including non-Netanyahu figures. And in that moment, the U.S. did not, Nermeen, try to pursue any kind of progress, right? President Biden didn’t even reverse policies that President Trump had imposed that were anti-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.

So, to me, the thing that needs to be questioned in this moment, certainly, Netanyahu, personally corrupt, attempting to hold onto power for as long as he can, but as one Israeli analyst put it, there’s a, quote, “culture of impunity” — right? — in U.S.-Israel relations. And that’s what really needs to be analyzed right now.

So, if you think about the broader Israeli political establishment, the person who would take over, if Netanyahu were to be unseated in weeks, months, later this year, is someone called Benny Gantz. He’s a former Israeli general. The military is understood to be a bit more pragmatic on the Palestinian issue, just from a strategic and security standpoint, than politicians are. All that said, even a Prime Minister Benny Gantz might not be willing to accept statehood — right? — might not be willing to give Palestinians security control in Gaza.

So, the actual culture of the U.S. and Israel, unfortunately, over decades, has become one in which even these small steps towards progress are so difficult. It’s like pulling teeth. And I just draw people back to the last few examples of effective U.S. leverage over Israel. Interestingly, they’ve been under Republican presidents, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, to some extent. But we haven’t seen that in the last 10 or 15 years, and certainly not under Presidents Biden or, really, Obama.

AMY GOODMAN: Akbar, I wanted to talk about the level of dissent in this country and in other countries that are supporting Israel right now. You just wrote a piece about over 800 government officials in the United States and Europe that have anonymously signed a statement that their own governments’ support for Israel is in violation of their values. If you can talk more about that, and also the level at the grassroots in the United States, right up into the White House and the State Department? In fact, let me play a clip. We interviewed Josh Paul, a high-level State Department official, when he quit. You were the one who broke the story about Josh Paul.

AMY GOODMAN: I just have to ask before we go, Josh Paul. We spoke to you soon after you resigned from the State Department in October. This was, of course, in the midst of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which came after the October 7th surprise attack on Israel that killed 1,200. Can you talk about the response of your colleagues at the State Department? Have others resigned in other parts of the government?

JOSH PAUL: So, we have seen, certainly from the U.N., a U.N. senior official, Craig Mokhiber, resign. We have not seen, to my knowledge, significant resignations within the U.S. government. But I have heard, and continue to hear, from many of my former colleagues who are really trying to find what mechanisms they can use to slow this down, to change the policy. I fear that their efforts at this point continue to be in vain. I think we need to see a policy change from the top. But I know a lot of good people are continuing to make the argument.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Josh Paul, who quit the State Department. And he is not the only one. And I wanted to get a sense from you how aware is President Biden of the enormous, as our guest yesterday said, Matt Duss, “incandescent” kind of rage in the Democratic base, but also in high levels of the government. We just — Nermeen just read headlines. In Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, over a hundred people, led by Jewish Voice for Peace, were arrested, demanding a ceasefire and much more. Talk about all these levels of dissent in the United States and outside and what effect it’s having. Is Biden fearful that his very reelection is in jeopardy?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Absolutely, Amy. I’ll start with the letter you mentioned, because it’s a fascinating statement, more than 800 officials in the U.S., in European institutions, in the Netherlands, France, Britain. I just heard from another European official yesterday who just signed the letter. So, the numbers on that letter are just going to keep growing. It’s not closed yet.

I’d say the dissent is — it’s striking because, given the initial attack, there was such deep sympathy for Israel, which is a close U.S. partner. There was such a sense of “We want to do something to help.” But I think it became so clear, within three or four days, to people that President Biden’s approach to helping Israel was not going to be measured or strategic or involve planning, consultation, all of that. It was just, full tilt, whatever they want, whatever the consequences. And I think that’s where you see a lot of dissent come from. It comes from moral reasons, certainly, for some folks within government, from people in the Democratic base, also from strategic considerations — right? — also from a sense of is the U.S. tearing up goodwill and shoving away the good work that we have done over years and decades, particularly after former President Trump, to reestablish America’s reputation in the world, right? Is that all moot now? And I think that’s only grown since October, because President Biden has not been willing to shift in any tangible way.

In terms of his own awareness of that, what’s so striking about this moment, too, is there is a huge national security establishment here in Washington, as I know you both know, so many layers — counterterror, State Department, Treasury. But this policy is being controlled in a group of, I would say, 20 to 30 close officials around the president, right? So, what’s really important to remember there is there is a real filtering of information. And it’s indisputable, of course, President Biden is going to campaign rallies and events, and he’s seeing the protesters. But to what extent is he aware that many of the actual foreign policy and national security experts within his government, who are nonpartisan, are opposed to this policy, I think that’s a little questionable, right? Because advisers around him have their own priorities. A gentleman called Brett McGurk, the top White House Middle East official, who I’ve reported on extensively, is really pushing that U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal, and President Biden has been going along with that.

I think there’s very heated debates in the president’s close circle, but because especially the State Department has been so frozen out at this moment — and the way I’ve heard it from State Department officials is they’ve literally been told, “We understand your concern. Why don’t you try to work on another part of the world? You know, why don’t you look sort of the Pacific or Latin America? Just apply your skills there.” I think that kind of dismissal of this really reasoned dissent, and response to it of listening sessions and town halls and “we feel your pain” — people don’t want their pain to be felt. They want to see a shift. So I think you’ll see even more pushback from within government, certainly from within the party base.

I think one of the important things — and maybe this is how the message will get through to the president — is not necessarily from his White House national security team of Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, Tony Blinken, but maybe through his political contacts. Right? You’ve seen multiple Democratic senators, Chris Van Hollen, importantly, of Maryland, but many others, Chris Coons even, of Delaware, who’s personally close to the president, they’ve publicly started to say, “OK, we need to see a shift from Israel.” So, once those lawmakers, once governors, once others who are actually elected officials start standing up, you might see a shift from the president. But right now there’s still a wariness even on those fronts. I reported yesterday that this new bipartisan border package that was unveiled had Democratic senators agreeing to defund the U.N. agency for Palestinians. That’s a reversal from the Biden administration’s own policy, a reversal from Democrats, a triumph from Republicans. So, I think as soon as elected Democrats kind of find that assertiveness, that’s when you might start to see a shift from the president.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we’ll just be speaking to a doctor who’s recently returned from Gaza, where we’ll discuss what’s happening with UNRWA in Gaza. Thank you so much, Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, based in Washington, D.C.

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“Unconscionable”: American Pediatrician Who Worked in Gaza Hospital Recalls Horrors of Israel’s War
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 06, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/6/p ... transcript

Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Seema Jilani, a pediatrician who spent two weeks in Central Gaza volunteering in the Al-Aqsa Hospital emergency room. “I saw the fall of a hospital before my very own eyes,” says Jilani, who shares recorded voice notes from her time in the besieged territory while trying to save children in a health system collapsing under Israeli pressure and bombing. “I have never treated this many war-wounded children in my career.” Finally, Jilani shares why she continues to serve as a doctor in war zones with the International Rescue Committee. “It is the absolute honor of my life to serve the people of Gaza,” she says. “It is all of our responsibility to consider those orphans, consider those families who are completely bereft of any and all human dignity that has been taken from them. … Their fate will sit with us.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We spend the rest of the hour with an American doctor who just spent two weeks in central Gaza. Dr. Seema Jilani is a pediatrician who volunteered in the Al-Aqsa Hospital emergency room as part of a team of doctors with the International Rescue Committee, where she’s senior technical adviser and leads their emergency health responses globally. The team included doctors from both IRC and Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Before she joins us, we’ll play some of Dr. Jilani’s voice notes that she recorded in Al-Aqsa Hospital’s emergency room and also at night in the compound housing the emergency medical team.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: We’re in the resuscitation room in Al-Aqsa Hospital. It’s a mass casualty, where the site of the mass casualty was a school. Of the five casualties, four are children. So, he was injured in the first day of the war.

UNIDENTIED: Yeah.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: And now we’re day 82.

UNIDENTIED: Yeah.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: And he’s waiting.

UNIDENTIED: Yeah.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: I’m so sorry.

I can hear the — I can hear the airstrikes coming in now. It’s about 2 a.m. And this is the sound of drones right outside my window, and also overhead flying more airplanes, I believe. I can’t sleep, so I decided to do this voice note. It’s a very specific hellscape that exists here in Gaza when you’re cursed enough to hear the words from a doctor that say, “Whose body part is that? Don’t carry it through the halls. I don’t want children seeing that.” And that is a quote from one of my colleagues in the emergency room, where we saw a leg being carried, a lower leg with the boot still on, sock still on. And it was being carried through the emergency room.

We have arrived here at Al-Aqsa Hospital emergency room. And what I’m seeing here is children lying on the ground, a double amputation on one child. And there are no beds available, so people are literally just on the ground seeking treatment. We’ve already had three parents come up to us and ask — they see the stethoscope, and they ask me, “Can you come see my child? Can you come see my child?” And I’m waiting for the local doctors to come in to be able to guide us through what we need to do and do a handover. There is one child that I’m looking at, approximately 8 years old, at the — lying on the ground. Next to him is a woman in a wheelchair who’s waiting to be seen. The one on the ground has bandages on bilateral lower extremities going all the way up, and looks like he’s been brought in overnight.

And we’re hearing right now that it was a terrible, terrible night because of the bombing in al-Maghazi, where people had been told to evacuate and then, subsequently, were bombed. There are definitely more people here than yesterday, and yesterday was very full. So, no beds available. As I said, people — there’s not really room or space for us to breathe or think. There’s a gentleman here that’s sobbing in front of me and being comforted by maybe his son, maybe a stranger. I don’t know. But he’s an older gentleman with a bandage on his head, and he’s just sitting and holding his head in his hands, crying and head hung low. And then there’s one, two, three, four, six children in my line of sight right now in the corner that need medical attention urgently, one of whom is crying, a little boy around 6 or 7 years old, wiping his tears. I can’t see the injuries clearly, but we’ll get started to work today to see how we can support and help them through this — through their tragedy.

UNIDENTIFIED: Rockets. They’re rockets. And they’re nearer than they were before.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: That feels very close.

UNIDENTIFIED: Because you don’t get to hear — you don’t get to hear much whistle before it comes.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: One morning, we arrived to a nurse who was quietly sobbing in the corner. His colleague had been killed the night before, and he had tried to resuscitate him in the emergency room. He is dignified in his grief. I asked, “Should we leave?” But instead, he just thanks us for our presence and asks us to see a few patients on his behalf. He just could not face the grueling work and the patients outside the room right now. I felt rewarded if I could be helpful to this one person in this one moment. As I was rounding about two hours later, I raised my head from a patient to see him, again, right back at work, as if nothing had happened.

The next day, we see a 23-year-old patient with his lower leg blown off so badly, it’s disconnected from its upper leg, floppy. I look down to plant my stethoscope on his chest, only to find him still wearing his UNRWA, or U-N-R-W-A, vest as a staff member. The only comfort I can provide him is to wipe the dried blood off his face, to moisten his dry lips as he yearns for some water, quietly lifting his neck for a little more. I quieten his fear with a wet washcloth to his forehead and some whispers of sweetness, of calm. None of these interventions are morphine. He died on the floor of a Gaza emergency room with little more than my hand in his hand and a washcloth to his forehead.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Those were voice notes recorded by Dr. Seema Jilani, a senior emergency health technical adviser and pediatrician who traveled to Gaza to volunteer in the Al-Aqsa Hospital emergency room as part of a team of doctors from the IRC and Medical Aid for Palestinians. Dr. Jilani previously worked in Gaza and the West Bank in 2005 and 2015. She’s also a freelance journalist who was nominated for a Peabody Award for her 2006 radio documentary, Israel and Palestine: The Human Cost of the Occupation. She joins us now from Brussels.

Dr. Seema Jilani, welcome back to Democracy Now! Those were immensely haunting notes, voice notes, that you made. If you could talk about your journey to Gaza in December, where you went from, how long you stayed, and what you witnessed?

DR. SEEMA JILANI: We departed Cairo on December 25th as part of an emergency medical team with the IRC and Medical Aid for Palestinians in partnership. From Cairo, we arrived through the Sinai, which itself is a militarized zone, and then El-Arish, and then — overnighted there, and then, following that, completed the two-day journey to Rafah and crossed over into the Gaza Strip as a team and later went to our guesthouse. And the drive from the Rafah border all the way up to the guesthouse, which should only have been a few kilometers, maybe 10 at most, maybe seven, took several hours, two to three hours, if I recall, because everyone was leaving and evacuating from the north.

There were people piled into cars, vans, if they were lucky, because fuel is such a precious commodity. There were babies falling asleep. There were pets and cats and dogs and families and blankets and mattresses, any food items you can imagine piled into donkey carts, and people hanging off, trying to evacuate. It was a sea of human tragedy coming straight to the border, straight into southern Rafah. And it was quite a harrowing scene, people that were barefoot, looking for shelter, looking for garbage bags to put up tents, looking for lumber. Quite, quite something. And I’ve worked in several areas of conflict, and it was quite staggering.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Jilani, it must be just incredible for you to listen back to what you were saying, so immediate, as you whispered into your microphone, whether you were holding the hand of a dying man or with a baby or in the barracks where you were staying. The place where the doctors slept, does that even exist anymore?

DR. SEEMA JILANI: Our guesthouse was bombed shortly after I left. And I am not sure of — it’s certainly not functional or able to be resided in. I don’t know of how it looks anymore. But certainly, it has been bombed, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And one of the people you describe helping on the floor of the hospital — and I was wondering if you can talk about the significance of Al-Aqsa, and what does it mean for so many hospitals not to be functioning — was wearing an UNRWA vest. It is the center of controversy right now. Netanyahu talks about getting rid of UNRWA the way he talks about getting rid of Hamas. Talk about the central role UNRWA plays, whether we’re talking about education, whether we’re talking about hospitals.

DR. SEEMA JILANI: I worked at Al-Aqsa Hospital, which was one of the last remaining hospitals in the middle part of Gaza, or central Gaza. It was a lifeline hospital providing critical, critical services. And from the time that I arrived to the two weeks, I saw its decline. I saw the fall of a hospital before my very own eyes. And, you know, in war, we’re used to talking about the fall of cities, the fall of Mosul or Saigon. And suddenly, we’ve normalized, somehow, the fall of Al-Shifa Hospital and the fall of Al-Aqsa Hospital. We’ve normalized the fall and complete dismantling of healthcare infrastructure, totally paramount to saving lives not only in a war zone, but in an otherwise high-functioning, high-capacity society. And it’s unconscionable that we continue to watch this unfold.

In terms of UNRWA, it provides services throughout the region. I have worked in the West Bank and in Gaza. I’ve worked in Lebanon, in Shatila refugee camp, in Burj al-Barajneh. They provide schooling services. I’ve been to their schools. They provide health services, education. And so, the thought of defunding such an organization that provides jobs, education, healthcare, other services that are not otherwise available, really is deeply disturbing, as we’re now producing a generation of orphans, a generation of children with new disabilities, who will then have no access to healthcare, education or other services that would be able to, in some way, help relieve some of their pain and get them back to a functioning society.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Jilani, you have spoken about the fact that many patients may not have survived, but their pain would certainly have been eased, if the proper medical supplies were made available, if, minimally, medication — you spoke specifically of morphine — could be administered to ease their pain. I mean, if you could explain, you know, how you work under conditions where you don’t have access to even minimal medical supplies, and what it is that you’re calling for?

DR. SEEMA JILANI: Well, it’s the doctors and nurses and healthcare staff of Gaza who have displayed just absolute colossal bravery in how their see their patients, many of whom haven’t been paid, many of whom are themselves displaced, four or five times over, scavenging for food, water, shelter, and then showing up to work, as I mentioned in one of those notes, strenuously to serve their communities, and then coming to a workplace that doesn’t have what they need to be able to treat their patients with dignity. There is no death with dignity in Gaza on the floor of an emergency room.

At the beginning of my time in Gaza, we did have access to morphine. But by the end, there was no access. And at that point, it becomes a very cruel and inhumane situation to have someone actively dying without any pain — or, comfort to offer them. There was, I recall vividly, a young boy that had come in, not for a life-threatening injury, but for stitches because of some deep lacerations. And we would usually use ketamine in a situation like that, because it’s safe, and in children it provides both pain relief and amnesia, so they’re not retraumatized from the procedure. Of course, we didn’t have ketamine. And so I tried any distraction measures I could with this young boy. I have sort of flashing lights in my arsenal as a pediatrician. I have some toys. And he just was screaming through the pain.

And then, when I tried to ask him questions and engage him to distract him, because that’s a mechanism, a coping mechanism, we can use, you know, every question is a landmine. What I would typically say in the U.S. is, “Who’s your best friend?” Well, his best friend probably or might be dead. “What’s your favorite food?” I don’t know the last time this young child ate, and would probably retraumatize him further. You know, “Are you closer to your mom or dad?” She came in as an orphan with only extended family members. There is no part or no prism or facet of their life that has been left untouched. It is completely devastated and in a cataclysmic situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about being a pediatrician in a war zone, and also people seeing you as a foreigner coming in? And you — parts we didn’t play — talk about people just coming up to you and saying, “Ceasefire.”

DR. SEEMA JILANI: Yeah, absolutely. People, as the days went on, more and more crowded into the hospital seeking safe shelter. And so you would see entire families perched on blankets. And so, you would — they would recognize us as foreigners. And their little blankets served as their bedroom, their coffee room, their breakfast room, their kitchen. Just in the hopes that the hospital would keep them safe, and they would see us and turn to us and see us as foreigners and say, “Ceasefire?” or, even more heartbreakingly so, “Take me with you.” Well, where can we go? Where is safe?

In terms of being a pediatrician, I’ve worked in war zones. I’ve worked in refugee rescue boats off the coast of Libya. I’ve worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Egypt. I have never treated this many war-wounded children in my career. No system is built to withstand what these people are going through.

On one day, as you saw, four out of five of the children whom we were actively resuscitating, which means trying to bring back from the brink of death, four of five of my patients were under the age of 15, so children. And the extent of the injuries, the scale and magnitude and severity, especially in terms of burns, is also something that I’ve not witnessed, borne witness to before. We had an approximately 11-year-old girl whose face was completely charred black, and her arms were flexed and contractured and sort of waxy because the burns had penetrated all the way down to the very flesh of her. And the smell of burnt flesh permeated the entire emergency room and will stay with me for a very long time.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Seema Jilani, we only have a minute, but if you could say — it’s already so unbearable to just hear accounts of what you’re saying — why do you do this work? And what has it been like for you, from one war zone to the next, and now in a place like Gaza, as you say, where you’ve never seen so many children in an emergency room of the hospital?

DR. SEEMA JILANI: It is the absolute honor and privilege of my life to be able to be let into people’s moments, whether they are tragic moments of death and pain or whether they are a new baby being born and counseling a new mother on breast-feeding. It is the absolute honor of my life to serve the people of Gaza. And I am so lucky to have served alongside these towering heroes that are nurses and doctors and people that are serving their communities. And that’s why I will keep going back and keep doing this work.

And on the flip side of that, I would say it is all of our responsibility to consider those orphans, consider those families, who are completely bereft of any and all human dignity, that has been taken from them. And it sits with us. Their fate will sit with us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Seema Jilani, thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Jilani, senior technical adviser at the International Rescue Committee, where she leads their emergency health responses globally. She’s recently joined an emergency team of doctors from IRC and Medical Aid for Palestinians who went to central Gaza to volunteer in the Al-Aqsa Hospital.

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Former Israeli Negotiator Daniel Levy: Only U.S. Pressure on Israel Can End Gaza Assault, Lead to Truce
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 07, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/7/i ... transcript

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, joined by Amy Goodman. Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Nermeen. Welcome to all our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hamas has put forward a detailed plan for a new ceasefire deal aimed at ending Israel’s assault on Gaza. The plan is a response to a proposal drawn up two weeks ago by the U.S., Israel, Qatar and Egypt. The Hamas counterproposal, which was introduced late Tuesday night, envisions three phases of 45 days each.

In the first phase, Hamas would release all female Israeli hostages, males under 19 and elderly and sick people in exchange for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails. Israel would also withdraw from populated areas in Gaza, cease aerial operations, allow far more aid to enter, and permit Palestinians to return to their homes, including in northern Gaza.

The second 45-day phase, to be negotiated during the first, would include the release of all remaining hostages, mostly soldiers, in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners, and Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza.

In the third phase, the sides would exchange the remains of hostages and prisoners.

President Biden commented on Hamas’s counterproposal on Tuesday, calling it, quote, “a little over the top.”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: There is some movement. And I don’t want to — I don’t want to — let me choose my words. There’s some movement. There has been a response from the — there has been a response from the opposition. But —

REPORTER: Hamas?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Yes, I’m sorry, from Hamas. But it seems to be a little over the top. We’re not sure where it is. There’s a continuing negotiation right now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel overnight after meetings on Tuesday in Egypt and Qatar. He will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, among others, to discuss Hamas’s response to the proposed deal. Blinken will also meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas later today.

As the negotiations continue, Israel’s assault on Gaza is entering its fifth month. Over 27,500 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 67,000 wounded since October 7th. While the vast majority of Gaza’s population have been driven from their homes, much of the territory has been destroyed or severely damaged, and a quarter of the population is facing starvation.

For more on the ceasefire negotiations, we’re joined by Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.

Daniel Levy, welcome to Democracy Now! If we could just begin with your assessment of the negotiations, how they’ve been proceeding so far, and what you anticipate Israel’s response might be to the counterproposal offered by Hamas?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, we do now have a detailed position that has been put out in the public domain. You referenced that. I think a crucial thing to say about this is that what Hamas have said is that it’s not that we can do phase one, move on to phase two, move on to phase three, is that there has to be an agreement upfront that this is going to deliver a final ceasefire.

Now, we’ve heard not detailed counterproposals from the Israeli side — we don’t have that. What we have heard is Prime Minister Netanyahu making clear that he will not accept a permanent ceasefire, he will not redeploy his troops out of Gaza, and has also been circumspect on what kind of Israeli prisoner exchange would be on the table. That suggests that the parties are still really quite some distance apart, that there’s an element of blame game, not being attributed with blame, and there’s an element of where more could one take the negotiations.

I think, Nermeen, that will be partly dependent on three factors — firstly, the balance of forces on the battlefield. This has not gone as Israel had anticipated, as Israel had hoped, as Israel’s maximalist war game — war claims had set out. Israel is, yes, operating in Gaza. We’ve seen the terrible destruction. You’ve gone through that, the level of death, of civilian death, of child death, the disease and starvation now. But we are not seeing Hamas’s resilience wane. So, on the battlefield, that is still something of a stalemate.

The second vector is internal pressure. Now, there is internal pressure inside Israel from the families. There are some inside the war cabinet who have said this needs to change direction.

The third vector — and here’s where we get to the Blinken visit, Nermeen — the third vector is what are the external dynamics of pressure. We have had what South Africa has done at the International Court of Justice, which I think was very significant. What we do not have is an American secretary of state empowered to use leverage, to put on the table a disincentive, a cost structure for Israel to continue this, and therefore, I think we’re stuck. What you instead have — curiously, perhaps — is an attempt to almost do an end run and to tie in postwar plans with the ceasefire. Now, that could be a good thing, right? This didn’t begin on October 7th, four months ago today. There are root causes that absolutely need to be addressed, if Palestinians or Israelis are going to have to have security in the future. But Blinken seems to be putting on the table some pretty magical thinking, which has partly been set out in articles by Tom Friedman and David Ignatius and, I think, are going to cause more problems. And maybe that’s something we can touch on.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Daniel Levy, if you can talk about the role of Qatar, the role of Egypt in these negotiations? Right now Blinken is meeting with Netanyahu. And what, ideally — and you, as a negotiator, know the significance of negotiations — Blinken needs to say to Netanyahu? While Blinken has continually said he’s heartbroken and gut-wrenched over the fatalities in Gaza, what he’s continued to do is provide weapons to Israel, an end run around Congress twice to ensure artillery shells go to them. So, whatever he feels or says he is feeling, the significance of what the U.S. is doing in shoring up Netanyahu?

DANIEL LEVY: That is crucial, Amy, because some may have heard the president say, “Well, it seems like the Hamas position is a little too much.” Some may consider the provision of 2,000-pound bombs by the U.S. to Israel, after everything we’ve seen, a little too much. Some may consider that when there is a plausible case for genocide at the International Court of Justice and you’re ignoring those provisional measures, a little too much.

So, what we have is a Qatari and Egyptian party — because there are no direct negotiations with Israel, between Israel and Hamas. So you have the mediators from the region who are talking to Hamas. They can try and lean on Hamas. If Hamas does not feel that it has to concede further, it will not. The question is, as you have noted: Will the U.S. lean on Israel? Now, it seems that rather than coming and saying, “There’s a cost for you to do this,” what Secretary Blinken is attempting to do is say, “You know what? I’m going to reward you. You know what I’ve got in my back pocket? I’ve got Saudi normalization.” Now, the Saudis have poured some cold water on this in a statement that they issued overnight to contradict something that spokesman Kirby said. But Blinken is hoping that this could somehow push a deal over the line.

I think this demonstrates, first of all, naivety. We’ve had normalization with the UAE and others in the past, and it only encouraged Israeli extremism. It’s layers and layers of make-believe, the idea that you can have Western-appointed Palestinian technocratic leaders somehow run the Palestinian side with no credibility on their own people, these limited measures against Israeli settlers that the administration took, when the problem is not a few bad apples. The problem is the state structure of occupation and oppression.

So, it seems that there’s another effort here by the administration to say, “We can stop ethnic cleansing. We can stop this displacement.” But — and here’s one of the big problems, I think — what is on offer is not Palestinian statehood. It’s not that anyone is saying, “Israel will withdraw. The army will be out. You’ll have recognition of a viable state that’s actually going to exist, with Jerusalem as its capital. Then we can deal with refugees and other things.” What is apparently on offer is a little bit of verbiage in exchange for Saudi normalization.

And what this is, really, Amy, is this is an attempt to reentrench, to refreeze the existence of a Bantustan, and the use of partition as a tool of violence in ensuring a future apartheid. And I think that’s a pernicious thing to offer Palestinians: You can either have ethnic cleansing or apartheid. Because what is not on the table is justice or genuine peace. And to be quite honest, if the U.S. administration wants to make a deal with the Saudis to export more arms, maybe have some companies do well over a civilian energy program, as a geopolitical move to try and slow down de-dollarization, don’t pretend that this is a peace move to end the horrors in Gaza, because this is a geopolitical maneuver, not a genocide avoidance maneuver.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the role of Qatar and Egypt in this, and how you feel this is going to play out, in the midst of these so-called negotiations, that are coming close to yet another — Blinken won’t use the word “ceasefire,” he talks about pause — the threat of a ground invasion of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled? What, something like 2 million Palestinians are there, just on the tip of Gaza, on the Egyptian border.

DANIEL LEVY: Well, as you say, Palestinians have been moved from one location to the other, and then, every time, the area they’re told to move to, that becomes bombed. That’s the story with Khan Younis today. That’s the story with Rafah tomorrow.

Qatar can, and has — and we saw the first pause, and we saw releases. So, there’s magical thinking that there’s a non-negotiated path to saving the hostages. Unfortunately, those numbers are smaller than what was previously talked about. There is a negotiated path. But Qatar and Egypt can only work with what they have from the Israeli side. And if they have something that is woefully falling short of what is needed — because on the Israeli side there is division, there’s an unwillingness to make those hard decisions — they are not going to be able to deliver on the back of that.

Now, Egypt has another concern, which is that Israel still hopes and holds a plan for the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza into Egypt, given the horrendous conditions there. And if Israel takes over the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, I think that exacerbates those concerns. You’ve had Egypt make statements to the effect of that not being something that can happen, as far as they are concerned.

So, you have the role of the mediators. Perhaps what Netanyahu is hoping is that he can get some of the hostages out — because there is pressure — without having to concede on the other issues. So, perhaps they’re hoping that phase one happens. I don’t think it’s going to happen at that low cost. What the Americans seem to hope is that they can drive a wedge between Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and that Netanyahu, if faced with the opportunity, for instance, of a deal with Saudi Arabia, will not be able to stand down public pressure. I think this is more American naivety, American failure to learn the lessons of history, because I think Netanyahu will turn around and say, “I can get a better deal, maybe not now, maybe not with this president. But, look, I got those Abraham Accord deals while giving nothing, and I’ll get something this time.”

So, again, what does it boil down to? It boils down to whether this administration, this president, actually wants to create circumstances in which Israel has hard choices to make, in which genuine American leverage is on the table. If not, we’ll continue to depend on battlefield dynamics, which aren’t going well, on Israeli internal pressure, and we risk further regional escalation, which has gone up again in the last weeks. And America is apparently willing to risk being further entangled yet again in Middle East wars, because it is unwilling to stare down an Israeli leader who has his own political survival at stake — perhaps that’s true of the president here, as well — and who is insistent on maintaining his apartheid regime.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Daniel Levy, I want to go back to a comment that you made about Saudi Arabia, the normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel being one of the principal incentives being offered. But there are also questions being raised, which I’m sure the Saudis are aware of, that the U.S. promises to Saudi Arabia are not likely to be accepted by Congress, even if this goes ahead, including a defense pact, as well as technical support to Saudi Arabia to develop a nuclear power industry. And it’s also unclear, as has been reported, that Netanyahu sees Saudi normalization and the continuation of U.S. support as essential to his survival. I don’t know if you agree with that. Do you think that’s true, since it does seem clear that his principal objective, Netanyahu’s, for reasons that we’ve covered on the show, his principal aim, is to remain in power?

DANIEL LEVY: Prime Minister Netanyahu is a leader who now has the legacy of October 7th hanging over him. [inaudible] in court facing criminal charges. Does he — can you still hear me?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Go ahead, Daniel.

DANIEL LEVY: Thank you. He is, therefore, making a daily calculation of how does he keep this going. Now, right now it is more important for him to maintain his coalition rather than to go on this journey to Saudi normalization — something he wants, but not at any cost. And as I have said, he can turn around to the Israeli public and say, “Don’t worry, the Americans want me to give up things which are too much for Israel to give up. My parliamentary opponents are willing to give them up, but not me. I will get a better deal.” So that’s on the Netanyahu side of things. He does not feel that he is in a corner yet.

On the Saudi side of things, the Saudis, of course, why not, if you’re in their position, say, “Let’s see what more we can get from the Americans. Let’s see what more they will put on the table. If there’s enough on the table, maybe there are circumstances under which we will do this. And if not, at least we’ve already now got an American offer, which we can use in the future and see where else this can go”? So, what you have is an Israeli side quite effective at playing the administration, a Saudi side quite effective at playing the administration — and, you know, I don’t take joy in saying this — but a very weak, very ineffective and self-harming government in Washington, D.C.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, I want to go back to something you said. You referred to an apartheid regime, being the Israeli government. You also talked about the Bantustan. Now, this is very significant, given who you are, a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak as well as Yitzhak Rabin, we’ll remind people, was killed by a Jewish extremist, was assassinated. Explain what you mean by “Bantustan.” And then talk about where you see this going, and how painful it was to see President Biden yesterday. He couldn’t remember the name Hamas, really cognitively stumbling there, but then saying Hamas’s proposal is “over the top.”

DANIEL LEVY: Look, on that latter point, I can’t comment on — oh, I can comment, but I have no special insight into the decision-making that has a reality in this country where that is the nature of the candidate being put forward. I imagine, and my assessment would be, that that community of people, a sizable community, who see a significant, massive importance in an outcome in the election in which Donald Trump does not return to the White House — I imagine they would see it as crucial that everything be done so that the alternative to Trump is a president who is someone as broad a coalition as possible can vote for, certainly amongst those who previously voted for him. And therefore, I hope that those other groups, who have such a strong interest in that Trump outcome not materializing, would be pressuring the administration to change its policy on aiding, abetting and arming what the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice, has plausibly said is a genocide, rather than beating up on people in Michigan and elsewhere who say, “I can’t. I cannot vote for this man.” So, that’s on the American side.

In terms of what I have witnessed previously as a negotiator and the assessment I made with regard to the apartheid reality and the offer of a Bantustan, there was a two-state option, which was an incredibly good deal for Israel, not the partition plan that the U.N. voted on in 1947 to allow this Jewish state entity to come into existence — that partition plan voted on by a U.N. with virtually none of the decolonized states, right? You didn’t have an African, Asian, Global South, as we would call it, presence at the U.N. then to create the Jewish state. That gave Israel about 53, 54%. Today Israel has 78%. That was the basis on which the two-state negotiation took place.

Rather than grabbing this with both arms and saying, “My goodness, how do we — how do we go the extra mile so that we can get this remarkable deal?” rather than going there, the Israeli negotiating position over time — and I don’t know what would have happened had Rabin not been assassinated — but the negotiating position on the Israeli side, when the Palestinian leadership, the PLO, was ready to accept that, was to keep draining this Palestinian state, meaning not only would there be nothing on the refugees, not only would there be no truth and reconciliation, there would have to be an end of all claims, there would be demilitarization, there would be islands of Israeli settlement in this state — those islands kept getting bigger with every iteration of the map — nickel-and-diming on Jerusalem, on border crossings, on everything.

What we are left with, a quarter of a century after the deadline for completing those negotiations, is something that factually, legally, accurately resembles the Bantustans that existed under that apartheid regime. There’s no perfect symmetry, but the legal definition of apartheid, I think, has been strongly proven in the reports by the human rights organizations.

And so, what the Americans — and I think this is the difference between Biden and Bibi, if you like. Bibi is saying, “I’m not offering them a state. I’m offering them a Bantustan.” And Biden is saying, “God damn it, man, can’t you just call it a state?” We all know that it’s not a state, because what you have there is partition being used to create these tiny islands of Palestinian limited self-governance, so that the envelope of control is an Israeli regime which makes sure the Palestinians cannot have equal rights, cannot have security, cannot have a future. And that is always going to be a recipe for insecurity and an explosion, whether that’s one that impacts Israelis or one that impacts Palestinians. And to try and come out of this crisis and say the solution is to go back to squeezing things into that box, I think that is criminal.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Daniel Levy, we just have a minute, but if you could say what you think the significance of — you mentioned it earlier — dissent within the Israeli war cabinet, however minor, and popular opposition to the war continuing, to what extent that might actually make a difference with respect to the negotiations and what Israel is willing to concede?

DANIEL LEVY: Very important, Nermeen. So, first of all, you do have a camp inside Israel that is anti-apartheid, anti-occupation, amongst Jewish Israelis, who do see a different future, and Israelis will ultimately need a landing place in which they have a future and a home, just not at the expense of Palestinians.

You have a different camp, that’s not that camp. You have a parliamentary, a political and a much larger camp, which was against Netanyahu in that huge protest movement before October 7th, which continues not to trust Netanyahu, which believes that the release of the hostages should be a priority, and which, as was expressed by one of the ministers, Gadi Eisenkot, who lost a son in this war, believes that the goal that you can totally decimate Hamas is not realizable, and that Israel — he didn’t use this language, I will — should cut its losses.

So you do have strong internal pressure. Unfortunately, that is not enough yet to drive an end to this war, and it’s not being matched by the kind of external pressure we should be seeing from the U.S. administration.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, thank you so much, Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.

When we come back, journalist Jeremy Scahill on “Netanyahu’s War on Truth.” Stay with us.

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Jeremy Scahill: Israel Has Waged a “Deliberate Propaganda Campaign” to Justify Brutal Gaza Assault
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 07, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/7/i ... transcript

The United States and more than a dozen other countries quickly moved to suspend funding to UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a vital lifeline for millions of people in Gaza, shortly after Israel accused a handful of the agency’s staff of taking part in the Hamas attack on October 7. But the U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 obtained the intelligence dossier on UNRWA that Israel shared with allied countries, and found “no evidence to support its explosive new claim.” The Financial Times and Sky News also reviewed the materials and came to the same conclusion. Israel’s claims about UNRWA are just the latest example of what journalist Jeremy Scahill says is a “deliberate propaganda campaign” to justify its brutal assault on Gaza. “This is one of the most epic frauds in modern history, reminiscent of the lies told to explain and justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq,” says Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.

A key Israeli intelligence document used by over a dozen countries, including the United States, to justify defunding UNRWA, the primary aid group for Palestinian refugees, contains no evidence to back up Israel’s claims, according to several news reports. The allegations made in the Israeli document include accusations that several UNRWA employees participated in the Hamas attack on October 7th. Britain’s Channel 4 obtained the document and found that it, quote, “provides no evidence to support its explosive new claim that UNRWA staff were involved with terror attacks on Israel.” The Financial Times, which also reviewed the materials, came to the same conclusion, as did Sky News. Now the aid agency, which is critical to providing humanitarian support in Gaza, says it will run out of funds by March as a result of the funding cuts.

The allegations made by Israel are just the latest in what journalist Jeremy Scahill calls, quote, “Israel’s information warfare campaign,” which is aimed at, quote, “flood[ing] the public discourse with a stream of false, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable allegations.” In his latest article, published today in The Intercept, Scahill writes, quote, “Nearly every week, sometimes every day, the Israeli government and military have unloaded a fresh barrage of allegations intended to justify the ongoing slaughter.” He adds, quote, “The tactic is effective, particularly because the U.S. and other major allies have consistently laundered Israel’s unverified allegations as evidence of the righteousness of the cause.”

Jeremy Scahill is a senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept. His latest article is headlined “Netanyahu’s War on Truth: Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians.” He joins us now from Germany.

Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could just begin by laying out the case that you make in your latest piece?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, in the early morning hours of October 7th, members of Hamas from the Qassam Brigades, the Nukhba, their elite special forces, as well as members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, led a multipronged attack in Israel. Everyone is familiar with this. And the initial targets that they hit constituted almost the entirety of Israel’s infrastructure in what Tel Aviv calls the “Gaza envelope,” and they were able to actually quite swiftly overpower the Gaza Division, the main entity of the Israeli state responsible for enforcing the prison conditions of the people of Gaza, for carrying out drone strikes, for waging war, for conducting all manner of warfare against the people of Gaza. And then the militant Palestinian fighters made their way into a series of settlements in the area.

And the intent was quite clear: They were trying to take hostages captive so that they could negotiate the release of their own prisoners. But what they did on that day was nothing short of shattering the paradigm, of sending a message that the big lie that is promoted by Israel — not just under Netanyahu, but certainly under Netanyahu — that Israelis could somehow live in peace a stone’s throw away from what is effectively a concentration camp filled with 2.3 million people that are deprived anything vaguely resembling a human existence, that that is tenable.

And Israel was, by all accounts, caught off guard, despite the fact that its own intelligence analysts had been warning that it appeared that Hamas was preparing and training for something that was quite spectacular, and not simply some small, one-off attempts to fire rockets or even do a minor incursion into Israeli territory. And by all accounts, those were overlooked and dismissed.

And what we saw happen then, as the Palestinian fighters made their way across these various Israeli communities and overtook the Gaza Division and took many, many military personnel prisoner and brought them back to Gaza, was the Israeli government engage in sustained counteraction, including with Apache attack helicopters, with drones. When the military did finally arrive in some of these communities — and, mind you, it was hours and hours before any official Israeli security forces were responding to some of these civilian areas — they engaged in widespread firefights. At Kibbutz Be’eri, we know that eyewitnesses have said that Israel forces shelled a house, likely killing at least a dozen Israelis who were being held captive by Palestinian fighters. And so, the Israeli government then was reeling from the shock of having these crucial military bases overrun, communities being flooded with Palestinian fighters.

And within hours of these attacks happening, the Netanyahu government began to craft a very deliberate propaganda campaign to sell the United States, other Western leaders and the global public on a scorched-earth war of annihilation against Gaza. And this campaign kicked into such high gear immediately. And what they did, what was central to this, is that the Israelis began showing President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, the heads of state of NATO countries and other Western nations images and videos that they then proceeded to tell an unverified story about what they depicted. And the characterization from Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was that this was the greatest act of violence against Jewish people since the Holocaust, that the tactics that Hamas used included rape, beheading of babies, mutilation of bodies, torture of families, the bounding of children in groups, including in a nursery in one of the kibbutzes, and then engaging in mass execution of small children, setting children on fire. And President Biden, Secretary Blinken and many Western leaders then started to repeat these claims.

But what happened is that when the Israeli social security agency began to actually document the deaths on October 11th, they documented 1,139 deaths; 695 of them were civilians. And we started reviewing the public documentation of the deaths. It turns out that there was only one infant that was killed in all of the attacks combined on October 7th, a 9-month-old baby named Mila Cohen. And she was hit by a bullet during gunfire while she was in her mother’s arm. There were also — I think there were 36 children under the age of 19 that died that day. Fourteen of them were actually killed in Hamas rocket attacks. So, when journalists started actually looking then at the official death toll — and you can go — the Israelis have published the stories, the photos of many, many, many of the victims — you realize that these were all lies. It was a massive fraud that was perpetrated on the world, particularly this business about mass decapitation of babies. And Joe Biden, on numerous occasions, said that he saw actual photographic evidence of the beheading of babies and the bounding and burning alive with kerosene whole families.

And what I discovered in my research was that these stories appear to have ended up in the heads of Biden and Blinken and others based on the totally fraudulent version of events on October 7th that was offered by private Orthodox rescue operations — the most famous of them is Zaka — telling stories, you know, about a pregnant woman who had a fetus cut out of her body, and then the fetus was decapitated in front of the woman and her two children. There’s no evidence whatsoever to indicate that that happened. In fact, there’s no documentation that any pregnant woman died on October 7th. There was one pregnant woman who was shot while in her car on the way to deliver her baby. She was a Bedouin woman. And the doctors were able to save her life. They tried to deliver the baby. The baby died some hours later. But that wasn’t Hamas cutting a baby out of a stomach. And yet these lies were sold. And some of the most obscene things that Israel said, that we now know are false, were repeated by Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, in testimony in front of the Senate, by Joe Biden himself. And this has gone on and on and on. I’ve just given you a couple of the most graphic examples of this.

But what’s clear is that the Israeli government understood that they needed to sell this as like the worst crime against humanity in modern times, in order to justify a long-planned siege of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu — he represents the most extreme and violent version of the Israeli state project. And it’s very, very clear that they sold this fraud, and the White House laundered it, and that’s why we’ve seen — and I think 27,000 people killed in Gaza is a conservative estimate. I think it’s much greater than that, because there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home. So, this is one of the most epic frauds in modern history, reminiscent of the lies told to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, I’m wondering if we can jump for a moment to the beginning of this segment, from October 7 to the UNRWA story, that something like, what, the Israeli government was alleging 12 — and then that number got larger — members of UNRWA, which has something like 13,000 workers in Gaza, were involved with the October 7th attack. Talk about, if you will, the way you do in your piece, take apart, as Channel 4 did, as a number of news organizations have, the evidence for this, that has been used by now almost 20 countries to defund this essential organization that supports the hospitals and the schools of Gaza for over 2 million people.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, UNRWA is nothing short of the most important humanitarian organization operating in Gaza. In fact, it was explicitly established in 1949 during the Nakba, where 750,000-plus Palestinians were forced from their homes in an extermination/annihilation campaign that then paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel in the aftermath of World War II. And the mandate of UNRWA was to care for those Palestinians and ensure that their right of return to their homes and land was going to be protected. And so, the Israeli government, certainly under Netanyahu, but under other heads of state, as well, has always wanted UNRWA eliminated, because this represents a very serious problem for the Israeli agenda of eliminating Palestinian territory in its entirety. So, just to give that context.

But then, the Israelis decide that — immediately after the International Court of Justice rules in favor of South Africa and orders provisional measures that include the prevention of genocidal acts, the stopping of killing Palestinians, that the court recognized as a protected group, and to allow, with immediate effect, the entry of aid sufficient to confront the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the Israeli war on Gaza, the Israelis then choose to open a new front and just blast the public and the ears of Western leaders with a propaganda campaign aimed at trying to get them to join the crusade to eliminate UNRWA. And Israel then prepared what it called an intelligence dossier, alleging that 12 employees of UNRWA — it has 13,000 or so employees in Gaza, 30,000 employees spread out across the Middle East where displaced Palestinians reside.

And the response from the Biden administration was to immediately announce it was suspending all funding to UNRWA. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted publicly that the United States had not even done its own review or investigation of these assertions that 12 members of a 30,000-member organization had some link to the October 7th attacks.

And then what happened — and this is so reminiscent of Judy Miller, The New York Times, the mushroom cloud, Dick Cheney, build-up to the War in Iraq — they go to The Wall Street Journal, and the Israelis provide the The Wall Street Journal with what the Journal then advertises as a dossier, an intelligence dossier. And they go further than the 12. They say that a full 10% of UNRWA’s Gaza staff, 1,200 employees, are connected to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and they say this is not just a few bad apples.

Well, this laundering of Israeli propaganda in the form of an article for a major American newspaper was — the lead author of that article was Carrie Keller-Lynn. She’s a new contributor to The Wall Street Journal. I started digging into who is this person, because she didn’t have a full bio on The Wall Street Journal website. Well, it turns out that she is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. She was a militant opponent of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement when she was at university in the United States. And her close friend, who she did a joint interview with for an organization that takes American grad students to Israel, she credits her with, during the 2009 Gaza war, creating the social media strategy for the Israeli Defense Forces. This is the reporter that was the lead journalist writing this UNRWA story for The Wall Street Journal.

And once we started to draw attention to that and put photos of her in her IDF uniform and talking about her ties to someone she said helped create the social media strategy for the IDF during a previous war in Gaza, then these organizations she was affiliated with scrubbed all of these articles and photos from the internet. The Journal has locked her Twitter account.

But this was very, very clearly a sophisticated propaganda campaign, where they knew which journalists to go to, they knew which governments would buy into it. And what they got is the Biden administration now being actively complicit in violating the orders of the International Court of Justice, which has Israel under watch for potential plausible genocidal actions in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Jeremy, do you think, on the October 7th investigation, that it wasn’t simply enough for Israel to say over a thousand Israelis and other people, majority of them civilian, were killed in the Hamas attack, was not enough of a justification to go into [Gaza] and then multiply that over 27,000 [sic] times — 27 times, to more than 27,000 dead today?

JEREMY SCAHILL: The Israelis, particularly the civilians who were killed that day, deserve the truth about what happened. The Israeli government responded with very heavy firepower. There’s indications that the Hannibal Directive may have been invoked, which says that it’s better to injure and possibly even kill Israelis than let them be taken hostage. They also made sweeping allegations about sexual violence being systematically committed by Hamas, that they have provided no proof that such a systematic campaign took place. The victims in Israel deserve the truth. And the 30,000-plus Palestinians who have been murdered with American bombs, whose deaths have been justified by the killing of those Israelis, possibly including by their own government, they also deserve the truth, and they deserve justice.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jeremy, I’m afraid, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to leave it there. Jeremy Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept. His latest piece, out today, “Netanyahu’s War on Truth: Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians.” And that does it for the show. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

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Ex-UNRWA Official: Funding Cuts Make Donor Countries Complicit in Starvation of Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 08, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/8/u ... transcript

As Israel’s assault on Gaza has displaced the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, more than half are sheltering in facilities run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Despite being the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza, UNRWA says it may run out of funds by the end of the month, after at least 18 states or institutions, including many of the agency’s biggest funders, announced they were suspending their donations in January. The cuts came after the Israeli government accused several UNRWA employees of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7. Israel made the allegations in a document it provided to foreign governments which apparently contained no direct evidence of the claims. “As of now, the evidence simply does not exist” outside of this “dodgy Israeli dossier,” says Chris Gunness, former chief spokesperson for UNRWA. He slams donors who have pulled their funding as “doing Israel’s political bidding” in its “scheme to dismantle UNRWA” and further dispossess Palestinians in Gaza.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fears are growing in Rafah over an imminent Israeli ground invasion after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a Hamas proposal for a ceasefire on Wednesday and ordered the military to attack the southernmost city in the territory. Over 1.2 million Palestinians are sheltering in Rafah after being displaced in the Israeli assault. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said a ground invasion of Rafah would, quote, “exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences,” he said.

Aid agencies are warning of famine amid profound food shortages, with a quarter of a million people in Gaza already starving. The healthcare system has collapsed, and the lack of water and sanitation has prompted outbreaks of illness and disease. Most of the residents in Gaza have been internally displaced, with more than half the population sheltering in facilities run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

Despite being the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza, UNRWA says it may run out of funds by the end of the month, after at least 18 states or institutions, including many of the agency’s biggest funders, announced they were suspending their donations last month. The cuts came after the Israeli government accused several UNRWA employees of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7th. Israel made the allegations in a document it provided to foreign governments, which apparently contain no direct evidence of the claims. Several news outlets, including Britain’s Channel 4, the Financial Times and Sky News, have all reported the document provided no evidence to support the conclusions that the agency’s staff were involved in the October 7th attacks. Meanwhile, Australia’s foreign minister said today she did not have all the evidence about the allegations and that she was working to bring an end to the suspension of funds. The government of Canada has also not seen any evidence to back up Israel’s claim, according to CBC News. UNRWA is set to lose $65 million in funding by the end of February as a result of the cuts, according to The New York Times. The agency relies on government contributions to fund its operations in occupied Palestine, as well as in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

For more, we’re joined in London by the former spokesperson for UNRWA, Chris Gunness. He’s now the director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.

Chirs Gunness, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could begin by responding to this news about UNRWA possibly running out of funds by the end of this month, losing $65 million?

CHRIS GUNNESS: It’s extremely sad, and it’s extremely regrettable, because UNRWA wants nothing more than to work, as it’s done for decades, with its donors in a very cooperative relationship to restore funding. UNRWA has taken robust and resolute action. The commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, sacked these workers, even before the external investigation and the internal, the OIOS report in New York, even before that had barely started. This was resolute action as part of a zero-tolerance policy.

And it’s with regret I say that I hope that the donors get onto the right side of history and get onto the right side of humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law. And I say with regret that it’s possible, at least, that even the Genocide Convention, which calls on state parties, including most of these defunders, to prevent genocide. And what is happening is that this starvation, which the U.N. correctly says is breaking out, the U.N. assesses that it’s possible that more people will die of starvation than the actual military assault. So, it’s with great regret I say that donors need to come back into the fold.

And just if I can give you just one example. We’re seeing in The New York Times these appalling pictures of these Abu Ghraib-style humiliating actions by individual Israeli soldiers. Will American officials, will American audiences judge the Israeli army by the action of a few? No, it will judge the Israeli army by the response of the Israeli army to these appalling, appalling images. And I say that is the basis upon which UNRWA should be judged, not the actions, which remain entirely unproven, as we now stand, against a few bad apples; it must judge the agency by how it responds. How has the agency responded? With robust and resolute and swift action as part of a zero-tolerance policy that is inculcated in the agency. And it’s been done in partnership with the donors. This is a failure not of UNRWA. If it’s a failure, it’s a failure of the donor community, as well, that’s been working so closely.

And even Mr. Blinken, the [U.S.] secretary of state, has said that the Americans have not been able independently to corroborate this evidence, the — what I’m calling, and what is now established in the international discourse, the “dodgy dossier.” That’s a reference to the dossier, the intelligence dossier, upon which Mr. Blair, former British prime minister, took Britain to war in Iraq. It was the dodgy dossier.

Do the donors want to be judged by history as potentially adding to a starvation, complicity potentially with the genocide against the crime of — the crime of crimes, genocide? No. They need to come back onto the right side of history and of the law and of humanitarian principles and immediately resume the funding of UNRWA. That’s the logical, that’s the humane, that’s the compassionate thing for the donors to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Gunness, can you talk about what UNRWA does, how large it is? And, I mean, you talk about this Israeli dossier. We just saw CBC said the Canadian government hasn’t seen the evidence of this. The U.S. government says they haven’t seen actually the evidence, where they’re talking about something like nine or 12 UNRWA employees, of, what, 13,000 in Gaza, over 30,000 overall. Talk about the history of UNRWA.

CHRIS GUNNESS: I think it’s important, in conceiving of UNRWA, both historically and its activities today, to think of it not as an aid agency, but as a government. So, UNRWA runs, in Syria, Jordan, West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon, schools, 550 schools, so schools for 550,000 students. UNRWA’s primary health clinics have 7 million patient visits a year. UNRWA has nearly 2 million food recipients across the region. That’s the core budget. That’s the education, relief and social services, and the primary health. As well as that, UNRWA has emergency programs. So, UNRWA does these core services — education, health, relief and social services — for as many as 6 million Palestine refugees across the region, in some of the most vulnerable, isolated, fragile communities. But when emergencies happen — for example, the Gaza war — UNRWA has to keep these life-saving, regionally stabilizing services ticking over, while it turns to the emergency.

And that’s what it’s done historically. It became operational on the ground in May 1950. And as its title suggests, it did relief, humanitarian relief, for the 750,000 people who fled or were forced from their homes fleeing in the 1948 War. And it also did works. It did job creation programs, if you like. But when it became apparent that the Israeli government was not going to grant them what the Universal Declaration grants all people, which is the right to return home, UNRWA then realized that it had a huge refugee population whose children needed education, that needed primary health, that needed all sorts of services. So UNRWA gradually grew in response to the humanitarian need of the refugees that UNRWA was serving.

Cut to today, huge education program — that’s the biggest program — and, by the way, offering children around the Middle East an escape from the drudgery and the isolation, the vulnerability, the fragility, the marginalization, and offering them the chance to be citizens of the world, to put their refugee status behind them, rather than perpetuating this refugee status, which, you know, that’s an accusation that’s often thoughtlessly thrown at UNRWA. UNRWA offers refugees an escape from that narrative and that kind of life, which is why it is such a tragedy that based on a dodgy Israeli dossier, this huge existential crisis has been triggered within UNRWA, perhaps the worst in its history, and the donors have become complicit.

As Penny Wong, the Australian foreign minister, has said, as you’ve just quoted in the news, she hasn’t seen the evidence. No donor has seen the evidence, because, as of now, the evidence simply does not exist. There’s nothing that links these dozen or so former UNRWA workers — I stress the word “former” — with the alleged crimes.

So, let’s get the funding resumed. Let’s avoid a mass starvation. And to be clear, starvation is a massacre in slow motion. And that slow-motion massacre has already begun. The donors need to realize the enormity of what they have unleashed, and come back immediately into the fold, where UNRWA will embrace them and will work with them to deal with these issues, as it has always done throughout its history.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the news conference that Secretary of State Tony Blinken held yesterday in Tel Aviv. A few journalists got to ask questions, and this was the question on UNRWA.

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: On UNRWA, look, we were deeply concerned by the allegations that were made about the participation or involvement of some of its employees in the – in October 7th. And it’s imperative that, as the U.N. has said it’s doing, that there be a thorough investigation, that there be clear accountability, and that there be clear measures put in place to make sure that this can’t happen again, that personnel working for it were not in any way involved in terrorism or the events of October 7th. We know that the work that UNRWA performs, the functions that it performs, have to be preserved, because so many lives are depending on it.

AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to go back to Washington, D.C., where Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press spokesperson, was asked about the fact that Channel 4, Sky News and the Financial Times found no evidence of UNRWA involvement in the October 7th Hamas attack.

NADIA BILBASSY-CHARTERS: One more question on Gaza: Did the White House receive an ironclad evidence that, actually, the UNRWA staff members, 12 of them, were involved in the October 7 attack? Because four news organizations, including Financial Times, Channel 4 and Sky News, found no evidence to support the Israeli claim. They said, actually, what they provided was just cellphone messages and cards that had been found after Israel went to the —

PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: You’re talking about UNRWA?

NADIA BILBASSY-CHARTERS: Yes.

PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Well —

NADIA BILBASSY-CHARTERS: So, where are you in the process of reviewing that? And second, considering the disaster humanitarian situation in Gaza, what’s the alternative, if you’re waiting for the results to come out or the review to come out?

PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: As you know, there’s an investigation happening, so we’re going to let that investigation move forward. And look, you know, funding for Palestinian civilians is a team effort. And so, for example, while we continue to provide funding to organizations like WFP, other countries may continue to fund UNRWA, which is their own sovereign decision. That is their right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Karine Jean-Pierre saying that they think that they’re continuing the investigation, yet they’ve already cut the funding. Meanwhile, Australia, who did also defund, says they are now reevaluating. Chris Gunness, you have called the cutting of aid to UNRWA — the U.S. most important, overwhelmingly gives the more than any other country — immoral and illegal. Why illegal?

CHRIS GUNNESS: Because it’s very clear that international humanitarian law, which expressly prohibits the use of humanitarian aid, food aid, as a political weapon. And the Genocide Convention makes it an obligation on state parties to prevent genocide. And if you don’t prevent genocide, then you are guilty of violating the convention. And the fact that mass starvation is already breaking out suggests that the Genocide Convention is being violated.

But if I may, Amy, just return to some of the things Mr. Blinken said, notice — I mean, let’s be forensic about this. He used the word “allegation,” not “evidence.” Now, there is a vast, gaping gap between allegations, which anyone can make, frankly, and evidence, which needs to be corroborated. And the fact that the American intelligence services, the best, allegedly — certainly the best resourced, I should say — in the world, has not been able independently to corroborate this information, which has triggered this huge crisis, that is, I think, very, very revealing. It’s also revealing, incidentally, at the end of that soundbite you heard Mr. Blinken saying UNRWA’s work is indispensable. And I think we can talk about this whole idea of replacing UNRWA.

But you heard the spokeswoman talking about accountability. Well, let’s look at what UNRWA has done. Even before the internal U.N., at the highest level, investigation had barely started, and certainly before the external investigation had barely started, UNRWA took robust action against this. It has in place — and it’s worked for years with the donors — accountability frameworks and mechanisms. Staff are screened. The very fact the Israelis know these names is because UNRWA, as part of the zero-tolerance policy and its commitment to neutrality, passed on to the Israelis last May — let’s be precise — the entire staff list of UNRWA in Gaza and the West Bank in digital form to the Israelis. It had already been run through the Security Council’s terrorism list. And Israel didn’t come back with a single complaint. It was only until after the ICJ ruling, the day after the ICJ ruling, accusing Israel of plausible genocide, and the headlines were — we all saw them — that the Israelis leaked this.

So, what I would say is the news management is unraveling. It’s been exposed. And what we’re now seeing is the spotlight turning to the donors. And I would like to see some proper investigation into the frameworks that are there for the donors who are accusing UNRWA of politicization. I would like to say: What are the donors doing, in a way which is accountable and which is transparent, to show to the world how they ring-fenced their humanitarian decision-making process and to keep it immune from politics? Because they’re accusing UNRWA of politicizing, weaponizing. You know, there’s all this accusations around UNRWA’s neutrality. What about the donor neutrality? Because it looks increasingly as if the donor community, based on a very dodgy dossier, was doing Israel’s political bidding. We heard Mr. Netanyahu — we’ve heard him say several times that he would like to see UNRWA destroyed, dismantled. And it looks horribly — and I say this with deep regret — that the donors are, on the face of it, going along with that Israeli scheme to dismantle UNRWA, which is why I say they can reverse that.

They can reverse that this moment, by coming back and saying, “It was a dodgy dossier. We don’t have the facts.” They’re now openly saying they don’t have the facts. They need to come back and acknowledge what is actually happening. It was a piece of news management. Treachery happens in wars. It happens. You know, that’s what goes on: misinformation, lies. The truth is the first casualty of war. All of that. That’s what’s happened here. The truth appears to have been the first casualty.

The donors have made this precipitous, regrettable, I would say, illegal and disproportionate decision to defund UNRWA. That can be reversed immediately by the donors coming back. And I would urge them to do this, because, you know, judge UNRWA by its response. Just as I say judge the IDF — I say to American audiences, judge the IDF by its response to these Abu Ghraib pictures, judge UNRWA by its response. Commissioner-General Lazzarini has been swift and resolute as part of a zero-tolerance policy, which, by the way, has worked throughout the region. Do you really think that 33,000 UNRWA workers could be actively doing this humanitarian, human development work across the region if it weren’t implementing policies which were absolutely impartial? There’s no question that UNRWA would very quickly lose the trust of the communities and the donors if they weren’t implementing this zero-tolerance policy. And that has to be recognized. It’s the response of UNRWA that donors need to respond to, not a few bad apples who we don’t even know.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Chris Gunness, I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us.

CHRIS GUNNESS: My pleasure.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Chris Gunness, the former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA. He’s now the director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.

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“We Cannot Trust Biden” on Gaza: Michigan House Dem Majority Leader Meets White House Officials
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 09, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/9/b ... transcript

Senior Biden administration officials traveled to Michigan on Thursday to meet with Arab American and Muslim leaders amid growing opposition to Biden’s candidacy over his support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Michigan is an important election battleground state and home to the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the United States. Michigan House Majority Floor Leader Abraham Aiyash, the state’s highest-ranking Arab and Muslim leader, joined the meeting to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, restrictions on military aid to Israel, and recommitting humanitarian aid to Palestinians. “Now the question is: Are they going to heed the call of their constituents and do something that a majority of Americans and Democrats support in demanding for a ceasefire and an end to the violence?” demands Aiyash, who has signed on to the “Listen to Michigan” campaign and pledged to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s primary on February 27. “We’re focused on ending a war and stopping the military funding that supports genocide,” says Layla Elabed, Palestinian American community organizer who is spearheading the “Listen to Michigan” campaign. “Until that happens, we cannot trust Biden and we cannot commit our votes to him.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Senior Biden administration officials traveled to Michigan on Thursday to meet with Arab American and Muslim leaders amid growing opposition to Biden’s candidacy over his support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Michigan, which is an important swing state, is also home to the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the United States. Biden’s campaign manager traveled to Detroit last month, but a number of Arab American leaders and elected officials declined to meet with her over the war in Gaza. Last week, Biden traveled to Michigan himself to meet with members of the United Auto Workers union, who endorsed him, but he did not meet with any Arab American leaders.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to a question about the meetings in Michigan at a news conference yesterday.

PRESS SECRETARY KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Senior officials traveled to Michigan — and they are obviously traveling today — to hear directly from the community, to hear directly from community leaders on a range of issues that are important to them, obviously, as well, and not just them, but their families, including the conflict that we’re currently seeing in Israel and Gaza. This is a private meeting. We want to give them the space to have a meeting that certainly has candor, certainly where both — where we can hear directly from them. So, don’t want to get too far into what’s going to be discussed. But we want to hear directly from them. We want to hear their concerns. We believe it’s important for these leaders to be — to be able to speak directly to officials in the White House.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Among the people who met with Biden administration officials yesterday was Michigan House Majority Floor Leader Abraham Aiyash. He’s the state’s highest-ranking Arab or Muslim leader. Representative Aiyash is among over 30 elected officials in Michigan who have signed on to a “Listen to Michigan” campaign and pledged to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s primary on February 27th. Representative Aiyash joins us now from Detroit.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Representative Aiyash. If you could tell us who was present in this meeting, and what were your demands to them?

REP. ABRAHAM AIYASH: Thank you for having me.

There were several meetings throughout the day. We had folks from the National Security Council. Samantha Power was present, as well as other folks from the Biden administration and State Department. And the conversations were very frank. I know many of us did not spare any time or word in terms of discussing what we need.

And the conditions that we laid out are simple. We are expecting a permanent ceasefire. We want to see restrictions and conditions on the military aid that Israel continues to receive right now without any conditions and without any restrictions or parameters. And we want to see a serious commitment for the humanitarian aid to be sent to Gaza, as well as reinstating the funding for UNRWA.

So, we were clear that unless these demands are going to be initiated, then we have no interest in continuing the conversation with the White House, because now is not the time for posturing. I would be remiss to not mention that this meeting happened 19 days before the presidential primary here in Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about that, state Representative Aiyash. And you’re extremely significant as the number two person in the House in Michigan and, again, as Nermeen said, the highest-ranking Arab American and Muslim leader in Michigan. This meeting where — original meeting with the campaign manager for President Biden, you chose not to meet with her. He has sent out a whole group, including Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, now head of USAID, and Tom Perez, former labor secretary. This clearly has shaken the White House, the level of protest. When he was getting the endorsement of the UAW, UAW workers holding up signs calling for a ceasefire. Talk about why you decided to have this meeting and not boycott the invite, and also what they had to say to you about where President Biden stands on a ceasefire.

REP. ABRAHAM AIYASH: So, there was no direct commitment on the ceasefire. But what I will say is, when they invited us to meet with the campaign manager, we rejected it because this is not the time to engage in electoral politics, particularly when you see 30,000 innocent folks that have been murdered at the hands of weaponry that our U.S. taxpayer money has unfortunately funded. So the conversation was very clear that we need to have a serious framework for us to say the United States should lead with moral clarity and fight for peace and that we are not going to engage about this in any sense through electoral politics. Palestinian life should not be measured simply in poll numbers, but on the basis of their humanity. And that’s what we reiterated to them. And anytime there’s an opportunity to engage to help shift policy, we’re going to try to do that. And that was what yesterday’s attempt was.

And now the ball is in the president’s court and the White House’s court to see what they will do after hearing our concern. They could no longer say, “Well, we didn’t know.” We had very robust, very frank discussions with them, and they know where we stand. And now the question is: Are they going to heed the call of their constituents and do something that a majority of Americans and Democrats support in demanding for a ceasefire and an end to the violence?

AMY GOODMAN: Michigan is a key swing state, and the Arab American and Muslim community is key to the votes for President Biden. You’re part of a larger effort to vote “uncommitted” in the February primary in Michigan. Can you explain why you’ve made that decision, and if you addressed this yesterday with Biden administration officials?

REP. ABRAHAM AIYASH: So, we made it very clear with them that there would be no engagement on electoral politics at this moment, and we were not going to entertain that. But as far as February 29th — 27th, rather, for the Michigan presidential primary, we are going to remain uncommitted. And the reason why we’re doing that is because we need to let the White House know that they have an opportunity in this moment to earn the votes. As an elected official, I can tell you, when I run for office, I don’t say, “Well, the other guy is worse than me.” I give them a message and a platform for why I’m running. And we expect the White House and President Biden to do the same. And the expectation is, we are letting him know from now — it’s February; the election is November, but we are letting him know now — that we are uncommitted to his presidency until we see some changes in the policies that have affected both Americans here and so many abroad, as well as their families in the Gaza Strip.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to bring in Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American community organizer from Dearborn, Michigan, and a leader of the “Listen to Michigan” campaign, which is urging constituents to cast a vote for “uncommitted” on Michigan’s February 27th primary election in protest against President Biden’s ongoing support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Elabed is also the younger sister of Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress.

Layla Elabed, welcome to Democracy Now! If you could begin by explaining why you decided to lead this campaign?

LAYLA ELABED: Well, personally, as a Palestinian American and somebody who, from the age of 12, saw the power of electoral politics within our Arab American and Muslim community, I knew that I wanted to be part of something that could possibly effect change. And the “uncommitted” campaign in Michigan is part of a larger anti movement, antiwar movement, across the country. And we’re focused on ending a war and stopping the military funding that supports genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to turn to comments that President Biden made while speaking at the White House last night. After he addressed the special counsel’s report on his handling of classified information, Biden responded to a question on Israel’s assault on Gaza.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, has been over the top.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Layla Elabed, if you could respond to what President Biden said, and what you hope will come out of this campaign?

LAYLA ELABED: That was — his comments were still not a call for a ceasefire or for the reevaluation of military aid to Israel, that is committing a genocide and an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. And until that happens, we cannot trust Biden, and we cannot commit our votes to him.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s put the question to state Representative Abraham Aiyash. If you can respond to what the Biden administration is now saying? President Biden, Tony Blinken, just back from his Mideast trip, are not calling for a ceasefire, but Blinken is talking about a pause. But they are warning Netanyahu about a ground assault on Rafah. Can you talk about the significance of this? I mean, the area you come from in Michigan, and Layla coming from Dearborn, one of the largest Arab American communities in the United States, you represent, state Representative Aiyash, so many people who have family in Gaza right now. What that kind of ground assault would mean?

REP. ABRAHAM AIYASH: It would be devastating, one, for the people, but I think, more — more importantly, I think the broader conversation is we need to make sure that if this happens, that the American people are very aware of what is going to be the message in November. But we are going to keep having that conversation and letting them know. But at this point, it’s clear to them that we have made it our mission and our message that where we stand on this is very clear. We are a community that is demanding peace, and we expect it to be that way.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Representative Abraham Aiyash, second-ranking Democrat in the Michigan House, thank you so much for joining us, and Layla Elabed, Palestinian American community organizer from Dearborn, Michigan.

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“Our Children Deserve to Live”: Mother in Rafah Desperate to Escape as Israel Prepares Ground Invasion
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/12/ ... transcript

As Palestinian health officials say overnight Israeli strikes killed dozens in Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought refuge, we speak with a teacher trying to evacuate Rafah with her young children, who urges the U.S. government to stop the bloodshed. “My message to President Biden: We are innocent civilians, and we have no fault in what is happening,” says Duha Latif. “Our children deserve to live a normal life like the rest of the world’s children.” Latif is fundraising to gather the money she needs to enter Egypt. The latest Israeli bombardment was conducted as part of an operation to free two Israeli hostages and came amid warnings from U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders against Israel’s expected ground invasion of Rafah. Aid agencies fear the offensive would cause massive casualties.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian health officials say overnight Israeli strikes on Rafah in southern Gaza have killed at least 67 people as concern grows Israel will soon launch a full-scale ground invasion. Over a million displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in Rafah, which borders Egypt, after Israel claimed it was a safe zone. Palestinians in Rafah say a mosque and several houses were hit by the overnight Israeli strikes.

KHALED AL-TAWEEL: [translated] It was an Apache firing with a really loud noise. The F-16s fired, the Cobra, the drone, all kinds of aircraft. Terror, terror, so much terror. They wiped out mosques, people, and displaced people. They kept saying, “Go to Rafah. Go to Rafah.” And people came here. And then you target them?

AMY GOODMAN: Over the weekend, Israel carried out numerous airstrikes on Rafah, including one that leveled a five-story home, killing at least eight people.

ENAS AMER: [translated] My sister and her husband are sleeping in the room, and my mother and my other sister with her children in the living room, me and my father in the room over here. Suddenly, a rocket fell on us. My sister, her husband and their children, including my niece, who is 2 months old, all gone.

AMY GOODMAN: The overnight airstrikes came as Israeli forces carried out an operation in Rafah to free two Israeli Argentine hostages, who were found to be in good condition. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces increasing pressure at home to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza. Earlier today, a relative of the two men freed in Rafah called for Israel to reach a deal now.

EDAN BEGERANO: And we know about the discussions in Cairo, or in Paris, in others, between the Hamas and between Israel, with the mediators. Please, be serious and strike a deal. The Israeli people need the deal done — not yesterday, not tomorrow, today. We want it done as soon as possible in order for to give us some breath. We must breathe a little bit here.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, President Biden spoke by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning against Israel launching a ground invasion of Rafah. Aid agencies fear the offensive would cause massive casualties, while UNICEF has warned an escalation of Israel’s attacks in Rafah will cause hunger and disease to skyrocket. Hamas cautioned an Israeli invasion of Rafah will torpedo ongoing negotiations for a truce. Authorities in Egypt have also threatened to suspend a key peace treaty with Israel if Rafah is invaded.

For more, we’re going directly to Rafah to speak with Duha Latif. She’s a 29-year-old teacher from Gaza trying to evacuate Rafah with her young children, 6-year-old Ameer and 1-and-a-half-year-old Kareem.

Duha, welcome to Democracy Now! Especially under these difficult circumstances, we appreciate you being with us. You are a native of Rafah. Can you describe the situation there now?

DUHA LATIF: Hello, Amy. Thanks for hosting.

I’m sure most of you saw the news yesterday. And what happened in Rafah, it was the worst night in my life, and I really cannot believe that I am still alive. And actually, situation here is very terrible. Rafah is a small city, and now 1.5 million people in Rafah, and Rafah is just 55 square kilometers, which means that per square kilometers in Rafah, there are around 24,000 Palestinians. Just imagine this, Amy. Therefore, it is very difficult to get food, water or medicine, in addition to the spread of diseases, because of a large population. Also, Rafah is a city with no hospital, no electricity, no bakeries since four months. This is the situation here.

AMY GOODMAN: You are 29 years old. You’re a teacher, Duha, in Rafah?

DUHA LATIF: Yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: The city has swelled to four times the population. Can you talk about your attempts to get out with your two little ones, your 1-and-a-half-year-old and your 6-year-old?

DUHA LATIF: The issue of leaving Rafah and evacuation to Egypt is very complicated, and it’s very, very expensive, because we need the approval of the Egyptian side to grant us exit arrangements, which costs a large amount of money. And this is what we don’t have at the present time. And this is what got me created a GoFundMe account, because we don’t have money to get out from Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean? How much money does it cost to leave Gaza? What are you raising money for?

DUHA LATIF: In fact, I can’t determine that exactly, but I can tell you that’s the amount required to be paid to exit Gaza. It’s considered somewhat high, very high, especially in our current case. This amount includes the travel cost and the expensive coordination, in addition to what is required when we arrive in Egypt side — of course, if we’re still alive — such as renting a place to stay and buy clothes and food and children needs. Actually, we don’t know to whom this money goes, and I cannot mention specific site. But what I know, it’s that we have to pay this amount for one of Egyptian offices.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your little ones and how they are processing what’s happening right now? Do you hear bombing, shelling around you?

DUHA LATIF: Yes, yes. Last night, maybe you see this in the news. And it was terrible. And we are all — that my children was scared all the night, and they’re crying. And maybe you see what’s happened in the news. And what’s happened, really, is very, very hard and difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering if you heard the relative of the two Israeli Argentine hostages who the Israeli military freed in Rafah. Their relative said, “Please, have a truce now. It is not enough that you have freed our two loved ones.”

DUHA LATIF: Yes. No, I don’t hear of this. And I am like you: I hear this just from the news.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about, at this point, what message you have for President Biden? You may have heard that his aides are saying that he’s made mistakes in dealing with the Middle East. What message do you have for President Biden?

DUHA LATIF: I will send a message. I have two children, and they are always nervous and afraid from the voices they hear around us, and always ask me questions I don’t have the answers for it: “Mom, when can we get out? Mom, when we will eat burger? Mom, when we can go back to school?” And it’s difficult to calm children while the mother needs somebody to calm her. So, my message to President Biden: We are innocent civilians, and we have no fault in what is happening. Our children deserve to live a normal life like the rest of the world’s children. Just one word, President Biden: ceasefire now. You have the power to make it happen right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Duha, do you have access to clean water? Also, have you taken in refugees from other parts of Gaza at this point into your own home?

DUHA LATIF: And actually, Amy, yes, I have, but there is only canned foods, beans and tuna, for four months. My children are in a growing stage and need healthy and useful food, like an egg, milk, fruits. And all of this doesn’t exist at the present time. There is no clean water. Because of this, my young son Kareem, 1-and-a-half years, suffered intestinal khatar. And also, there is also no medicine for this. Also, about the refugees, yes, our situation like the situation of thousands people here in Rafah. Yes, I have many refugees in my home. They are my relatives from Gaza, in northern Gaza. Every home in Rafah is full of refugees.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I thank you so much for taking this time, speaking to us from Rafah.

DUHA LATIF: Amy, I want just to say a word. Can I?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

DUHA LATIF: We are urgently trying to leave Rafah, but we need money to leave. We have a GoFundMe account, if people want to support us by donating or sharing or help my family. We need to leave to keep my family safe.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Duha Latif, I thank you so much for being with us, 29-year-old teacher from Rafah, trying to evacuate there with her young children, her 6-year-old Ameer and her 1-and-a-half-year-old Kareem.

When we come back, we’ll speak with Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, as the U.S., the European Union, countries around the world warn Israel against a ground invasion of Rafah. Stay with us.

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“Worst-Case Scenario”: Noura Erakat on Israel’s Looming Invasion of Rafah
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 12, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/12/ ... transcript

As the United States, the European Union and countries around the world are warning Israel against a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, we speak with Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat. “This is disproportionate, excessive force that is meant to terrorize a population,” says Erakat. “Israel must stop its genocidal campaign now.” Erakat also responds to news that one of President Biden’s top foreign policy aides has admitted the administration has made “missteps” in the Middle East, and discusses calls to stop arms transfers under international law to prevent war crimes.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The United States, the European Union, countries around the world are warning Israel against a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought refuge from the rest of Gaza. One top EU official said it could lead to a, quote, “unspeakable humanitarian catastrophe.” Authorities in Egypt have threatened to suspend a key peace treaty with Israel if Rafah is invaded. Hamas has also warned an Israeli invasion of Rafah will torpedo ongoing truce talks.

For more, we’re joined by Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, an associate professor at Rutgers University, author of the book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Noura. If you can start off by responding to this threat over the weekend that plans are being readied to invade — for Israel to invade Rafah, and the world, countries around the world, warning Israel not to do this, apparently President Biden doing that in a phone call with Netanyahu, as well? Your response and what this would mean?

NOURA ERAKAT: Good morning, Amy.

It might be a bit refreshing to hear these warnings sound off from across the world in various capitals, but they are completely and wholly inadequate, given that we know that this is a plausible genocide, given that we know what Israel has said. Despite multiple warnings, it created a ground invasion on October 27th. It has destroyed all of the hospitals. It has blown up all of the universities. It has created a situation of starvation, of a lack of even water. There is a humanitarian crisis that, even without another bomb falling, will lead to sure death of thousands of Palestinians.

These capitals, these states have an arsenal of diplomatic options available to them to stop a genocide. First and foremost is a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire. Short of that is the cutting of weapons transfers, as has the Netherlands high court demanded this morning of stopping the transfer of F-35 jet parts to Israel. Belgium has stopped weapons transfers. Japan has cut military contracts. Short of that, these states can cut diplomatic ties.

What is it? What is it to the population of Rafah, now basically bracing themselves for more massacre, for warnings to a state that is responsible under international law and accountable? And if it is not responsible or accountable, it is either a complete rogue state that must be isolated by everybody, or it means that all these other countries are complicit and basically covering responsibility for themselves by issuing empty warnings.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to that issue of the Netherlands court ordering the Dutch government to stop exporting — these are U.S.-made F-35 jet parts being stored in the Netherlands — to Israel. In the ruling, one of the judges wrote, quote, “It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law.” In November, Oxfam and Amnesty International sued the Dutch government, saying the arms transfers violate Netherlands’ obligations under international law to prevent war crimes. Are you seeing this escalating around the world and other countries doing the same? Certainly, Germany gives even more weapons, and, of course, the United States, the most.

NOURA ERAKAT: I am seeing a surge. We have seen for the five — past five months, the only thing that has kept humanity together is the surge of civil society, which has waged lawsuits, which has risen in protest, to do the work that states have failed to do. We see in the United States the Center for Constitutional Rights bring a lawsuit in the Northern District of California, where the judge agreed that the ICJ was correct that this is undeniable, a case of genocide, but he doesn’t have the jurisdiction in order to stop the Biden administration. We saw the highest court in the world say the same thing, that this is plausibly genocide. We are seeing a series of judicial decisions that are coming to the same conclusion, but none of them can be enforced without political will, which is being impeded in the Security Council by the United States.

Let’s be clear: The ICJ, on January 26th, when it issued its provisional orders, said that the international community has a duty and a responsibility, according to its responsibility under the Genocide Convention, not to perpetuate Israel’s genocidal campaign. We see Israel directly violating those provisional orders. Nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been killed since January 26th. We know for a fact that they have impeded the access to humanitarian aid, going so far as the Israeli Navy shooting, lobbing at U.N. humanitarian convoys from the Mediterranean Sea. We also see very clearly a continuing incitement to genocide, most recently in the convening of a far-right coalition of, I think, 11 ministers in government under the banner of “Settlements Bring Security and Victory.” There is an explicit campaign to depopulate the Gaza Strip, to resettle it. No one is mincing words. Everybody is watching, covering themselves with these empty promises and warnings as Israel continues with its campaign. And this is a warning to the world. This is a warning to the world that we are watching, that this is very blatant and being exposed.

In this situation that we have right now, in the worst-case scenario, Israel will continue with its campaign. Egypt, which is trying to prevent this from happening, will likely create a buffer zone in the Sinai. If Israel is actually successful in pushing out the Palestinians, they will be stuck in that buffer zone, as have refugees from Syria been stuck at the buffer zone with Jordan and Iraq. That is the worst-case scenario. Israel — or, Netanyahu telling the world that they’re going to evacuate the Palestinians up north mean nothing when the north has been decimated. Rafah is the last standing city. They should not be taken — there’s nowhere to go north.

Israel must stop its genocidal campaign now. If it wants to offer refuge to Palestinians, it must offer refuge to Palestinians within its — within what is historic Palestine, Palestine 1948, where they can actually be housed safely and where we know Israel does not want them and will return them to Gaza. There are many options at our disposal, and yet none of them are being accessed in this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask your thoughts on this latest development, the overnight airstrikes in Rafah coming as Israeli forces carried out an operation to free two Israeli Argentine hostages, who were found to be in good condition, Fernando Simon Merman, age 60, and Luis Har, age 70. Earlier today, a relative of the two Israeli hostages freed in Rafah called for Israel to reach a deal now.

EDAN BEGERANO: And we know about the discussions in Cairo, or in Paris, in others, between the Hamas and between Israel, with the mediators. Please, be serious and strike a deal. The Israeli people need the deal done — not yesterday, not tomorrow, today. We want it done as soon as possible in order for to give us some breath. We must breathe a little bit here.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, this is very interesting, because this is a man whose beloved ones have been held since October 7th, but he’s saying we cannot rest unless all the hostages are freed, and he’s calling for a truce. But that is not what Netanyahu is calling for. Are you concerned that finding these hostages in an apartment building in Rafah will lead to more bombing and attacks in Rafah or to justify a full-scale assault?

NOURA ERAKAT: Amy, Israel is not concerned — the Israeli government is not concerned with its hostages. If they were, they would have engaged in good-faith negotiations. The diplomatic negotiations led to the release of 136 hostages. That wasn’t any military operations. After five months, they’ve only extracted two hostages. We know that the families want a truce. We know that the government is opposing a truce. We know that the concern is not the hostages. Israel shot to kill two of them, two of their own, who were raising white flags and speaking in Hebrew — giving us an idea that this is not a legitimate war. This is a genocidal campaign of extermination.

Last night, last night, the images that came out of Rafah are horrifying. There was a young girl, her legs cut off, hanging off of a wire by her shirt. This is disproportionate, excessive force that is meant to terrorize a population, that is telling them, “You have no life here. There is no future here. You must leave.” That is the message that is being sent. We’re seeing young children who are forced to be far older than their age, a young boy who escaped bombing, having his head and the blood cleaned off of it, telling the world, “[in Arabic],” “I am not scared.” How can he not be scared in this situation? How are all of us not terrified? We have taken away life for these children. We are decimating their future, even if we do survive. Images of babies who are being removed from the rubble with only two limbs, with no family members left. What is their future?

And yet we’re obscuring these atrocities. We’re obscuring these genocidal campaigns with words of distraction. We’re taking it and abstracting it to warfare and strategy, hostages and the negotiations, when the humanitarian situation speaks for itself, when tribunals have told us repeatedly this is a genocide. It must be ended, unequivocally. And that is incumbent upon us now, before we see the last city in Gaza, the one that is normally home to 220,000 Palestinians, now housing 1-and-a-half million Palestinians, 80% of the population, in tents and in dire humanitarian situation. We should be rushing in to treat them with medicine, with food, with water, with adequate care, rather than now preparing massacres for them, like the speaker before you, Duha, who has created a GoFundMe to save herself and her children. This is our responsibility.

Last word on this. There is a concept in international law known as state responsibility, where a state can — must deal with the consequences of its actions. It cannot — Israel cannot say — cannot say — that it is now fighting a war of self-defense, which it doesn’t have a right to under international law, against territory that it occupies. But if those actions are illegal, it must bear the consequences for them. Israel has imposed a siege against international law for 17 years, imposed a military — a prolonged military operation for 56 years, imposed an apartheid regime, which is a crime against humanity, that the international community has said is an apartheid regime, and still asking the world for an exception and blaming the Palestinians as the assailants as it is committing a genocide, and now asking the world to let it commit genocide as a form of exception, that somehow it is like any other situation. And rather than meet that with the full force of diplomatic and international will to rebuff it, instead we’re allowing Israel to create that exception, which will make none of the world safe, when other powerful countries and nuclear powers decide that they want to decimate an inconvenient population, a native population, as in this case, in order to fulfill its national interests. It defies all of the logic of international legal institutions and international law, which are set up to regulate things like this in this very moment.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 10 seconds, but you have a top aide to President Biden admitting that the Biden administration has made many missteps since the beginning of this. What do you think they could do, a single action that could make the greatest difference when it comes to what Israel does in Gaza, Noura Erakat?

NOURA ERAKAT: They can abstain in the Security Council and allow an immediate ceasefire to take place. Biden can pick up the phone and tell Netanyahu to stop. They can actually stop the weapons transfers or even revoke this supplemental budget, which plans to resettle Palestinians in what will be an ethnic cleansing campaign and complicity in genocide. There are so many things to be done. These are empty words aimed at the 2024 elections, as opposed to aimed at compliance with international law to meet our duty and responsibility under the Genocide Convention.

AMY GOODMAN: Noura Erakat, we want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, associate professor at Rutgers University, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

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Bombs, Disease, Starvation: Canadian Doctor Describes the Desperate Situation Inside Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 13, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/13/ ... transcript

As Israel continues to threaten to invade Rafah, where over a million Palestinians have sought refuge, we speak to a surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. “What I saw in Khan Younis were the most horrific scenes in my entire life,” says Canadian ophthalmologist Dr. Yasser Khan. He describes the dire conditions of injured civilians in Gaza, the majority of whom are children. “The genocidal intent of Israeli politicians, the Israeli army, is really clear. What is really bizarre is that they haven’t hid it,” says Khan. “The killing machine that Israel has unleashed on the healthcare system, I think, is unprecedented. … If the bombings are not going to get you, then disease will surely get you.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to Gaza, to Israel threatening to launch a ground invasion of Rafah, where over a million displaced Palestinians have sought refuge. On Monday, President Biden hosted King Abdullah of Jordan at the White House. During public remarks, Biden initially described Israel’s operation in Rafah as, quote, “our operation.”

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: As I said yesterday, our military operation in Rafah — the major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan, a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than 1 million people sheltering there.

AMY GOODMAN: Jordan’s King Abdullah condemned Israel’s plan to attack Rafah and called for a ceasefire and the creation of a Palestinian state.

KING ABDULLAH II: We cannot afford an Israeli attack on Rafah. It is certain to produce another humanitarian catastrophe. The situation is already unbearable for over a million people who have been pushed into Rafah since the war started. We cannot stand by and let this continue. We need a lasting ceasefire now. This war must end. … Seven decades of occupation, death and destruction have proven beyond any doubt that there can be no peace without a political horizon. Military and security installations are not the answer. They can never bring peace. Civilians on both sides continue to pay for this protracted conflict with their lives.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Toronto, where we’re joined by Dr. Yasser Khan. He’s a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza.

Dr. Khan, welcome to Democracy Now! If you can describe what you saw there in Khan Younis, the level of the injuries, how crowded the European Hospital was, the threats people were facing there?

DR. YASSER KHAN: Thank you very much for having me.

Well, you know, I look at the impending invasion of Rafah and the attacks on Rafah, and I know, because I’ve seen it — I know what’s going to happen. I know the casualties, and I know how much worse it’s going to get.

When I was in Khan Younis a few weeks ago — I’ve been to over 40 different countries, you know, doing humanitarian work, anywhere from in Africa, Asia and South America. And what I saw in Khan Younis were the most horrific scenes in my entire life, and I hope I never see them again. It was just — you know, the bombings were going on every few hours at that point in time. The Israeli forces were about a kilometer away. And the mass casualties kept on coming in.

And it was mostly — I mean, the majority of the patients that I treated were children, anywhere from the age of 2 to 17. I mean, I saw horrific eye and facial injuries that I’ve never seen before, eyes shattered in two 6-year-old children with shrapnel that I had to take out, eyes with shrapnel stuck inside, facial injuries. I saw orthopedic injuries where — you know, limbs just cut off and dangling. I saw abdominal injuries that were just horrific. And it was just mass chaos. There was children on the floor, unattended to, with head trauma, people suturing patients without anesthesia on the ground. It was just mass chaos and really horrific, horrific scenes.

And I know that now with the bombing going on in Rafah and scenes of children hanging exploded and, you know, half their bodies cut off and hanging on a wall because they’ve been exploded — I mean, those are scenes going on now. So I know exactly what my colleagues are going through right now in Rafah and in Gaza, basically.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Doctor, you were working shifts of 12-, 13-hour days. Can you talk about the conditions of the medical staff and the doctors you worked alongside with? Where did you sleep? Were you able to eat? Could you talk about those conditions you faced?

DR. YASSER KHAN: Well, the doctors were amazing. I mean, the Palestinian doctors were amazing. Their dedication and their will to resist dying and staying alive was amazing. They’re talented. But they have nothing. There’s no antibiotics. There’s no painkillers. On the last day I was leaving, we ran out of morphine, which is very important in a lot of orthopedic injuries.

So, patients were — I mean, the whole European Gaza Hospital was, at the time — now everything I’m saying and — everything I saw is much worse now. But, basically, it was overcrowded, about 300, 400% over capacity. There was patients and bodies lying all over the hospital floor, inside and outside. They had orthopedic devices coming from their legs or their arms. They were getting infected, they were in pain, because they were on the floor, so the conditions weren’t very sterile. And if they survived amputation the first time, the infection would get them, because then they’d have to be amputated after.

A lot of the kids that I saw — and more than 60% of the patients I saw were children — they’re thin. They had no fat on them. They’re starving, because, as you know, Israel has had a food blockade since this war on Gaza started. And so, they’re all thin, with no fat, starving. And they were coming in, and, you know, it was just — and we didn’t have enough supplies, enough gauze, enough antibiotics, enough instruments even — the instruments are rusting — to kind of, you know, deal with the mass trauma.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Khan —

DR. YASSER KHAN: I stayed in the hospital — yes, please.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Khan, this is Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland speaking Monday ahead of a vote on the $95 billion aid package to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Madam President, I want that to sink in. Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food. In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true: That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. … And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Dr. Khan, you’re talking about the thinness of the children, of the whole population.

DR. YASSER KHAN: Yeah. Well, you know, Amy, it’s — you know, from what I saw and what I experienced when I was on the ground, speaking to officials, speaking to the doctors there, and this whole — you know, one of the whole aspects of this war on Gaza, you know, the genocidal intent of Israeli politicians, the Israeli army has been clear. What is really bizarre is they haven’t hid it. They have openly called for it. They have openly called for epidemics.

And so, as a healthcare professional, the attack on the healthcare system has been unprecedented. I mean, the viciousness of it, the killing machine that Israel has unleashed on the healthcare system, I think, is unprecedented. Hospitals have been bombed. When the doctors have tried to repopulate them, they’ve been — you know, sniper fire with drones has prevented them from going in.

They’ve attacked the sewage system, the water system, so the sewage mixes with the drinking water. And you get diarrheal diseases, bacterial diseases. You know, cholera, typhoid is not far away. Hepatitis A is epidemic there now. They’re living in cramped spaces.

They have killed over 300 or 400 healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics. Ambulances have been bombed. This has all been a systematic sort of — you know, by destroying the healthcare system, you’re contributing to the genocide.

What’s going on is now there’s 10,000 to 15,000 bodies that are decomposing. So, it’s raining season right now in Gaza. So all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies, and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply, and you get further disease.

They have kidnapped about 40, 45 doctors, that have been specifically targeted. They have targeted specifically specialists who are, you know, one-offs. So, like, the one nephrologist in the Gaza Strip was targeted. The pathologists, hospital chiefs and directors have all been targeted through drones or targeted missile strikes.

And, you know, so the whole thing is that if the bombings are not going to get you, then disease will surely get you, because they’re all malnourished. So, as you know, if you’re malnourished, your immune system is weaker, so you’re more susceptible to disease. But there’s no antibiotics.

You know, the amount of amputations I saw in children, for example — both arms, one arm, one leg, both eyes gone, you know, both eyes amputated, basically, out of their eye socket — you know, it’s amazing. I mean, it takes about — you know, if this was done properly in a nonwar scenario, one amputation in a child, a child will need about nine to 12 surgeries by the time they’re an adult, you know, for prosthetic fitting and whatnot. Now, in this case, first of all, it’s a war situation. They have not been done properly, fair enough, because you have to rush it. But secondly, who is going to take care of these children? Most of them mostly children. Because their parents are gone. Their uncles are dead. Their grandfathers and grandmothers are dead.

And so, you know, the Israeli killing machine has been vicious. I mean, they’ve used drones. When I was there, I was speaking to doctors who were there, and they told me that they’ve used drones like the Hellfire drone, that is an explosive drone. It fires off these discs once it implodes or explodes. And these discs are very unique, and they cause unique amputations. Most amputations occur at the weak points, like the elbow or the knee. But they cause, you know, mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations, which are much more complicated. And they fire off this shrapnel.

And, you know, from what the doctors are telling me, that what I believe is that they’re using weapons on the civilian population that have never been used before, because from what I heard, based on my experience, you know, Israel has a very strong defense industry, and buyers like weapons that are battle-tested. So, if you can put a label to your new weapon that it’s battle-tested, that increases the value of it. And they’re experimenting with these weapons, from what I’ve heard and from what I saw, in a civilian-dense population. So, it’s just — it’s been vicious, really, really vicious.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Yasser Khan, I want to thank you for being with us, Canadian ophthalmologist, eye surgeon, based in Toronto, Canada, just recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza.

[admin]

Jon Stewart on Israel - Palestine
The Daily Show
Feb 26, 2024 #DailyShow #JonStewart #MiddleEast
Jon Stewart weighs in on the war in Gaza and offers up a solution for ending the conflict.



Transcript

Welcome to The Daily Show.
I am your host, Jon Stewart.
This is number three.
The third episode.
This is my third episode.
The first two, very controversial.
A lot of discourse around it.
A lot of carping back and forth.
A lot of anger.
A lot of commentary.
Tonight, I'm done with it.
Tonight is perhaps an amuse-bouche, a trifle.
Something light.
Tonight, we discuss Israel, Palestine.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
Are we?
Who wrote this?
Well, I legally have to read what's in the prompter,
so here we go.
We're going to take a look in our new
and probably never-ending segment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yes!
Somehow, the audience knew, but tonight
we discuss Israel, Palestine.
[HIGH SPEED DISCLAIMER]
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
Well, folks, this is an awful situation.
We're coming up on five months of a brutal bombing campaign
brought on by a horrific massacre and hostage-taking,
and we seem no closer to ending anything
but the reigns of a couple of Ivy League presidents.
Well, this weekend, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally
laid out his plan for peace.
Benjamin Netanyahu is calling for complete demilitarization
of Gaza, as well as Israel taking
over security and controlling entry and exit points to Gaza.
So your peace plan is a siege, a military siege.
You really think a military solution ends this cycle?
Victory is within reach, and you can't have victory
until you eliminate Hamas.
But, oh, OK.
But your plan to eliminate Hamas
by destroying all of Gaza, uh, doesn't
that just make more Hamases?
Is that the plural of Hamas?
Hamasi?
I mean, it's an idea.
Palestinian liberation is an idea.
Unless you have a bomb that kills ideas.
Do you have a bomb that kills ideas?
I mean, how long would it even take to bomb the shit out
of an idea?
The intense phase of the fighting
is weeks away from completion.
Not months, weeks away from completion.
Oh, dear God.
If you insist on this plan, if you think that ends Hamas,
I believe we in the United States
have a banner you can use.
It's a little wind-damaged, but equally delusional.
Look, the United States is Israel's closest ally.
Israel's big brother in the fraternity of nations.
Israel's work emergency contact.
Maybe it's time for the US to give
Israel some tough moral love.
This is shameful.
There has to be accountability for these war crimes.
No targeting civilians in war.
Stop the war crimes and the atrocities and end
the war today.
It could happen right now.
Right now!
Thank you.
These atrocities must be--
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
I'm sorry, I'm being told the administration was talking
about Russia bombing Ukraine.
I apologize.
Also, a war crime.
But I'm sure they're giving equally
stern advice to Israel.
The Biden administration is urging Israel to be much more
careful, to be more cautious.
How Israel does this, matters.
Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.
We want to see the government of Israel
take steps to minimize civilian harm.
Be more surgical and more precise.
Be more careful.
Hey, Israel, take it down a notch.
Could you please be more careful with your bombing?
It's good advice.
But really, could the United States
have told Israel that when we gave them all the bombs?
They're our bombs.
These-- this is like your coke dealer
coming in with an eight ball and going,
don't stay up all night.
Don't, sleep is very important.
You got to sleep.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
You don't want to--
And breakfast is an important part of the day, so.
Look, the Israeli position doesn't seem so tenable.
Perhaps I can find some diplomatic leeway
in the Hamas position.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
Israel is a country that has no place on our land.
We must remove that country.
Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?
Yes, of course.
I cannot find diplomatic leeway in the Hamas position.
[BLEEP] Well, this is when we need
the world, the civilized world of nations
to come together and stop this madness.
A resolution calling for an immediate cease fire in Gaza
has just failed to pass.
A UN Security Council draft resolution to allow
aid delivery has been vetoed.
Russia and China used their veto
against an American resolution condemning Hamas.
Immediate cease fire in Gaza has failed.
Western nations voted against it.
It was delayed four times this week.
Draft resolution has not been adopted.
Why do you even have a [BLEEP] building?
Why?
Why do you, we could use that!
We have a housing crisis.
Give us back our [BLEEP] building!
It's just not right.
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
What is-- what is the United Nations even?
What are you?
Just a support system for a diverse and pleasing
food court?
What are you?
That cannot be the UN's food court, by the way.
That is, that is clearly just a mall in Long Island.
Doesn't anyone care about the suffering of all
these civilians?
What about a good neighbor, Saudi Arabia?
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
The Palestinian cause is the Arab world's
most important cause.
I want to see really a good life for the Palestinians.
Thank you, Saudi Arabia, thank you.
And while Saudi Arabia does not accept Palestinian refugees,
and Egypt doesn't either, for that matter,
the Saudis are the richest country in the region.
And they've given, this can't be right,
on average, about $200 million a year to the Palestinians.
Jesus!
Are you [BLEEP] kidding me?
The Saudis have given just as much money to Phil Mickelson.
Is that true?
I assume, I assume to promote the equally important cause
of the Mickelsonian people.
So Israel, the United States, the United Nations,
the Arab nations, no one seems to be
incentivized to stop the suffering
of the innocent people in this region.
And I didn't want to bring this up,
but there is another player.
Small religious startup out of Bethlehem.
I think it might have began as a carpenters union,
but has gotten big.
Do they have a plan for the Middle East?
There, will be the battle of Armageddon.
Jesus Christ is going to sweep over that battlefield
and to annihilate that army of 200 million people.
The blood will flow to the bridle of a horse.
So, that's the plan for the Prince of Peace?
Is that so?
I am not an equestrian expert, but if the blood goes all
the way to the bridle, that's an enormous amount
of blood, no?
Unless, are we talking about the mini horses?
Because that's still, it's a lot of blood,
but more manageable.
And adorable.
Look, I think--
[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]
--I think we have to get real here.
The status quo cycle of provocation and retribution
is predicated on some idea that one of these groups
is going to go away.
And they are not.
If we want a safe and free Israel,
and a safe and free Palestine, we have
to recognize that reality.
And I know that there is a twisted and much
contested history in the region that
has brought us to this point.
But we are at this point.
And anything we do from here has to look forward.
So tonight, lucky you, I'm going
to do that with not one, not two,
but three solutions for peace.
Number one.
Along the shores of pleasant lake in Maine,
95 Israeli and Palestinian teens
are trading rockets for rackets.
The goal of Seeds of Peace is to open these young minds.
OK, that one hasn't been scaled up yet.
And may take longer than we have.
Unless we just bring the whole [BLEEP] region to Maine.
How fast can we make 14 million rackets?
But that's just my opening offer.
That was just one piece plan, people.
Don't abandon me yet.
Number two.
Let's just ask God.
It's his house.
He's the one who started all this.
Just ask God.
He could tell us who is right.
Is it the Jews?
Is it the Muslims?
Is it the Zoroastrians?
If it's the scientologists, a lot of us
are going to have egg on our faces.
But given God's lack of communication over this past,
let's say millennia.
All right, here's another one.
And heaven forbid, I actually think
this last one could work.
Starting now, no preconditions, no earned trust, no partners
for peace, Israel stops bombing,
Hamas releases the hostages, the Arab countries
who claim Palestine is their top priority come in and form
a demilitarized zone between Israel
and a free Palestinian state.
The Saudis, Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Jordan, they
all form like a NATO arrangement
guaranteeing security for both sides.
Obviously, they won't call it NATO.
It's the Middle East Treaty Organization, it's METO,
it's let's tweet it out.
METO.
Tonight, people, let's get this region METO'd!
Now, obviously, I have not worked out the exact verbiage,
but anything is better than the cluster [BLEEP]
cycle we have now.
Because honestly, what is the alternative?
The trumpet of God sounds and the rapture happens.
[WHEW]
We're gone, in the twinkling of an eye.
We're just simply not here.
Poof, indeed, sir.
Poof, indeed.

[admin]

“A War Against Palestinian Americans”: Jailed, Attacked, Killed in West Bank and U.S.
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 14, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/14/ ... transcript

We look at the killing, arrests and attacks on Palestinian Americans both in the Occupied Territories and in the United States. We speak with the son of Palestinian American Samaher Esmail, who was detained in the West Bank by the Israeli military last week, beaten in custody and denied medication, according to her family. “They came in the middle of the night, raided our home, dragged her out of the house in her pajamas, didn’t even give her a chance to wear her hijab,” says Suliman Hamed, who says Israeli forces are persecuting Palestinians like Esmail for social media posts. We also speak with Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, about other cases, including 17-year-old Palestinian American teenager Mohammad Ahmed Mohammad Khdour, who was shot dead on Saturday in the town of Biddu in the occupied West Bank; 17-year-old Palestinian American Tawfiq Ajjaq, who was fatally shot in the head in January in the West Bank; and the stabbing of Zacharia Doar, a 23-year-old Palestinian American in Texas. “There is a war happening against Palestinian Americans, a war on their right to free speech, a war on their culture,” says Mitchell.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

A Palestinian American detained in the West Bank by the Israeli military last week was beaten in custody and denied medication. This is according to her family. Samaher Esmail was detained near the Silwad village area in the West Bank February 5th. The family said she was dragged from her home by Israeli soldiers and badly beaten. They also said her home was destroyed in the raid. The Israeli military confirmed Esmail’s detention, saying she was arrested for, quote, “incitement on social media,” but did not respond to the allegations of mistreatment raised by the family.

The family is calling on the State Department to gain consular access to her and to secure her release. At a press briefing, the State Department said it could not address any specifics about the case.

Samaher Esmail’s case is just one of a number of Palestinian Americans detained, attacked or killed, both in the occupied West Bank and in the United States. And we’re going to go through some of those cases.

We’re joined now by Samaher Esmail’s son, Suliman Hamed. He’s joining us from New Orleans. And we’re joined from Atlanta by Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director of CAIR. That’s the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Suliman, can you tell us about your mother? Where was she when she was detained? What’s exactly happened to her? Have you been able to communicate with her in the Israeli jail that she’s being held?

SULIMAN HAMED: Hi. Yes. So, I’m Suliman Hamed. I can give you a little bit of insight on that.

So, it was Monday morning, February 5th, Jerusalem time. They came in the middle of the night, raided our home, dragged her out of the house in her pajamas, didn’t even give her a chance to wear her hijab. They broke stuff all inside the house. They came in with muddy shoes on purpose. And long story short, they came and took her, and ever since, we have not had any communication with her. It’s been very traumatic, very anxiety-inducing. Yeah, so that’s what happened.

And, you know, we’re hearing there’s not even a formal charge. On Monday, the judge ruled that she’s not a security threat, and there was no charge, so he allowed her to get put out on bail. And I’m not sure exactly who, either the IDF or the Israeli military commissions, somebody appealed it, and they have an automatic appeal process. So, once that happened, she had to be in detention for what I believe is at least another four days, maybe up to another week. And from there, we’ll what — they’re just trying to find a charge now to charge her with, even though she’s been in custody for a week. And this past week, she’s been, you know, questioned, interrogated, all that. You know, it seems like they’re just trying to find something to pin her, just because they’re annoyed with her for speaking her mind. So, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, when they came into your home, there was no explanation whatever why they were there? Or were they specifically looking for her, or were they seeking other people when they came into your home?

SULIMAN HAMED: No, no. I mean, apparently, they were looking for her, but we had no knowledge. Like, she would have been fine with coming in. And, like, if they had something against her, she would have definitely, like, came in and handled the situation. But, no, we had no idea she was wanted or they were looking for her. They did come into my village that day, and they took multiple people, all for, what it appears to be, like, social media, just something that they may have liked that they don’t like, you know, something just supporting Palestine. So, that’s all I know about that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s bring in Edward Ahmed Mitchell to talk about Samaher Esmail’s case. And then we’re going to talk about the other cases. Another young man from your community itself, from Gretna, a Palestinian American, was just killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. But first, let’s continue with Samaher’s arrest. Edward Ahmed Mitchell, you and Suliman and others held a news conference on Monday in Washington, D.C., demanding the State Department deal with these Palestinian Americans. Can you talk about what they’re saying about Samaher Esmail?

EDWARD AHMED MITCHELL: Thanks for having me, Amy.

So, the Israeli government is completely out of control. They’re not only committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but they are targeting, kidnapping, even killing Palestinian Americans in Gaza and the West Bank. This attack on Samaher is just the latest example of that.

And our State Department is, to be frank, not doing enough. They claim they are working behind the scenes to look into the issue. They made general statements about the importance of protecting American citizens abroad. But the reality is they are not publicly condemning or taking any concrete action to hold the Israeli government accountable for abusing American citizens. And if even Palestinian Americans are not safe, you can imagine that Palestinians are not safe at all.

And so, that’s the condition we’re in. The State Department is just making general vague statements, you know, that they could say about anything, boilerplate statements, but they’re not using any concrete action to protect American citizens who are being attacked by the Israeli government.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and then come back to this discussion and talk about a young man from Gretna, Louisiana, just like Samaher Esmail is from Gretna, Louisiana, but this teen was killed. We’re talking to Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. And we’re speaking with Samaher’s son, Suliman Hamed. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “That Moment When” by Adnan Joubran. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The family of — we’re looking at calls for the U.S. State Department to address the killing, the arrests and attacks on Palestinian Americans, both in the Occupied Territories and here at home. We just spoke about the case of Samaher Esmail, a Palestinian American woman from Gretna, Louisiana, forcibly taken by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank earlier this week.

Meanwhile, the family of two Palestinian American brothers say the pair, their Canadian father and three other relatives have been detained after an Israeli raid on their home in Gaza. The brothers, Borak and Hashem Alagha, are aged 18 and 20. National security spokesperson John Kirby said the U.S. will talk to Israel about the detention of the brothers, as well as Samaher Esmail.

We also learned about the stabbing in Texas, the Sunday stabbing in Austin, of 23-year-old Palestinian American Zacharia Doar, which is being called a hate crime.

For more, we continue with Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Suliman Hamed, Samaher Esmail’s son. If you can talk about this arrest, killing and detention and attacks on Palestinian Americans, what the State Department is saying in each case? We’ve also learned about the killing of two Palestinian American teens, one in Biddu — the State Department is just saying they’re looking into this — as well as another young man from Gretna.

EDWARD AHMED MITCHELL: Amy, sadly, you have described what the State Department is saying, and it’s what they say every time this happens — “We’re looking into it. We care about American citizens abroad” — and that’s about all you get from them, no condemnations of the Israeli government, no concrete action, nothing. And so, whether it’s the shooting of the young man from New Orleans, who was shot in the head while driving in a car with his family, whether it’s the kidnapping of the two Palestinian Americans from Gaza, one of them who already had a broken leg and whose home had been destroyed twice by Israeli bombing, you don’t get much from the State Department other than “We’re looking into it, and we care about the safety of American citizens abroad.”

What they need to be doing is very clearly and explicitly condemning the Israeli government for attacking not only American citizens who are in Palestine, but also Palestinians in general. And as long as the Israeli government feels that the American government will not hold them accountable for even targeting American citizens, then, of course, they’re going to target everyone, without any sort of — with impunity, sadly. And that’s what we’re seeing happen.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask Suliman — the efforts by — all the attention so far in world press coverage has been on Gaza, for the most part, not on what is happening to Palestinians in the West Bank. You mentioned that when your mother was taken, was arrested, there were others in your same town that were arrested by the IDF. Can you talk about what life is like for those living in the West Bank today?

SULIMAN HAMED: Yeah, of course. It’s filled with just humiliation, harassment by Israeli forces. They come in — they come in in the middle of the night and take your little boy, take your little girl, take your mom, take your dad. They have no respect for us. They have said on record multiple times that they see us as animals. And that’s how it feels, like we’re second-class, even third-class citizens to them. And like you said, like, this was all in the West Bank. This isn’t a war zone. There’s no Hamas. There’s nothing like that over there. So, it’s just — again, they treat us poorly.

And I want to actually add something, because I forgot to mention this. But, you know, about my mom’s condition, her lawyer had said that she had been beaten in prison. She witnessed and wrote an official statement, that we got, to the U.S. Embassy that said that she had bruises, black and blue all over her body, specifically on her hands and back. She was shaking from lack of, like, I guess, medication and the abuse she’s received. They’ve had her medication for over seven days now — now it’s like day nine — and they still have yet to administer it. You know, they’re just cruel. They’re cruel. And, you know, it’s not a way to treat a person, first of all, and not a way to treat a U.S. citizen. And I want to see the embassy, you know, speak up about that and —

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go —

SULIMAN HAMED: — go see my mom.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller addressing reporters on Tuesday.

MATTHEW MILLER: When we see reports of U.S. citizens that have been detained, have been arrested, that have been killed, have been in any way potentially mistreated, we first gather information. If it’s appropriate, we ask for a full investigation. If that investigation shows that there ought to be accountability, we call for accountability measures. I will also state that when it comes to activity in Israel, we — the United States has shown that it is willing to impose its own accountability measures when we think it’s appropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Matthew Miller. And I want to address this to the lawyer, looking also at the case of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, the 17-year-old Palestinian American shot and killed in the occupied West Bank last week. Tawfic was born, again, in Gretna, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans. He and his family returned frequently to their ancestral home in the village of al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya in the occupied West Bank. On January 19, Tawfic and a friend were driving in a pickup truck on a dirt road near the village when they came under fire from at least 10 shots hitting the truck. One of the bullets struck the Tawfic in the head. The car skidded off the road, flipped several times before coming to a stop. He was pronounced dead when he was brought to the hospital in Ramallah. Israeli police didn’t identify who fired the shots, but described incident as, quote, “ostensibly involving an off-duty law enforcement officer, a soldier and a civilian.” The White House has called for a transparent investigation into the killing. Edward Ahmed Mitchell, if you can tell us more about this case? And then we’ll talk about just what happened outside Austin, Texas, a case you’re representing, as well.

EDWARD AHMED MITCHELL: Right. So, it’s been almost a month since that young man was shot in the head and killed. Has the State Department done anything more? Has the Israeli government announced charges against those responsible? No, because they’re not going to do it. You don’t ask the abuser to investigate himself. What the State Department is doing is releasing boilerplate statements after these incidents occur, and then nothing happens.

And you know this because you can go back even further. We all remember the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, what, a few years ago. Has anyone been charged with killing her? Has the Israeli government held anyone accountable? No. In fact, the Israeli government has said they’re not going to charge anyone with killing her, even though it was a sniper who did it, she was wearing a press vest, and even the people who tried to save her were then shot at. The Israeli government is not going to hold itself accountable. Only the American government can do that, but the American government is refusing to do so.

And so, whether it’s, again, the young man who was shot in the head, the two people who were kidnapped in Gaza, or Samaher, who was kidnapped in the West Bank, you see the same pattern over and over and over again. The State Department says something very basic and generic, and then they don’t do anything about it, and they wait for the story to fade away. And that sends the message to Israel: You can do whatever you want, even to American citizens, and no one will hold you accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: And how significant is it that the Austin police have declared a hate crime of the attack on Zacharia Doar and his friends in Austin? Explain what happened. You are involved with this case, Edward?

EDWARD AHMED MITCHELL: Yeah. So, this is a case I’ve been helping with. So, on February 4th, there was a pro-ceasefire protest held in Austin. After this event, Zacharia and three of his friends were traveling home in a car. They had the keffiyeh, a keffiyeh flag hanging out of their car, with “Free Palestine” written on it. They had other signs of Palestine on the car. When they got to a stop sign, a man named Bert Baker approached their car, attempted to rip the flag off the car, and then attacked them, opened the back door, pulled Zacharia out of the car. A fight ensued. His three friends jumped out and tried to help him. They subdued the guy, the attacker, and then he pulled out a knife. And Zacharia actually jumped in the way of one of his friends and saved them, but was stabbed in the process. So, the police department, relatively quickly, confirmed what we knew and what we had said and we asked them to say, which is that it was a hate crime.

And this is just the latest example of an anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim hate crime in the United States. We all know about the 6-year-old boy, Wadea, who was stabbed and killed outside of Chicago back in October by his anti-Muslim landlord. We know about the shooting of the three Palestinian college kids in Burlington, Vermont, who were, again, wearing the keffiyeh in public and just shot on the street.

This is happening again and again because, Amy, there is not only a war happening against Palestinians in Gaza, there is a war happening against Palestinian Americans, a war on their right to free speech, a war on their culture. And that is designed to silence them. And you can’t weaponize anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Palestinian racism against people in Gaza without it having blowback here in America on people right here at home. And that’s what we’ve been seeing over the past four months.

AMY GOODMAN: Suliman, your final comment, as we wrap up this segment? If you can talk about your mother?

SULIMAN HAMED: Yeah, sure. My mom, I mean, she’s the sweetest lady. Everybody knows her in our community. She’s a teacher — she was a teacher, a businesswoman, a mother of four. She raised us with good morals. She raised us to be good kids, professionals. Again, just the sweetest woman, a helper. She just — again, she expresses her opinion, and sometimes she demands justice. And, you know, I applaud her for that. She’s my hero for that. I don’t think it’s anything for her to be in prison about.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Suliman Hamed, we want to thank you for being with us. We’ll continue to follow your mother’s case. And Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

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Doctor Reports on Bombing of Nasser Hospital Just Before Israeli Troops Storm Complex
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 15, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/15/ ... transcript

Israeli troops stormed Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital in southern Gaza, on Thursday after days of besieging the complex, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have been taking shelter among hundreds of wounded. Israeli forces reportedly demolished the southern wall of the hospital before storming inside. Troops also targeted ambulances, tents of the displaced, and bulldozed mass graves inside the hospital. The assault came hours after Israeli forces bombed a wing of the hospital, killing one patient and wounding several others. Democracy Now! reached Dr. Khaled Alserr, one of the last remaining surgeons inside Nasser Hospital, shortly before the Israeli raid as he described desperate conditions inside. “The situation here is getting worse every time and every minute,” Alserr said, describing sniper, drone and tank attacks on the hospital.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israeli troops stormed the main hospital in southern Gaza today after a dayslong siege. Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was the largest functional hospital in Gaza. Thousands of displaced Palestinians have been taking shelter there among hundreds of wounded.

Gaza’s Health Ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra, said in a statement that Israeli forces demolished the southern wall of the complex and stormed the hospital, adding that they turned it into a military barracks. He said troops targeted ambulances, tents of the displaced, and bulldozed mass graves inside the hospital. Israeli troops have also ordered medical staff to transfer all patients to another wing of the complex, including patients in the intensive care unit and the nursery. Hours earlier, Israeli forces bombed a wing of the hospital, killing one patient and wounding several others.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! was able to receive updates from inside Nasser Hospital several hours before Israeli troops stormed inside. Dr. Khaled Alserr is one of the last remaining surgeons inside the hospital. He described the bombing of the hospital, as well as an incident when a quadcopter drone opened fire on doctors inside. You can hear the bombs falling in the background as he speaks.

DR. KHALED ALSERR: There was a direct bombing to the hospital. They forced people inside the hospital, including patients, relatives — oh, Allah — patients, relatives and healthcare workers, to evacuate immediately. And you can hear in the background the continuous bombing in the hospital.

Every minute and every hour, we have a new update. Just one hour ago — now the time here is 3 a.m., after midnight. At 2 a.m., Israeli army bombed the hospital directly with a rocket, which hit directly into the patient wards. Six patients were injured again, and one of the patients died on his bed.

Israeli army is trying to communicate with the people inside the hospital every time to warn them and threaten them to evacuate immediately, even if it’s after midnight. The speakers on the drone shouting on people that they have to go out the hospital immediately, or they will bomb the hospital. And unfortunately, they have committed their warning and bombed the hospital directly just one hour ago.

The situation here is getting worse every time and every minute. Yesterday I tried to evacuate my parents from the hospital, because I have them here with me inside the hospital, but through a secure passage, as they claim that it’s a secure passage for people and refugees to be evacuated through, in front of tanks and snipers and soldiers. The bulldozer and a tank tried to approach the people, so they were afraid and came back to the hospital here, as a lot of the refugees.

Actually, the situation here in the hospital at this moment is in chaos. All of the patients, all the relatives, refugees and also the medical staff are afraid because of what happened. We could not imagine that at any time the Israeli army will bomb the hospital directly, and they will kill patients and medical personnel directly by bombing the hospital building. Yesterday also, Israeli snipers and Israeli quadcopters, which is a drone, carry on it an AR, and with a sniper, they shot all over the building. And they shot my colleague, Dr. Karam. He has a shrapnel inside his head. I can upload for you a CT for him. You can see, alhamdulillah, it was superficial, nothing serious. But a lot of bullets inside their bedroom and the restroom.

Because I’m not easily getting internet access, you can share my voices or edit them to spread the news and spread the truth and what’s happening to us right now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Dr. Khaled Alserr, one of the last remaining surgeons inside Nasser Hospital. Israeli troops stormed the hospital a few hours after he sent in those reports.

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“I Always Imagine Myself Being Blown Up”: Journalist in Rafah on Dire Situation as Invasion Looms
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 15, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/15/ ... transcript

We speak with journalist Akram al-Satarri, reporting from Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza bordering Egypt, where more than a million Palestinians are now packed together following forced relocations from elsewhere in the territory. Israel is threatening to launch a ground invasion of Rafah, which Israel had previously designated as a safe zone. Al-Satarri describes how hunger, thirst and other pressures are impacting the displaced population as the death toll continues to rise from Israel’s assault. “Every single time I walk one step in Gaza, I always imagine myself being blown up,” he says. “The killing is massive. The killing is thorough. And I think no one in Gaza is protected, no safe haven.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The raid on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis comes as fears are mounting that Israel will act on its plans to launch a ground invasion into Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza that Israel had previously declared a safe zone.

Over half of Gaza’s population, some 1.4 million people, including over 600,00 children, are crammed into Rafah after being displaced from their homes and driven south during Israel’s brutal assault. There are now massive tent encampments pushing up to the Egyptian border.

International pressure is mounting for Israel to call off its ground invasion. The U.N.’s top humanitarian official, Martin Griffiths, said that an assault on Rafah, quote, “could lead to a slaughter.”

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Rafah, where we’re joined by journalist Akram al-Satari.

Akram, welcome back to Democracy Now! We have just heard these chilling reports from inside Nasser Hospital right before Israel occupied it and the bombing of it. You’ve sent out a picture of some of the ammunition used by the Israeli military. Explain what happened inside and also what’s happening around you in Rafah.

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Well, the situation continues to be extremely dire in the vicinity and inside Nasser medical complex. The Israeli occupation forces have been targeting the vicinity of the area, including some of the UNRWA shelters not far away from the hospital. They are destroying and they were destroying the walls of the hospital, the exterior wall of the hospital. They targeted the wards of the hospital. They’re in wards of the hospital. They targeted the surgery department in the hospital and injured at least one surgeon while he was inside the surgery department.

They asked people to leave the hospital, and when they were leaving the hospital, they shot them dead. They asked one guy, whose hands were tied, and he was sent to the people inside the hospital, to the internally displaced people, asking them to leave the hospital. And then, when he ended up speaking to the people and returning to the Israelis, because he was fearful from death, he was killed, and he was left on the ground.

Around 80 bodies are laid right in front of the outer gate of the Nasser Hospital, up to some 200 meters away from the hospital. Fear, death and shock are enclaving and encircling the people in that area. The Israeli occupation forces continue their operation, continue targeting Nasser Hospital, continue to ask people to leave, and then when they are leaving, they snipe them. There are some disturbing images and footage of the people — of the bodies of the people being eaten and devoured by the dogs and by the stray cats. People who were just communicating with their relatives were describing the horrors, and they were also documenting those horrors.

Israel continues to target the hospitals. They target Nasser Hospital, and they are still targeting Al-Amal Hospital not far away from Nasser Hospital, around one, 1.5, two, 2.5 kilometers, in Al-Amal neighborhood. And they continue the very same policy, the policy of targeting the medical complexes, targeting the medical personnel, targeting the patients, targeting the escorts, and spreading the fear and destruction in that area. Some of the people who were inside Khan Younis were rushing, were pulling the beds of their dears, some of them in the orthopedic department that was targeted, some of them in the general surgery department. And they were carrying or pulling the beds for around five or six or seven kilometers to reach Rafah.

As you can see, now the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, where I am located now, has been receiving numbers of the people who were inside Nasser Hospital and Al-Amal Hospital. They received them. They are trying to expand the bed capacity of the hospital. They are trying to accommodate to the influx of people who are fleeing from Nasser Hospital, who are fleeing for their safety, who are fleeing for their life. And they end up staying in tents like those, where sanitation is at question, where the quality of the medical care provision is at question, too, where the large number of people who are already staying inside the hospital prevent them from absorbing or accommodating any other additional number of people injured. The health system at large has been struggling.

The infrastructure of the whole city of Rafah cannot absorb or accommodate the large number of Palestinians inside Rafah. Around 1.2 million Palestinians were staying in Rafah. Now tens of thousands of them are leaving Rafah and heading towards Khan Younis and towards Gaza’s central area, with doubts of the continuous and with fear of the looming ground invasion that is likely to be a replication of everything that was done in Gaza in the north and everything that was done in Khan Younis.

People were hopeful that the ICJ, International Court of Justice, would bring them justice or would at least make Israel reconsider its tactics when it comes to protected objects, human objects, and health facilities, also journalists. But it looks like Israel is continuing the very same approach. It’s continuing the very same way of targeting. We were hopeful, as journalists, that Israel wouldn’t be targeting Nasser Hospital or Al-Amal Hospital. But, unfortunately, the targeting is still continuous.

And a large number of people, tens of thousands of people, who were stuck in Khan Younis, are now being targeted, either by the artillery fire or by the quadcopters or by the F-16 or by all the other means, and they are being killed, and they are being left — even the ones who are injured are being left to die on the ground. People were describing the atrocities they have been seeing. People have been crying over their dears, who were screaming for help, but they couldn’t help them. People are now crying over their dears who are still waiting in Khan Younis and cannot be reached, cannot be rescued, cannot be saved, and they are likely to lose their life, like many others who lost their life the very same way.

As to Rafah, Rafah is the place now for around, as I said, 1.2 million Palestinians. The area is underserved, no good infrastructure, no organized camping, no organized tents, no organized service of provision. And the pressure resulting from this massive number of people is overburdening the municipalities, is overburdening the civil defense, is overburdening the Ministry of Health and is overburdening the international organizations. The concern has been voiced by the UNRWA, by the World Food Programme, by the UNICEF, by the United Nations Development Programme. And they are all warning that any ground offensive targeting Rafah is going to result in a catastrophe, a catastrophe that is bigger and much, much more bigger than the one that took place in Gaza in the north and the one that is taking place right now in Khan Younis.

People in Gaza believe that no single international power is able now to bring an end to the ongoing misery that has been caused by the ongoing occupation and the indiscriminate — this indiscriminate targeting, as described by some of the Palestinians. Some of them are already on the beds recovering. Some of them are struggling for their life. And some of them are deprived from the very basic humanitarian need to food and water. Water is missing in Gaza. Food is missing in Gaza. And people have been struggling, not for their own food need, but, rather, for their children’s food need, for the elderly people’s food need. So, the situation is dire. And it continues to aggravate into something that is extremely life-threatening, that needs an imminent — that needs an imminent intervention for the sake of stopping any atrocities that are likely to happen and stopping the atrocities that are taking place now.

And I’m quoting many of the Gazans that I spoke to, many of the ones who are worried about their dears, many of the ones who are worried also about their own safety, many of the ones who are worried about the future and what it holds for them. They think it is about time that something happens. They think they have suffered enough. They think they have died enough. They think they have been hungry enough. They think they have been thirsty enough. They think they have been homeless enough. And this is the outcry not only of the 1.2 million Gazans who are staying in Rafah, but also of [inaudible] million Gazans who are in Gaza in the north, who are in [inaudible] in Khan Younis, and who are in Rafah. People have been deprived from the access to very basic, essential food supplies and water supplies. They have been struggling. They have been facing famine. They have been seeing children who are dying from the hunger. And this is an outcry from them to the whole world that this needs to stop. And the madness that is taking place in Gaza — and I’m again quoting the people who are talking to me — the madness needs to come to an end.

As I’m talking to you, the unmanned drones are hovering all around the Gaza Strip, day and night, continuous bombardment in different parts of Rafah, in different parts of Gaza Strip at large, and they continue to take the lives and hopes of the Palestinians. Palestinians who are living in Rafah and who are living in Gaza alike have been exhausting all the negative and positive coping mechanisms. The number of people who are injured is unconceivable. The number of people killed, and the way they are being killed, is also unconceivable. And people continue to suffer. And they expect that more suffering is coming, if the international community fails once again to protect them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Akram al-Satarri, if you could — you, yourself, right now are standing outside a hospital. We can hear possibly a drone overhead. If you could describe the situation there? And you mentioned how people, Palestinians, there are lacking even the most basic essentials — food, water. Tell us what humanitarian aid is getting in, if any.

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Well, I can describe the situation. I will have to describe the way I’m feeling about things and how things are unfolding. Every single time I walk one step in Gaza, I always imagine myself being blown up by an unmanned drone or by F-16 missile or by a quadcopter or by whatever weapon that is used by Israel. Every time I’m walking and every single home I pass by, I feel that this home might be targeted, and I might be ending up dying and killed under the rubble of that house, every single place I stay. I moved from my home six times. So I am homeless and displaced six times now. And I’m waiting what would happen in Rafah.

People in Rafah, as I told you, people are deprived from everything, even the very basic, essential things, the very essential things that are needed to lead a normal life or a seminormal life or a life of internally displaced people. Even the internally displaced people in Gaza are unique and different than any other internally displaced people all over the world. All over the world, people are receiving and accessing food and water supplies, according to the Sphere book. The Sphere book is a book that has been developed for the sake of just identifying the quantities that are needed and the calories that are needed for the people to stay alive at a time of famine or at a time of conflict, man-made or natural disaster. So, people are not even accessing that very limited — the threshold of food that is needed for the people in Gaza is not met, because the U.N. agencies that have been helping the Gazans are now tarnished, are now assaulted, are now attacked, and now the funding that is going to them is suspended.

So, people in Rafah and other areas have to do what they — what would they have to do to survive? Some of the people in the Gaza in the north had to do to use to food — to feed, of the animals, to ground it, the corn, to ground it, to make sure that they can bake some bread for their families. They don’t have rice. They don’t have water. They don’t have canned food. They don’t have anything.

And they have been calling for the world to stop that. And they have been even — the very emotional thing about that is that everything that is happening, including the most and profoundly shocking things, are happening live on air. People are just documenting their death. People are documenting their suffering. People are documenting their hunger. People are documenting their thirst. People are documenting their injury. People even documenting the hospitals when they are being raided and stormed in by the Israeli occupation forces. And the whole world — they have a feeling that the whole world is watching and that it’s not doing anything. And that feeling of helplessness is another way to kill the Palestinians. So, if they’re killed once, they are killed twice — once by the ongoing bombardment that has been taking place, that has been documented, and the second time by not offering the fitting homage for those people by serving justice and by stopping aggression, like was said by the many people that I talked to.

The situation is extremely dire. You will never be able to imagine the things that are happening, when you’re walking down the streets; when you see small children out crying for food; when you see lining up hundreds of people for a very limited one pot of rice or one pot of food, and they are struggling to get some of that to bring back to their families; when you see small children staying unaccompanied because they lost their whole family; when you see one man who buried his whole family and who’s walking down the street, like, losing his mind because he lost all that he dreamt would grow up with him, which is his children — he lost his wife, he lost his father, he lost his mother, he lost his house, he lost any hope in life that he can clutch to. I saw many people talking to themselves down the streets. I saw many people crying because they have no one to cry to. They have no shoulder to cry over. They have no one to look after them. They have no one to console them. They have no one even to offer them some kind word to look after them. And they are going to — and they are driven insane because of that. Situation is unconceivable. It has affected all aspects of life of Gazans. And it continues to affect them. And it has destroyed many lives, and it continues to destroy life. And it is likely to destroy any hope that Gaza would survive. And I think this is the plan, to break Gaza and to make Gaza uninhabitable and to destroy any possibility for Gazans to relive or to rebuild or to just retake their life again.

AMY GOODMAN: Gaza now has the highest percentage of people facing acute food insecurity anywhere in the world. Finally, Akram al-Satarri, as we watch you on the ground there in Rafah — and we thank you and your cameraman — we understand the very serious risks you face. I’m wondering if you question whether even to wear the vest you are wearing that says “press,” in light of the latest news just this week, bringing to possibly over 120 the number of Gaza-based journalists killed. The Israeli drones struck a pair of Al Jazeera journalists on Tuesday, seriously injuring correspondent Ismail Abu Omar — he’s had his leg amputated — and his cameraman, Ahmad Matar. They’re in European Hospital. Then you have yesterday, Palestinian journalist Mutaz Al-Ghafari killed in Gaza City in an Israeli airstrike that also killed his wife and his child. Did you know these reporters? How are you protecting yourself?

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Well, as a matter fact, Ahmad Matar is a friend of mine. The last time I shook hands with him was three days ago. He shook my hand. But, unfortunately, he has no hand now, because his hand and his arm was amputated, and he’s struggling for his life right now. He’s one of my neighbors. He’s one of my friends. I know him very well. He’s such a very nice and kind person. I know also Ismail Abu Omar, the one who’s struggling for his life now because of unexpected hemorrhage because of his injury. I know many other journalists who were targeted and killed because of the Israeli ongoing bombardment. I know they have lives. I know they have families. I know they have a career that should be protected, according to Geneva Conventions. And I know they were targeted and killed despite the fact that they are protected.

And I know also that it’s not only the journalists who were killed. There are also some humanitarian aid people who were killed. There were also some UNRWA people who were working to serve the population that is displaced, and they were killed also. I know many other people who were caring for other people, and they ended up being killed. The killing is massive. The killing is thorough. And I think no one in Gaza is protected, no safe haven. And I think there is — every single person in Gaza now lacks that sense of safety and security. And we all understand that we are going to be suspended killed people, and we know it’s just a matter of time when Israel will reach any one of us and would kill any one of us, either our dreams or ourselves or our families or our friends or our acquaintances.

This is the situation. It is as dire as it sounds. But it’s different when it’s felt. It’s different when it’s about the people you know. It’s different when about the people you love. It’s different when about the people who shake their hands, smile — shake your hands, smile at your face, say “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” or even “Good night.” It’s the personal stories of the people that makes us sometimes at the verge of collapse and breaking.

But we understand that we have a mission to fulfill, which is to communicate the voice of the voiceless in Gaza, which is to show the real suffering the people has been enduring — they have been enduring, without no guilt that have been committed by them. It’s a story of a whole population. It’s not just Ismail or Ahmad. It’s not just Akram or any other one. It’s a story of a whole nation that has been under considerable fear and horror because of discriminate fire. And it’s the duty of the world to continue to work towards ceasing the fire and ending this atrocity now, because I think the consciousness of the world has been stained by the ongoing atrocities. And I think the ones who were killed, the ones who were guiltless, the ones who were hoping that they would survive and build their life and continue growing and loving their friends, and ended up killing, I think they deserve a fitting homage, which is serving justice and ending this ongoing aggression and enhancing and bringing about a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: Akram al-Satarri, I want to thank you so much for being with us. I can’t believe what we are talking about now, as you’re risking your life to bring us this report. Akram is a Gaza-based journalist, joining us from Rafah in southern Gaza.

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Kenneth Roth: Only Joe Biden Has Power to Stop “Massive Bloodshed” of a Rafah Invasion
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 15, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/15/ ... transcript

South Africa has urgently requested the International Court of Justice to intervene if Israel proceeds with its planned ground invasion of Rafah. The South African government says Israel’s actions in Rafah could lead to significant loss of life, harm and destruction, potentially violating international law and the top U.N. court’s January order that Israel must take measures to prevent genocide in Gaza. “The person who, frankly, does have the most power to stop all of this bloodshed is Joe Biden,” says Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, now a visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Roth also discusses Israel’s “ideological vendetta against UNRWA” and possible war crimes charges against top Hamas and Israeli leaders at the International Criminal Court.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: South Africa has urged the International Court of Justice to take action if Israel goes ahead with its planned ground invasion of Rafah. In a statement, the South African government said it’s concerned Israel’s actions in Rafah will result in, quote, “further large-scale killing, harm and destruction” and breach the Genocide Convention. This is South Africa’s International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor speaking Wednesday outside the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

NALEDI PANDOR: South Africa is totally horrified at what is happening, continuing to happen, to the people of Gaza and the West Bank, and now Rafah. We believe this confirms the allegation we’ve tabled before the ICJ that genocide is underway in the Palestinian territories, in the Occupied Territories. And clearly, the actions of the Israeli government prove that what we have said is actually accurate.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Geneva, Switzerland, by Ken Roth, visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Ken, welcome to Democracy Now! We just heard this devastating report on the ground from a journalist in Rafah, in Gaza, and then we hear the South African foreign affairs minister talking about the renewed appeal they’re making to the International Court of Justice. Can you explain what’s happening and what this imminent ground invasion, if that’s what’s about to happen, in Rafah means, and if you think international law can deal with this?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, Amy, I think, as everybody knows, the Israeli military has gradually been moving from northern to southern Gaza. And the last place left, the supposed safe place, where at this point, as we’ve heard, 1.2 million Palestinians have congregated, is Rafah. There’s no place else to go within Gaza. And, you know, not surprisingly, there undoubtedly are some Hamas people there, too, and so Netanyahu is saying, “We want to invade Rafah.”

Now, there’s this problem: There would be massive bloodshed if that happened. So, even the Biden administration is saying, “Don’t do it, until you evacuate the civilian population.” Now, Netanyahu has said, “Yes, I’ll evacuate,” but there have been no plans whatsoever. And indeed, if you listen to the far-right ministers in his Cabinet, people like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, you know, people whose votes Netanyahu depends on to stay in power and to stay out of prison on corruption charges, they’re saying the only evacuation that they want is into Egypt, out of Gaza — a forced deportation, probably another Nakba, with little prospect that anybody who leaves Gaza would get to come back. And so, that’s the stake. Everybody is telling Netanyahu, “Move people someplace else within Gaza,” but there’s no place else that’s safe. Netanyahu is determined to move forward, because he needs to keep this war going. Once the war ends, his political reckoning for the intelligence failure of October 7th starts, and he’s likely to be out of a job. And we’re sort of in this dilemma.

Now, the International Court of Justice could intervene. The order that it issued last month had basically three elements to it. One was, you know, take far greater care not to kill civilians. Two was to allow in humanitarian aid. And three was for Israeli government officials to stop their incitement of genocide. And as far as we can tell, it was only the statements that have stopped. The aid has not come in in any greater amount. The killing doesn’t seem to have stopped. And so, in any event, Israel has to report back to the International Court of Justice on February 23rd. I have no idea what they’re going to say, because they basically have just like ignored the order. But now there is a possibility that even before the 23rd, the court will hear this emergency application from South Africa.

And I think it’s worth noting that in the original case, South Africa sought a ceasefire, but I never thought that was in the cards, because only the Israeli government, only states, frankly, are before the International Court of Justice. Hamas wasn’t there. So the court wasn’t going to order a ceasefire of just one side. But Rafah is different, because there’s not a lot of fighting by Hamas from Rafah, but rather this is just a proposed invasion by Israeli forces. And it is conceivable that the International Court of Justice would order a halt to that.

That, of course, begs the question: Who enforces that? The U.N. Security Council has that power, but that requires contending with the U.S. veto, contending with Biden. The person who, frankly, does have the most power to stop all of this bloodshed is Joe Biden. But so far, while he’s been outspoken, he has not been willing to put any teeth in his words. Most significantly, he’s not been willing to stop or even to condition the $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid or the massive arms sales to Israel. Those are the kinds of steps that, if taken, Netanyahu would be forced to listen to. But so far, Biden’s words are just empty, and Netanyahu ignores them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ken Roth, if you could say a little bit more about this enforcement or lack of enforcement mechanism of the International Court of Justice? You wrote a “piece”: last month in The Guardian suggesting that the political pressure — despite the lack of an enforcement mechanism, that the political pressure on Israel would be such that they would have to, in some sense, comply. So, a couple of questions. First, what would happen — for instance, February 23rd, as you said, Israel is supposed to report back. Is it possible that they do not report back? And then, the International Criminal Court, which takes, of course, individuals to court — who are the people — you’ve just mentioned senior Israeli officials Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — who are the people that the ICC could prosecute? And your response to what Karim Khan so far has said?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, in terms of, you know, what is the pressure on Israel, I think it can be broken down into three elements. You know, one is just the utter embarrassment of having been found to be plausibly committing genocide — that’s what the court found. Now, most governments, that would be sufficient to force them to step back. But this is Netanyahu. And as I mentioned, Netanyahu’s political future and, frankly, his personal liberty are at stake. And Netanyahu has always prioritized himself. And so, ending the war means, you know, this political reckoning, this investigation into what happened, what intelligence failure allowed October 7th to take place. He doesn’t want that to go forward, so he keeps fighting and fighting, hoping somehow to survive, somehow to stay out of prison. So, the shaming isn’t working.

The economic pressure that Joe Biden could exert on Israel would be very powerful. You know, to stop the billions of U.S. military aid, to stop the arms sales, that would be incredibly powerful as a statement. Joe Biden is nowhere near that. He’s, you know, speaking nice words. He’s saying, “Take greater care for civilians. Let in more humanitarian aid. Don’t invade Rafah without an evacuation plan.” But there’s nothing backing that up. And Netanyahu basically is just, you know, thumbing his nose at Joe Biden, because there’s no clout behind these nice words.

Now, the final source of pressure, which you mention, is the International Criminal Court. And for viewers, just to make clear, there are two tribunals in The Hague, just to confuse people. One is the International Court of Justice, which is a civil tribunal that hears complaints between states. That’s where South Africa brought its genocide case. That’s the court that made the ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide, and issued the three basic orders that I outlined. The separate tribunal is the International Criminal Court. This, as the name implies, is a criminal court. It prosecutes individuals, not governments. It tends to focus on the most senior responsible officials. And that means it’s going to look at the chain of command. And it’s quite clear that in this case, the orders with respect to dropping these 2,000-pound bombs that are causing such devastation in Gaza, the orders to allow in only drips and drabs of humanitarian or medical aid, you know, these are orders that are coming from the top. So I think the people who are most vulnerable would be Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister.

Now, is Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, going to act? We don’t know. You know, he has had an open investigation into what’s called the Palestine case since he took office in January 2021. But he has gone very, very slowly. And so far, all we’ve gotten from him is a couple of nice, eloquent statements before the media, one on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border, another from Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. And so, you know, he’s a barrister. He’s very eloquent, and these are nice statements — but nothing else. So, we’re all waiting for the war crimes charges. Clearly, Hamas is going to be charged. You know, what it did on October 7th is horrendous, you know, killing civilians, abducting civilians — blatant war crimes. So Hamas leadership is very vulnerable. I don’t see Karim Khan only charging Hamas, given 28,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, given the pervasive starvation in Gaza. So he’s going to have to look at both sides, and he’s not moving quickly. If he were to move quickly, that would wake people up. You know, if Netanyahu suddenly faced war crimes charges, that would be a very different factor in the calculation that leads him to keep killing and besieging Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: In terms of crimes against humanity, the cutting of aid to UNRWA, the U.S. the largest contributor to the U.N. Palestine relief agency, can you talk about the significance of this, and the Senate bill that was passed by Democrats and Republicans, not only giving $14 billion, much of it in military aid, to Israel, but cutting aid to UNRWA, that runs the hospitals, the schools, to millions of Palestinians in Gaza and in other places, as well, Ken, and Israel particularly targeting hospitals?

KENNETH ROTH: Well, Amy, as you note, the treatment of UNRWA has been absolutely despicable. The Israeli government claims — they haven’t put forth evidence, but they claim — that 12 UNRWA employees, out of 12,000 in Gaza, that 12 took part in Hamas’s October 7th attack. We don’t know whether that was true or not, but UNRWA did everything that Israel conceivably could have imagined. It fired the staff members who were still on the staff — a couple of them had apparently died already. It immediately launched an investigation. It did everything you would want.

But Israel’s attack on UNRWA is really not about those 12 staff members. Israel has wanted to get rid of UNRWA forever. Now, this was, I think, accentuated by the fact that the International Court of Justice actually relied repeatedly on descriptions by UNRWA of the awful reality in Gaza — the utter lack of humanitarian aid, the starvation, the attacks on hospitals and the like. But Israel hates UNRWA because it believes that UNRWA is responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem. This is utterly naive. UNRWA is a humanitarian agency. It does, you know, as you noted, run schools and clinics not only in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also in Lebanon, in Syria, in Jordan — you know, wherever Palestinian refugees are. And the Israeli government view is, if UNRWA were to disappear tomorrow, Palestinian refugees would somehow forget that they’re Palestinian refugees, and this desire to return to their ancestral homes in Israel would just evaporate. Now, this is a way of just whitewashing history. You know, suddenly we don’t have to talk about 1948. We don’t have to talk about the fact that there were 600,000 Palestinians who were forcibly displaced by Israeli forces and have never been permitted back to Israel. That just disappears. You know, that was the original sin, but we’re going to forget about that. We’re just going to get rid of UNRWA. Now, this is naive, but that is the Israeli government line.

And what’s particularly despicable is that Joe Biden fell for this and suspended aid to UNRWA, followed then by 18, 19 other governments around the world. And, you know, it would be one thing to believe this kind of propaganda in ordinary times, but this is in the middle of a war. This is in the middle of a situation where there is, by all accounts, widespread starvation in Gaza. There is impending famine for a significant part of the population. And UNRWA is the main vehicle to deliver what drips and drabs of aid get into Gaza. You know, now, some of the governments, like Germany, said, “Oh, well, other groups can deliver the aid.” But the other groups got together and issued a collective statement and said, “There is no way we can even come close to replicating UNRWA’s staff. UNRWA alone has this capacity to deliver aid in the midst of this war.” So, if you devastate UNRWA, which is what this funding suspension does — UNRWA has said it will have to shut down by mid-March if the funds are not renewed — to get rid of UNRWA is to condemn the Palestinian population in Gaza to death by starvation. And that — we should be clear: That’s what’s going on right now, because Israel has this ideological vendetta against UNRWA in its hope that it can somehow disappear the Palestinian refugee problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Ken Roth, we’re going to have to leave it there, visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, speaking to us from Geneva, Switzerland.

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“Obscene”: Biden Pushes House to Approve Bill with $14B in Military Aid to Israel, Cuts UNRWA Funding
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 15, 2024

The U.S. Senate has approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes $14 billion in military funding to Israel, despite the finding by the International Court of Justice that it is plausible Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza. The Senate bill passed on a 70-29 vote, though its fate remains uncertain in the Republican-controlled House, where Speaker Mike Johnson is demanding the inclusion of new anti-immigrant and border enforcement measures before scheduling a vote. William Hartung, a national security and foreign policy expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says the massive spending package’s main effect would be “to ship weapons overseas into war zones,” noting that lawmakers rarely show the same urgency when it comes to issues like poverty or the climate crisis. “We’re putting the bulk of our resources into implements of war.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Here in the United States, President Biden is urging the House to vote to approve a $95 billion foreign aid bill passed by the Senate Tuesday that includes $14 billion for Israel’s war on Gaza, along with $60 billion for Ukraine and $8 billion for Indo-Pacific allies like Taiwan. It also strips U.S. funding for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders opposed the measure, joined by two Democratic senators who broke ranks with their party, Jeff Merkley and Peter Welch. This is Welch.

SEN. PETER WELCH: I voted against the supplemental for one key reason: I cannot in good conscience support sending billions of additional taxpayer dollars for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s military campaign in Gaza. It’s a campaign that has killed and wounded a shocking number of civilians. It’s created a massive humanitarian crisis with no end in sight. It’s inflamed tensions in the Middle East, eroding support among Arab states that had been aligned with Israel. And, of course, it has severely compromised any remaining hope, almost all remaining hope, for the two-state solution that we all know is ultimately essential for peace in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Vermont Senator Peter Welch. The foreign aid package now faces an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled House, where Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to schedule a vote without first adding new anti-immigrant and border enforcement measures, and may propose an alternative package today.

For more, we are here in New York with William Hartung, national security, foreign policy expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for Forbes is headlined “Senate Aid Package Underscores Washington’s Skewed Priorities.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Bill. Talk about what this bill represents, which is largely supported by Democrats.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the first thing that stuck out to me is $95 billion, most of it to ship weapons overseas into war zones. You know, this Senate would never do an emergency bill to stop record homelessness, stop hunger, you know, deal with the climate crisis. The United States has the worst record of life expectancy of any industrialized country, and yet we’re putting the bulk of our resources into implements of war.

And, of course, to give Israel more money to continue the slaughter in Gaza that we’ve seen laid out in this program is obscene. And I think the members who voted for it should be ashamed of themselves. But I think the real point is to stop the killing. There’s got to be a ceasefire. And President Biden, through cutting off conditioning U.S. military aid, has the strongest hand to try to do that. So, there’s got to be more pressure. I know there’s been a lot at the grassroots level, some within the government, but it’s got to continue, because I think the goal here has to be to stop the slaughter.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the Senate vote came just hours after the EU’s foreign policy chief urged the United States and other countries to stop providing arms to Israel. So, if you could respond to that? How common is it, first of all, for the EU foreign policy chief to make such a pronouncement? And whether this kind of pressure will affect the Biden administration’s policy?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, it’s very unusual to see that kind of statement from an ally. But this is a very unprecedented and devastating situation. So, you know, I don’t know what exactly is going to move the president. It’s clear it’s going to hurt him electorally. It’s clear that it’s running the risk of a wider Middle East war. You know, there’s really no — from a realistic point of view, there’s no reason to be doing this. It’s basically kind of an ideological kind of issue that seems to be embedded in the president’s consciousness, that has to be dislodged.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, you’ve talked about how the Pentagon and military contractors are exploiting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to get special favors to push arms out the door without proper vetting, building more factories without oversight. Can you explain?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes. Well, the industry has had this long-standing list of things they wanted: as you pointed out, push arms quickly, less human rights vetting, more subsidies to build factories. And, of course, this reduced scrutiny will also make it easier for them to engage in price gouging. So they’ve sort of wrapped themselves in the flag with respect to Ukraine. You know, the president has called them the “arsenal of democracy,” I think which would be a surprise to the people of Yemen and other places where the U.S. is arming dictatorships.

So, they’re trying to run with this and really change the whole argument about whether we should be spending more on the military, at a time when the budget is soaring towards a trillion dollars a year. U.S. accounts for 40% of the world military spending, more than the next 15 countries combined. So, there’s got to be strong pushback against this, because, essentially, it’s kind of a new Cold War atmosphere in its attempt to kind of whitewash the negative consequences of what these companies do. And, of course, contractors get about half of that close to a trillion dollars a year that we spend on the military.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, if President Biden says he’s warning Israel, for example, against a ground invasion of Rafah, but then increasing funding to Israel and military funding, what message is that sending?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think anything this administration says about human rights, the rule of law, the rules-based international order, rings hollow in the face of what’s happening with respect to supporting Israel in this war. And I think it will reverberate well beyond this conflict. I think, you know, the U.S. will not be taken as seriously when they raise these kinds of issues in the future. So, not only is it horrific for the people of Gaza, but I think it undermines the role of the United States in the world in any cases where they actually would want to play a constructive role. So it’s hard to imagine a more damaging foreign policy decision.

AMY GOODMAN: William Hartung, we want to thank you so much for being with us, national security and foreign policy expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’ll link to your piece in Forbes, “Senate Aid Package Underscores Washington’s Skewed Priorities.”

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“They Were So Close”: Israel Kills Medics Trying to Save Dying 6-Year-Old Hind Rajab
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/16/ ... transcript

We look at the case of Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza whose case reverberated around the world when audio of her pleading for emergency workers to save her was published online. Her body was found two weeks later alongside those of her aunt, uncle and three cousins. The bodies of two Palestine Red Crescent paramedics, also missing since they had been dispatched to rescue her, were located in their ambulance just yards away. All had been killed by Israeli fire. “She was killed alone and scared, and our rescue teams were only meters away from her,” said Palestine Red Crescent Society spokesperson Nebal Farsakh, who adds that more than a dozen PRCS aid workers have been intentionally targeted during Israel’s assault on Gaza. Farsakh also discusses the kidnapping and assault of healthcare workers by Israeli forces laying siege upon Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn to Gaza, to a case that’s reverberated around the world. Two weeks ago, January 29th, 6-year-old Hind Rajab climbed into a car with her aunt, her uncle and her cousins in Gaza City as they prepared to flee to the southern part of Gaza. But as they were in the car, an Israeli tank approached them and opened fire. Hind’s 15-year-old cousin Layan called the Red Crescent for help. These were her last words, recorded on the call with a Red Crescent dispatcher.

LAYAN HAMADEH: [translated] Hello?

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Hello, dear?

LAYAN HAMADEH: [translated] They are shooting at us.

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Hello?

LAYAN HAMADEH: [translated] They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me.

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Are you hiding?

LAYAN HAMADEH: [translated] Yes, in the car. We’re next to the tank.

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Are you inside the car?

LAYAN HAMADEH: [translated] [screaming]

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Hello? Hello?

AMY GOODMAN: That was 15-year-old Layan’s last words, killed along with the rest of her family. The only one who remained alive was 6-year-old Hind. Wounded, she called the Red Crescent back, pleading with the dispatcher to be rescued.

HIND RAJAB: [translated] Come take me. You will come and take me?

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] Do you want me to come and take you?

HIND RAJAB: [translated] I’m so scared. Please come. Please call someone to come and take me.

RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] OK, dear, I will come and take you.

AMY GOODMAN: After seeking approval from the Israeli military, two emergency workers with the Palestine Red Crescent, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, went to try to rescue 6-year-old Hind. But dispatchers lost contact with the medics.

Nearly two weeks later, Israeli forces finally withdrew from the area, and on Saturday Hind’s surviving family ventured back to the neighborhood. They found Hind dead inside the car alongside the bodies of five of her family members. The car riddled with bullet holes. The bodies of the two emergency workers were also found in an ambulance nearby, appear to have been killed by Israeli fire just yards away from the car. This is Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamadah, after she learned of her daughter’s killing.

WISSAM HAMADAH: [translated] My heart is completely destroyed over my daughter. Two weeks! They killed them. Two weeks, they were in that car! I’ve told the world from day one, “Please go get Hind.” God is the only one sufficient for us. Everyone failed us. I will tell God on the day of judgment about my daughter. I swear I will never forgive you or any human involved or any human rights organization.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on this case, we’re joined now by Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, joining us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Nebal, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us everything you know about this case.

NEBAL FARSAKH: Good evening. Thanks for having me.

We at the Palestine Red Crescent were heartbroken and devastated again after learning the fate of our colleagues, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. The ambulance was found bombed just meters away from the car where Hind was trapped.

The story began after we have received a call from the uncles of Hind and Layan, who live overseas, reporting that there’s two little girls are still survived after their family car was targeted by the Israeli tanks. He gave us a phone number. We called, and then Layan picked up the phone. And this is the call which you just previewed. Layan was killed while she was over the phone with our dispatch center.

And then we have called the number again, and Hind picked up the phone. Hind was supposed to turn into 6 years in May, and now she has lost her life. Over three hours, Hind was over the phone with our dispatch center. She was repeatedly seeking help, repeatedly appealing for our teams to come and pick her up.

It took us all of this time, over three hours, in order to coordinate safe access for our ambulances. And once the green light was given, the ambulance headed to the location. And upon its arrival, they have reported that there is a green laser on them, that the Israeli occupation force is pointing a laser on them. And then we have heard a sound of gunfire or a bombardment. It wasn’t that much clear. And the connection was lost.

For over 12 days, we were uncertain regarding the fate of our colleagues, Yusuf and Ahmed, and the little girl, Hind. We were thinking that they might be arrested. There was so many questions, like if they were succeeded to rescue Hind or not, because, basically, also they have confirmed that they can see the car of Hind and they were so close to Hind. I was just devastated to learn that Hind passed away alone. She was killed alone and scared, and our rescue teams were only meters away from her.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you explain the weapon found by the ambulance?

NEBAL FARSAKH: We’re not sure regarding the weapon found next to the ambulance. According to reports, it is an artillery shelling, U.S.-made, was found next to the ambulance, which was bombed by the Israeli occupation forces while they were trying to save 6-year-old Hind.

It’s just so much sad to see paramedics losing their life while they are trying to save people’s life. What was the fault of Yusuf and Ahmed? Their fault was they went in a rescue mission to save a 6-year-old girl. It was a coordinated mission, and the green light was given, and the Israeli occupation forces intentionally bombed the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance, which has clearly the Red Crescent emblem on top of the ambulance and from all the sides. There was no way or no option to be by mistake. It is an intentional targeting. Since the beginning of the war, we have lost 14 PRCS members. All of them were killed while they were on duty trying to save people’s life.

AMY GOODMAN: And what has the Israeli military explained to you, given that you got permission for your rescue workers to go rescue Hind, as the world heard her 6-year-old pleas for help?

NEBAL FARSAKH: Up to this moment, the Israeli military didn’t comment or reply at what happened. And even during the 12 days, we have tried repeatedly, even through the ICRC, to ask the Israeli occupation forces regarding what happened to Hind and the rescue team. And all the time they were mentioning they don’t have info regarding this incident. To turn out, after 12 days, they have bombed the ambulance, and still they don’t have info regarding the incident.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to another case. The Palestine Red Crescent has just posted new video online as evidence that their ambulance was shot at and its staff were, quote, “brutally assaulted” by Israeli forces. PRCS said the video was taken around a week ago and shows a Red Crescent paramedic with two black eyes sitting in an ambulance that is pockmarked by bullet holes. The organization says the attack happened as the ambulance crew was delivering oxygen cylinders to Al-Amal Hospital in Gaza. It also stated that Israel had claimed they had transferred the oxygen cylinders to Al-Amal Hospital. Can you explain what took place here in this video that we’re watching?

NEBAL FARSAKH: Yes. For over a week, Al-Amal Hospital was run out of oxygen. This has resulted to three of our patients died because of the lack of oxygen. After we managed to coordinate getting oxygen cylinders to the hospital via the ICRC, our ambulance had to bring the oxygen cylinders from Nasser Hospital and transport them to Al-Amal Hospital. On its way, the ambulance — Israeli occupation forces opened fire at the hospital, and they insult and beat our paramedic, who was trying to move and transport this oxygen cylinder, which is life-saving, for our patients.

This is not the first attack, because at that moment, also a week ago, the Israeli occupation forces raided Al-Amal Hospital. They have destroyed medical equipment, and they dehumanized the medical staff, patients and their companions. They arrested nine of the Palestine Red Crescent members from Al-Amal Hospital, including four doctors and a nurse. They have beaten the staff, denied them — not allowing them to drink water or even to go use the toilet, and they tie their hands on their backs. The situation is extremely dangerous inside Al-Amal Hospital. We are still extremely worried regarding the safety of our teams who were arrested from Al-Amal Hospital. Today, two of them were released, but seven of our PRCS members are still detained up to this moment who were arrested from inside Al-Amal Hospital. Al-Amal Hospital is under besiege and continuous attack for the 25th day. Today, Israeli occupation forces targeted the second floor of the hospital with artillery shelling. Gladly, it only damaged for two of the nursing rooms, but there was no injuries among the staff or the patients. But the situation remains very dangerous, with Israeli tanks are in front of the hospital, besieging the hospital, continuous gunfire and bombardment surrounding the hospital. No one is able to go in or go out of the hospital. There is no food, no water, extreme shortage of medicine and medical supplies inside the hospital. The situation is beyond dire.

AMY GOODMAN: Nebal, I asked you about Israeli response. I want to ask you about the U.S. government response and how important it is. This is a clip of State Department spokesperson Matt Miller at a news conference on Wednesday. He was questioned about the killing of 6-year-old Hind and her family by a reporter from The Intercept, Prem Thakker.

PREM THAKKER: It’s been over two weeks since Israeli forces attacked Hind Rajab’s family, killing her aunt, uncle and cousins, leaving her trapped alone in her vehicle. We heard her pleas to the Red Crescent Society. Two medics were sent, all to be blown up, allegedly, by Israeli forces. I wanted to ask about the status of the inquiry into this, just because it seems if the Israeli government, you know, which seemingly does have a pretty sophisticated operation, is prioritizing this — if they don’t already know which soldiers to interview, for instance, they have Red Crescent calls, timestamps, the location of the Red Crescent staff to, you know, question and rely on — plenty of material to figure out who exactly to inquire with and to figure out who to hold accountable. So I want to first ask about the status of this investigation.

MATTHEW MILLER: Sure. So, I think that question is appropriately directed to the government of Israel. I will say, on behalf of the United States, we have made clear to them that we want that incident to be investigated. They have told us they are investigating it. It’s our understanding that investigation is not yet complete. You should direct questions to them about where it stands. But we want to see it completed as soon as possible. And as I said from this podium several days ago, if accountability is appropriate, we want to be — we want to see accountability put in place.

AMY GOODMAN: Nebal Farsakh, we just have 30 seconds. That’s the State Department spokesperson. How important is pressure from the United States on Israel, as you talked about a U.S. weapon being found near the shelled ambulance?

NEBAL FARSAKH: It is extremely important. The life and the story of Hind should not be end in this way. We’re talking about 6-years-old girl. She was trapped in her family car for hours, after everyone was killed and targeted by Israeli occupation forces. During this, even two paramedics who went to rescue the 6-year-old girl was also targeted, and their ambulance was found. We need to see actions happen and to put Israel accountable for committing such crime against a 6-year-old girl and civilians who were trapped in their car, along with targeting our ambulance.

AMY GOODMAN: Nebal Farsakh, we thank you so much for joining us,