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“Uncommitted”: Over 100,000 Cast Protest Vote Against Biden’s Gaza Policy in Michigan Primary
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 28, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/28/ ... transcript

President Joe Biden won the Michigan Democratic primary on Tuesday, but over 100,000 voters cast their ballots for “uncommitted” in an organized campaign protesting U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. The major battleground state is home to one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, but the movement to vote “uncommitted” is now expected to spread to other states, including Minnesota and Washington. “I’ve rarely seen such an organic and authentic movement come together,” says former Democratic congressmember from Michigan Andy Levin. “We really need actual change in policy, and I think we sent that message strongly last night.” President of the Arab American Institute James Zogby says that Democratic voters need a reason to come out to the polls. “We gave them a reason with 'uncommitted.' Joe Biden’s got to give them a reason in November,” says Zogby. “There is genocide unfolding. People want it to end. The president either is going to have to act decisively to end it, or it’s going to have an impact in November.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Michigan, where President Joe Biden won the Democratic primary Tuesday but faced a significant backlash over his support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Biden won about 81% of the vote, but over 100,000 voters, or more than 13%, cast their ballots for “uncommitted.”

In recent weeks, the group Listen to Michigan urged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” to pressure Biden to call on Israel to end its assault on Gaza. Organizers of the campaign had said they were hoping for 10,000 “uncommitted” votes, pointing to Donald Trump’s win of less than 11,000 votes in 2016, to show the significance of that number. Tuesday’s vote shows they got 10 times that amount.

Michigan is the first major battleground state in the general election to hold its primary. It’s also home to one of the largest Arab American populations in the country. Top White House officials visited Michigan earlier this month to meet with Arab and Muslim leaders after a number of them refused to meet with Biden’s campaign manager.

The movement to vote “uncommitted” will likely spread to other states. Organizers of the movement are holding a call with supporters in Minnesota, which will vote next week, and Washington state, which holds its primary March 12th.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute. His new opinion piece for Pakistan Today is titled “Why the USA Continues to Fail the Arab World.” He’s joining us from Utica, New York. We’re also joined by former Democratic Congressmember from Michigan Andy Levin. He’s joining us from Southfield, Michigan.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! You’re a former congressmember, Andy Levin. You’re also a former synagogue president. Talk about this “uncommitted” campaign. For every six votes President Biden got yesterday in the primary, “uncommitted” got one. Talk about the organizing effort and what message that you hope that those who supported “uncommitted,” like yourself, sent to President Biden.

ANDY LEVIN: Well, good morning, Amy and everyone. I don’t have much of a voice left, so sorry about that.

It was really an incredible thing, Amy. You know, I’ve been organizing for peace for 40 years, and I’ve rarely seen such an organic and authentic movement come together in, as you say, just three weeks. And we got over 100,000 people to vote “uncommitted.” This was something that grew up out of the Arab American and larger Muslim communities in Michigan, but it had great power among progressives, among Jewish people, Christians, Muslims, people of other faiths, people of no faith. College campuses were aflame about this.

And the idea was that Michigan has this “uncommitted” box on our ballot, because, remember, this is a presidential primary, and some other states do the same thing. You’re voting to send delegates to a convention, so you could vote to send delegates “uncommitted.” And, in fact, we won so many votes, I believe we will send at least one delegate from two congressional districts: the 6th District, represented by Debbie Dingell, and the 12th District, represented by Rashida Tlaib.

I think the significance of this, Amy, is that the president’s people, and maybe the president himself, there’s a danger that they see this as sort of like a political problem: “We need to send surrogates. We need better messaging. People just need to realize what a disaster Trump would be, which, of course, we can never let him get near the White House again. So they’ll come around all of this.” No. This is war. This is the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people, leveling whole neighborhoods, most of the Gaza Strip. We don’t just want you to use a better message.

The message from us to the president yesterday was: You must change course. You must change course for the sake of your political reelection and because it’s the right and necessary thing to do from every point of view, including U.S. national security interests, for God’s sake. The message to the president is: Stop treating what Bibi Netanyahu says as the boundary of the possible. You’ve got to move towards an immediate and permanent ceasefire and an end to this carnage, free all the hostages, free political prisoners among the Palestinians, including leading longtime prisoners who — if you don’t like Hamas, free Marwan Barghouti, who’s been in prison for so long, whom many Palestinians might support to change the situation there. So, we really need actual change in policy, and I think we sent that message strongly last night.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Andy Levin, I wanted to ask you — I was particularly struck by the turnout. The Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said this was a record turnout on Tuesday for a presidential primary. Compared to, for instance, South Carolina, where only 4% of Democrats voted in the primary, here we had over, it looks like, 50%? Could you explain this issue of turnout, as well?

ANDY LEVIN: Well, one thing is that there were more — quite a greater number of Republicans voting, or people voting in the Republican primary than the Democratic primary. That’s also something that’s not great for President Biden. But there was some sense of a contest on that side, right? Even though we all know that Nikki Haley was going to trail by a wide margin.

But it is remarkable, Juan. Think about it. We have an incumbent Democratic president running for reelection. We all know he’s going to be the nominee. Most Democrats feel like maybe he’s done a really great job in other areas. Personally, I was really proud to serve with him in the 117th Congress. I’m proud of the Investing in America agenda that we passed, having some, at least a semblance of, industrial policy in America for the first time in many decades, and on and on. But what’s remarkable is that this 100,000-plus people who voted “uncommitted,” almost all of them, Juan, wouldn’t have showed up but for this. They’re mad at the president. They would have stayed home.

And our message was: Wait a minute. That would be a disaster if you stayed home. He won’t get the message. He won’t understand. Come out and express your rage. Shake your fist at the president and say, “Look,” for most of them, “I voted for you in 2020. I’m really mad at you right now, and I have to tell you.” So, that, I think, juiced turnout.

And look at East Lansing, where Michigan State University is. Look at Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is. It’s not just Dearborn and Hamtramck, with our incredible, beautiful concentration of Arab American and other Muslim voters. It’s also young people across the state and progressives across the state who said, “We’re your base. We want to win in November. In order to win, we want peace now.”

AMY GOODMAN: Andy Levin, the last time we talked to you, you were a congressmember. You were running for reelection. AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had invested millions in Democratic primaries to defeat progressives who supported Palestine. You were one of those they were trying to defeat. You’re a self-described Zionist who supports a two-state solution. But earlier, before that primary, a former president of AIPAC described you as “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Can you talk about what happened to you then? You lost that election. But do you see your point of view being embraced much both in Michigan and around the country in a way that AIPAC never imagined?

ANDY LEVIN: I do, Amy. I mean, basically, they spent millions of dollars of dark money. They raised a huge amount of so-called hard money for my opponent in that primary, who basically toed the AIPAC line completely. And now they say they’re going to spend $100 million in 2022, and evidently they’ve already raised $44 million to take out progressives in Democratic primaries. And much of their money is coming from Republican billionaires, who don’t have any place in a Democratic primary. And shame on us, as Democrats, if we continue to allow Democratic candidates to take Republican money in Democratic primaries.

But here’s the situation. This avalanche of mostly dark money coming to try to interfere with Democratic primaries is running into a tsunami of upset by Democratic base voters who say, “The Jewish people deserve self-determination. What about the Palestinian people? And, in fact, there is no peace and security for the Jewish people in the Holy Land unless and until we realize the political and human rights of the Palestinian people. And we have to love each other. We have to support each other. We have to find a way to live together.” And, yes, this is a huge rebuke to that point of view that we must support the Israeli government no matter what they do.

I mean, why are we letting Bibi Netanyahu set the boundary of the possible? This man has never been for a just peace for one day in his life. He has actively opposed Palestinian self-determination his whole career. Like some other people we know, he’s fighting to stay in office so that he doesn’t go to jail. I mean, come on. You can support the people of Israel and the people of Palestine without supporting these horrible policies and this horrible war.

I mean, you know, think of the average — I think of myself, Amy, 40 years ago, when I was a college student. And if I read what The New York Times reported, for example, that the U.S. was supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, and the IDF was dropping them not just on densely populated areas but on places where they had told the Palestinians to flee, and then, at the end of the article, “By the way, we’ve sent 5,000 more of one type of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel since October,” that Andy Levin 40 years ago is not unlike college students and other young people all around Michigan’s campuses and working people, saying, “Whoa! This is unacceptable.” And we showed the president that we don’t accept it yesterday.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d to bring in James Zogby to the conversation, get your reaction to the vote in Michigan, and also whether you think that this “uncommitted” movement could spread across the country, especially now as we head into Super Tuesday on March 5th.

JAMES ZOGBY: Well, look, number one, I want to thank Andy Levin for his leadership. He made an enormous difference here, and we’re so pleased to be partnering, as we were, in this campaign.

Secondly, I think, message sent. A hundred-plus thousand “uncommitted” votes, much larger than anyone anticipated, makes a point: President Biden, you ignore this vote at your risk.

And thirdly, I think, there, frankly, is not a need to go any further. And I think that it’s very clear. We can extrapolate from the rest of the states what the turnout would be in November if we ignore this issue and continue to ignore this issue, not only, as the congressman said, with the Arab American vote, but with young voters, Black voters. We’ve done polling. My brother John has done polling on this among American voters, not just Arab American voters. The impact that the Gaza war is having on voters under 29, the impact it’s having on Black, Latino and Asian voters, who are core to the Democratic coalition, is very clear.

We just wanted to make a point in Michigan. It was the place to make the point. But, frankly, it can also be read in Virginia. It can be read in Georgia. It can be read in Pennsylvania. You ignore this war, and you continue to offer nothing but anodyne, “Well, we’re really with you, and we feel bad, too, and we’re paying attention and working every day,” that does not cut it at this point. There is genocide unfolding. People want it to end. The president either is going to have to act decisively to end it, or it’s going to have an impact in November.

And as the congressman said it, as the organizers of this movement have been very clear, this is not the abandon Biden movement. This is the, for God’s sake, shape up or you might lose in November Biden movement. And the fact is, is that the president has to listen and change. It’s going to be too late for some. The fact that 30,000 have already died, that famine is on the way, that genocide has continued is going to mean a lot of people are going to say, “I can’t do this. I just can’t do it.” But if there’s to be any effort at all made to bring some voters back, something dramatic has to happen and change from the White House to say, “Let’s give him another shot.”

But, frankly, right now we’re having trouble finding that message. And I think Michigan sends a very strong signal, that doesn’t have to be repeated anywhere else. Look, when I saw the Emerson College poll out the day before this vote, I said, “Message sent.” They had 11%. We got a little — you know, we did a little better than that. They said youth vote was voting “uncommitted.” We did that. We showed that. In college towns across the state, we won. “Uncommitted” won in Dearborn. It beat Joe Biden. “Uncommitted” won in Hamtramck. It beat Joe Biden. Those are the two concentrations of Arab American voters. The president needs to pay attention. And I hope he does. And, you know, I hope he does in a way that is decisive and clear and actually turns the corner.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, James Zogby, of course, in Michigan, the participation of elected officials like Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and other local Michigan officials did have an impact on that vote. Do you see other Democratic Party officials in other states following that lead?

JAMES ZOGBY: Well, look, we’ve already seen city councils in 70 cities do this. And that number is growing. There is, not just among Arab American, like — you know, we saw a lot of that in Michigan. We also saw Black officials. We saw progressive Jewish officials. And as important as Rashida was, Andy Levin was an important message sender here that this is a broader movement for justice. And let’s not forget that. City councilwoman in Detroit came out just a couple of days before the vote, saying, “I am with 'uncommitted.'” That’s important, having Black elected officials, Arab American elected officials, progressive Jewish elected officials saying, “We want this to end, and we want President Biden to make a difference.” That’s important.

And so, yeah, I think this is going to have a sort of an effect across the country. And we don’t need to do it in other states. We just don’t, because the message is very clear. Number one, you know in Michigan there’s no way to create an electoral map that you win in November. But, number two, we can extrapolate what happens in Michigan and say, “Hmm, it’s going to happen in Virginia. It’s going to happen in Georgia. You’re going to lose youth vote, Black vote, Arab American vote. And you don’t win Pennsylvania if that’s the case.”

So, I think, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I know that these voter groups have to have a reason to turn out. I think what was important about this — and, Congressman, I thank you and others for it — was that you gave people a reason to turn out. These “uncommitted” voters would not have turned out, and they would not turn out again in November, if they didn’t have a reason to turn out. We gave them a reason with “uncommitted.” Joe Biden’s got to give them a reason in November.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk, Jim Zogby, about the other states. Talk about Minnesota and other states who are now, apparently, adopting this “uncommitted” vote. But in Michigan, what’s different — right? — is it’s actually printed on the ballot. And I think you can also add — I mean, most people didn’t — they talked about Dean Phillips, but Marianne Williamson, who suspended her campaign, came in third, and she was the one Democrat for a ceasefire. So you could probably add her votes to the “uncommitted” votes.

JAMES ZOGBY: [inaudible], for example, the Arab community said, “Let’s back Marianne Williamson, even though she dropped out,” because she’s on the ballot and there is no other option. Look, let me say, I’m not going to discourage anybody from trying to do it in other states. I just — like I said, I don’t think you need to. And I would rather have energy focused on city council resolutions and getting people to sign on to ceasefire resolutions across the board.

There is a — I did the Palestine statehood resolutions in 1988 with Jesse Jackson. We passed them in 11 states. We got to the national convention, had the first-ever debate from the podium on a minority plank. After that, everybody continued doing it, but without Jesse in the mix, we never had the momentum to carry it through.

We had a number of ideal things come together in Michigan: a huge concentration of Arab Americans, the support of elected officials, local elected officials, mayors, state reps, etc., city council people. We also had Congressman Levin, who was great on college campuses in terms of mobilizing and bringing people forward, and a great collection of organizers and a budget to make it happen. We’re not going to have that in Minnesota. We’re not going to have that in other states. And so, I don’t want to see people set up for failure. And so, I think you take what happened in Michigan, you extrapolate it to your state, you send the message to President Biden: “It happened here. It can happen elsewhere.” There’s no need to try to replicate what can’t be automatically replicated, given the ideal composition of forces in Michigan that made this happen.

And so, I, frankly, think — I don’t know what’s going to happen in other states, but I don’t want to take a defeat in Minnesota, because it’s not even on the damn ballot, and say, “Oh, look, it’s” — and give the other side a crowing rights. They’re going to try whatever they can do to crow and say we really didn’t — “They didn’t accomplish anything, because 81% still voted for Joe Biden.” Well, of course 81 voted for Joe Biden. But that’s not going to mean November, because in the Emerson poll, Joe Biden is losing by two points. Eleven percent “uncommitted,” and Joe Biden loses by two points, hmm, does that — DMFI, Democratic Majority for Israel, don’t you get what that means? That means that you need that 11% to come to your side in order to put you over the top. We can say that in every state without having to go through this whole process, especially when it’s not even on the ballot and you can’t really get the same outcome you get in Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Andy Levin. You come from a political dynasty. Your uncle was the late senator who headed the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, I’m sure a close friend of President Biden; your father a congressman, as well, Sandy Levin. What do you think they would say at this point about this movement, about this demand and grassroots organizing?

ANDY LEVIN: Well, Amy, Uncle Carl passed away, as you know, several years ago. My dad is 92 and going strong. And he is really proud of what I’m doing. He, you know, was involved in helping Soviet Jews flee to Israel. You know, he supported U.S. policy for a two-state solution forever. But I think he understands that there is no way now, after 54 years of occupation and things going in the wrong direction, there’s no way forward unless the president of the United States steps up and leads much more strongly as a peacemaker.

And, look, I’m going to end on a hopeful note. Joe Biden, with this long history of chairing the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate — and, you know, he says he’s known all the Israeli leaders, all the Palestinian leaders. You’ve got to step up, Mr. President, and now end this carnage and lead a diplomatic effort, not a military effort, to end this conflict. It can be done. You’ve got to step up and do it, both because it’s the right thing to do and because your politics depend on it. As Jim Zogby said, the other states are fine. Michigan is a must-win state. Minnesota isn’t, you know, for example. He’s going to win Minnesota anyway, I think. But you’ve got to win Michigan to put the Electoral College math together. And I think it’s just going to be hard to do unless you change course. So let’s get going.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, clearly, President Biden is hearing people. When he was with Seth Meyers the other night, the late-night comic, in an ice cream store, as he was licking his mint chip ice cream, a reporter asked a question about a ceasefire, and he said, yes, he thinks it’s going to happen on Monday. That surprised both Israel and Hamas. We’ll see what happens. But it was on the eve of the Michigan primary that he said that. Andy Levin, I want to thank you for being with us, former Democratic congressmember from Michigan, and James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.

When we come back, we look at the death of Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. support for the war in Gaza. Stay with us.

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The Life & Death of Aaron Bushnell: U.S. Airman Self-Immolates Protesting U.S. Support for Israel in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 28, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/28/ ... transcript

In an act that has captured the attention of the world, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington Sunday to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza and U.S. support for the military campaign. Bushnell, who live-streamed the action, said, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” before lighting himself on fire and repeatedly shouted “Free Palestine” as he was engulfed in the flames. He was pronounced dead in the hospital later that day. Democracy Now! speaks with Bushnell’s friend and conscientious objector Levi Pierpont, who says his friend’s death was not a suicide but was about using his life to send a message for justice. “We have to honor the message that he left,” says Pierpont, who says Bushnell died “to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine.” Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat, lays out the history of self-immolation to protest war and how Bushnell’s act could impact U.S. policy for the war on Gaza. “It was an act of courage, an act of bravery, to call attention to U.S. policies,” says Wright, who offers support to Pierpont and other veterans advocating for peace live on air.

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 in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

A warning to our audience: This segment contains graphic images and descriptions.

On the morning of February 25th, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, posted on Facebook a link to the video live-streaming service Twitch with a caption that read, quote, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now,” he wrote.

Aaron Bushnell then sent a copy of his will, that he had prepared days before, to a friend. In it, he gave his cat to his neighbor to be cared for. A few hours later, shortly before 1 p.m. local time, Aaron Bushnell walked towards the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., wearing his Air Force uniform. He began the live stream on his phone and spoke as he approached the embassy gates.

AARON BUSHNELL: I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Bushnell then placed his phone on ground, stood in front of the Israeli Embassy gate and doused himself in a liquid, before setting himself on fire. He shouted “Free Palestine!” several times as he was consumed by the flames. Those were his last words.

An officer who arrived on the scene can be seen brandishing a gun and pointing it at Aaron Bushnell as he burns alive and collapses to the ground. Another officer sprays him with a fire extinguisher. As the first officer continues to point his gun at Aaron, the second officer yells, quote, “I don’t need guns. I need a fire extinguisher.”

Aaron Bushnell was taken to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead several hours later. His extreme act of protest against Israel’s assault on Gaza made headlines around the world. Vigils have been held in his honor in Washington, D.C., here in New York, in San Antonio, Texas, in Portland and elsewhere.

Ali Abunimah, the founder of The Electronic Intifada, wrote on social media, quote, “Aaron Bushnell gave his life so that America would hear his message: End the genocide. He kept calling 'Free Palestine' through intense, horrifying pain. He gave his life so people in Gaza might live. There’s no greater love than that. I feel sadness and awe for this human being,” Ali wrote.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Ann Wright is a 29-year U.S. Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a colonel and a former U.S. diplomat. In March of 2003, she resigned. She has since worked with the antiwar groups CodePink and Veterans for Peace. She is co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience. Her new essay for Common Dreams is headlined “Why Would Anyone Kill Themselves to Stop a War? On Aaron Bushnell and Others.” She’s joining us from Hawaii. She resigned in 2003 over the War in Iraq. And joining us from Southfield, Michigan, is Levi Pierpont, who was a friend of Aaron Bushnell. They met at basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2020. Levi went on to become a conscientious objector.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! This is a very difficult segment to do. Levi, we want to begin with you. You were a friend of Aaron. Tell us about him, and then tell us when you learned what had happened. Tell us about how you met, your decision to become a conscientious objector — he stayed in the military — and what you then understand took place this weekend.

LEVI PIERPONT: Yes. So, I met Aaron Bushnell in basic training. And from the first day that I met him, I could tell that he was just a really sweet person. I could tell very quickly that he had a strong sense of justice. We became friends. And whenever people in basic training would talk about me or would talk about him, we would stick up for each other. And he always stuck up for me.

And I did end up getting out as a conscientious objector. And we spoke throughout that process. And at the time that I began to make headway with the process and it began to near its end — I got out in July of 2023 — he felt like he was already close enough to his own end date that he decided not to take the same path. And I understood that, because the conscientious objector process can take over a year. And so, I knew that he was still in.

And then he went to do SkillBridge at Ohio, and that’s when I met him in Toledo on January 5th. And that was the first time I had seen him since basic training. And it was, unfortunately, the last time I saw him. And, of course, you know, the other day, I heard what had happened. So, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And our deepest condolences to you, by the way, Levi. When you heard, did you first hear that a man had self-immolated, and then hear that it was Aaron?

LEVI PIERPONT: Yes. So, I had just seen the headlines. I don’t think I even clicked one and read anything yet. And yeah, Monday, Monday, a friend of mine reached out to me, and she knew that I had been a conscientious objector, knew that I had been in the Air Force, and knew that just the story in general might be difficult for me. She had no idea that I knew him. And she was the one who ultimately texted me his name. And I just immediately broke down and called her, and I said, “That was my friend. I went to basic training with him.” And she comforted me. And I just thought about all the conversations we had. I went back to the last text message I got from him. And I just — I just weeped.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Levi, in those conversations, did you get a sense of why Aaron initially decided to join the military and how his views evolved about the U.S. military?

LEVI PIERPONT: Yes. I know when we first talked, we shared similar goals and interests in the military. We wanted to sort of get out of our bubble, to explore the United States, to explore the world, to meet people from other backgrounds. And so, I remember when we both found out where we were stationed, it was kind of ironic. I found out I’d be stationed in Minot Air Force Base, and he found out he was going to be going back to Lackland, where we went to basic training. And so we both felt like maybe we were going to explore a little bit less than we thought, but we were ready for our careers.

And I know that over the years, both of us shifted, of course, in our beliefs regarding war, largely because of what we saw in the military, largely because of the things that we learned because we were a part of it. And I know that he and I both were encouraged by people on YouTube that were writing video essays about social justice movements in the United States.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Ann Wright to the conversation. This issue of self-immolation, we’ve already had two now in protest of the war in Gaza. But you noted that during the Vietnam War, as many as five Americans self-immolated themselves in protest against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I’m wondering if you could talk about that? You wrote about that recently for Common Dreams.

ANN WRIGHT: Yes. It’s a sad situation, for sure. I mean, our hearts go out to Aaron’s family and Aaron’s friends.

And the same back in — you know, 60 years ago almost now, in 1965, as the U.S. War on Vietnam was starting up, first we had an 82-year-old Quaker woman, Alice Herz, committed suicide by self-immolation, and then followed about six months later by another Quaker, Norman Morrison, from Baltimore, who went to the Pentagon and set himself on fire, little knowing the place that he had picked at the Pentagon was right below where Secretary of Defense McNamara had his office. And apparently, his self-immolation had a strong effect on McNamara, although he didn’t stop the war initially, but it did have an effect on him personally and on his family. And then followed by a young man in San — or, first in New York at the U.N. Plaza. So, yes, there were five people that burned themselves to death over a political decision of the United States to go to war.

And so, now we have — you know, 60 years later, we have two people in less than three months who have done the same, I would say, courageous act of taking their own lives to bring the attention of the American public and the world to what the United States is complicit in, which is the Israeli genocide and U.S. genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to go through a few more of those examples in history, that sent shockwaves through multiple conflicts. You had Thich Quang Duc, a monk who drew attention to the treatment of Vietnamese Buddhists by the government; and then Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, who sparked the Arab Spring when he set himself on fire — this was before Egypt, and that sparked the uprising in Tunisia; Malachi Ritscher, a musician who called for an end to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A pro-Palestine protester also self-immolated outside the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta in December, but we don’t know her name. It hardly got any attention.

And there’s been a whole debate in the media right now, those who talk about it as — don’t even want to talk. I mean, I think as it started, papers like The New York Times didn’t even say he said, “Free Palestine,” and other outlets, as well. But then, as time went on, they did talk about what happened. But the whole issue of going into a debate about mental illness and not wanting to encourage something like this versus you hear someone like Ali Abunimah talking about Aaron’s incredible bravery, your thoughts?

ANN WRIGHT: Well, it is incredibly brave. And a person — well, there’s no evidence at all that Aaron had any sort of mental illness. He was a very conscientious person who saw what the U.S. was doing in his position in the U.S. military. And one might say, you know, he’s not the first person to have committed suicide over what the United States has been doing. If you look, 22 veterans a day commit suicide over what they’ve done in the U.S. military. So, this is — what Aaron did was very, very courageous. I can’t imagine taking that step. It was an act of courage, an act of bravery, to call attention to U.S. policies.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Levi Pierpont, I wanted to ask you — you grew up as an evangelical Christian. Aaron Bushnell attended Catholic religious services while at basic training. How do you think his religious views informed his beliefs and, ultimately, his action?

LEVI PIERPONT: I think, ultimately, by the time that he did what he did, he didn’t identify with any particular religion. But I know that for me, even though I’m more agnostic than I grew up, my evangelical roots still influence me. They influence my sense of justice. And they told me since I was a young child that you have to stand up for what you believe in. And I can imagine that it was the same way for Aaron. And so, even though I don’t believe that he still believed in the Catholic faith by the time that he died, I know that that upbringing had a profound impact on him, and I’m sure that it influenced his sense of justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Levi Pierpont, Aaron was living in San Antonio, where Lackland base is. He was doing a lot of mutual aid work with people who were unsheltered there, very well known in those encampments. What do you want us to remember him by, as you think about him in these last few days, what you’re talking about in the vigils and with your friends?

LEVI PIERPONT: I want people to remember that his death is not in vain, that he died to spotlight this message. I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to. I would have done anything I could to stop him. But, obviously, we can’t get him back. And we have to honor the message that he left. I would have told him that this wasn’t necessary to get the message out. I would have told him that there were other ways. But seeing the way that the media responds now, now that this has happened, it’s hard not to feel like he was right, that this was exactly what was necessary to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine. And so, I just — I want people to remember his message.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ann Wright, your sense of how the movement here in this country to stop this genocidal war in Gaza has been building, and what Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice may contribute to that?

ANN WRIGHT: Well, it’s a huge, huge movement. And the Biden administration must recognize it, as your previous guests said. I mean, the voters are telling them a message. This is a massive, massive movement of youth, of people of all religions, that are saying, by any religious teachings, this killing is wrong. It has to end.

And I would say to Levi, you know, we have Veterans for Peace, and we have About Face, veterans organizations that would like to offer you support, because this is tough, really tough. But it’s for the people of Gaza, the people of Palestine, that we do this, to stop these horrible, horrible policies that our country has right now. The killing of innocent people for the United States and for Israel, it has to end. And ceasefire now.

AMY GOODMAN: Ann, I understand there is a Gaza flotilla being organized. We only have 30 seconds. Can you explain what that is?

ANN WRIGHT: Yes. We need to take action. I mean, right now there’s lots of talk. There are trucks that are stalled all over northern Egypt. And our Gaza flotilla movement, we are going to be doing something soon. And we will let you all know — pardon me — as soon as we get the plans for challenging again the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you know, Levi, as we have just 10-15 seconds, would Aaron have described this as suicide?

LEVI PIERPONT: No, absolutely not.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

LEVI PIERPONT: It was — he didn’t have thoughts of suicide. He had thoughts of justice. That’s what this was about. It wasn’t about his life. It was about using his life to send a message.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both so much for being with us. Levi Pierpont, dear friend of Aaron Bushnell, he, Levi, is a conscientious objector. And Ann Wright, 20-year U.S. Army vet. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks for joining us.

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Senator Jeff Merkley: U.S. “Complicit in Starvation and Humanitarian Catastrophe” in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/29/ ... transcript

As over 100 Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces while gathering for food aid in Gaza City, we speak to Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who in November became the second of only five U.S. senators to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In January, he traveled to the Rafah border crossing in Egypt to witness the system of humanitarian aid deliveries, which he described on the Senate floor as a “complicated, bizarre inspection process.” Merkley is now calling for the U.S. to bypass Israel in order to directly send aid to Gaza. Because of the United States’ relationship to Israel — “more closely tied than any situation in the world” — Merkley says, “It’s the United States that has leverage to address this situation, and the world expects us to take the lead.”

Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Scores of Palestinians were killed and 760 injured early Thursday after Israeli troops opened fire on a large crowd waiting for deliveries of food in Gaza City. At the time of this broadcast, the death toll stands at 104, with the number expected to rise, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which said the attack, quote, “constituted a new phase in the genocide.”

Hundreds of Palestinians had gathered on a major street where aid trucks carrying flour were due to arrive, when Israeli forces opened fire from tanks and drones. The wounded have been taken to four hospitals in the area, all of which are largely nonfunctioning, with no electricity or medical supplies.

The death toll in Gaza has now crossed 30,000, according to the Health Ministry, with thousands more missing and presumed dead. Over 70,000 have been wounded.

Among the worst-affected areas in Gaza is the north, where aid has barely been delivered in months. One official with the World Health Organization told Reuters that any aid deliveries that do come through are mobbed by desperate people who are visibly starving with sunken eyes. On Wednesday, top U.N. officials told the Security Council over half a million people in Gaza are on the cusp of starvation, while virtually the entire population of 2.3 million people is in desperate need of food.

AMY GOODMAN: Today we’re joined by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. In November, he became only the second senator to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In January, Senator Merkley traveled to the Rafah border crossing in Egypt to witness the system of humanitarian aid deliveries. Senator Merkley is co-author of the new book Filibustered!: How to Fix the Broken Senate and Save America.

Before we speak to the senator, let’s turn to a clip of his address on the Senator floor in early February about the humanitarian truck inspections at the Rafah border crossing.

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Israel has set up a very complicated system to inspect the trucks beforehand. They had such an inspection system before October 7th, and they were able to inspect and allow 500 trucks a day to enter. But they’ve set up a convoluted system now that Senator Van Hollen and I witnessed at Rafah crossing, where truck drivers, after loading up their supplies, often wait up to a week to get permission to pass into Gaza — a week.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon joins us now from Washington, D.C.

Senator, welcome to Democracy Now!

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Well, thank you so much. Very good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: You are the second senator to call for a ceasefire, this after last week — though you called for it before — the U.S. once again vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations. We just had reports today that you heard about Israeli troops opening fire, through tanks, guns, drones, on people desperate for aid, killing more than a hundred, perhaps wounding more than 700. Can you talk about the situation right now and what you feel needs to happen?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Well, the situation is a cascade of catastrophes. It is lack of food, it’s lack of clean water, it’s lack of shelter, it’s lack of power, it’s lack of communications — all while bombs and artillery shells keep falling. The seasoned humanitarian aid workers that I met with at Rafah gate and in Egypt and in Jordan said they have been in the worst conflict zones in the world, places like the frontline of Ukraine, places like Yemen and Somalia, and that nothing compares to the combination of tragedies that are simultaneously occurring in Gaza. The humanitarian situation is horrific.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Senator Merkley, despite what you say, of course, there are still only five senators who are calling for a ceasefire. What’s your message to them?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: My message is that we have to look with open eyes, because — because that’s what we do with every humanitarian situation around the world, whether it’s in Burma, whether it’s with people being enslaved in China or the way China is treating Tibetans. In this case, it happens to be occurring in the context of our work with an ally, with Israel. But that means we can’t just look away and pretend it’s not happening. We have to recognize we, the United States, are so closely tied, more closely tied than any situation in the world, because of our military aid to Israel, our resupply of bombs and artillery shells during the war, our very close consultation and intelligence sharings. For all these reasons, it’s the United States that has leverage to address this situation, and the world expects us to take the lead and to act in a much more bold and aggressive way than we have been doing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what about your position on military aid, quite apart from a ceasefire? Have there been calls for the suspension of military aid, given the situation on the ground?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Yes. I voted against the emergency supplemental, because it included additional offensive aid, as opposed to — well, it includes defensive, as well, which I can support, but the idea that we’re voting to resupply these types of arms that have been used in indiscriminate bombing by Israel in Gaza, contributing and creating to this humanitarian debacle, I had to oppose that. And it’s complicated, because it’s tied in the same bill with aid to Ukraine, which I and others strongly support. But we need to have a Senate where we can actually put up amendments, be able to debate pieces of the legislation, which we were unable to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Merkley, the Michigan primary just happened. We see there this “uncontested” [sic] vote. For every six people who voted for Biden, for every six Democrats, one person voted for “uncontested” [sic] — over 100,000 people in Michigan, the battleground state — meaning “uncommitted.” And this was clearly a vote for a ceasefire and for President Biden to change his position on embracing Israel, on providing weapons for Israel, on perhaps saying that he’s being harsh behind the scenes but continuing to embrace Israel publicly and when it comes to issues like military aid. Do you think that President Biden is perhaps putting his own reelection in jeopardy for the stance he’s taken on Israel, whether it’s the Arab American community in this country responding, the African American community — a thousand pastors just wrote him a letter — youth vote in this country? And have you had conversations with him?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Well, I have not had conversations directly with President Biden, but I have with many of his advisers. And the situation is such, they are conscious of, certainly, how this is reverberating in a political context. But, certainly, Palestinian Americans are profoundly disturbed. It’s hard to find any Palestinian American who has not lost members of their extended family in Gaza or is deeply disturbed through their friends and extended associations of the impact.

And we have a population that has thought about the issues of social justice in focused ways over the last few years, in the #MeToo movement, in the Black Lives Matter movement. And what they are seeing is a connection, identification with folks in Palestine that are in Gaza, who are the weaker party in this and who are civilians who are dying through this type of warfare and being injured on a massive scale. And it’s profoundly disturbing. It should be profoundly disturbing to every American, but it is certainly affecting how younger folks, who have grown up with a social consciousness, are seeing this and pondering the election to come. It is a significant electoral issue.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Senator Merkley, just to go back to your visit to Rafah last month, if you could explain what exactly the situation is on the crossing, along the crossing, and why so many trucks are being turned away? There are lines and lines of them on the Egyptian side of the border. And when you were there, you said that in a warehouse in Rafah filled with material — you saw this warehouse — that had been rejected in inspection, the warehouse included things like oxygen cylinders, gas-powered generators, tents, and medical kits used in delivering babies. What explanation has been given for why these things are being turned away?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Well, Israel has had great reluctance about providing aid into Gaza, and yet they control all the entry points into Gaza, so they are the critical factor. And so, they set up a system that’s full of challenges. So, truck drivers have to wait for permission to go to the inspection location, which is in Israel. So they drive them from — they may be waiting quite a while in Egypt, waiting for permission to do that, get to that inspection point, and may be told, “Well, there is an item on your truck that we can’t allow.” For example, one issue we heard about was scalpels in birthing kits. Well, they have a sharp edge, so this is being rejected. Or perhaps it’s an oxygen tank for a hospital, but that metal could be used as a missile launcher. Or this is a power generator needed also for a hospital, but it could be used by Hamas to put air into a tunnel. So these things get rejected, even after they have often been cleared in advance. And if a single item is rejected off the truck, the entire truck is rejected.

And so, this is why the process is so complicated and difficult. Partly it’s rooted in an authentic desire to avoid dual-use items that will help Hamas, and partly it’s rooted in a reluctance to provide aid directly from Israel into Gaza. And yet the U.S. has depended upon that as a way to provide humanitarian aid, and it’s been so grossly inadequate. So, every single day, we see the growing collapse of the medical system. We see women who are having C-sections without anesthesia. We see children having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. We see basic supplies of medicine for people who are suffering from high blood pressure, or they’re suffering from diabetic circumstances, or they have infections, and they don’t have antibiotics. This is unacceptable.

It’s why I’ve been calling for the U.S. to bypass Israel and do direct deliveries of aid. We have the ability to get airlift of every medicine needed to those remaining few hospitals that are functioning. We have the ability to get aid onshore with our huge sealift and airlift capability and then have it distributed by humanitarian organizations. We are complicit now in the starvation and humanitarian catastrophe because of our close relationship, and this has to end. We have to act directly.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you call it a genocide, Senator Merkley?

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: I have not used the word “genocide.” I’m not a lawyer. I’m not an international humanitarian or a legal organization. But let’s just describe that these circumstances, being deliberately inflicted upon the people, and the displacement, have many of the characteristics of the worst situations around the world that we have condemned previously.

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Israel Kills 104 Palestinians Waiting for Food Aid as U.N. Expert Accuses Israel of Starving Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/29/ ... transcript

In Gaza City, at least 104 Palestinian refugees were killed Thursday when Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd waiting for food aid. “This isn’t the first time people have been shot at by Israeli forces while people have been trying to access food,” says the U.N.'s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, who accuses Israel of the war crime of intentional starvation. This comes as reports grow of Palestinians resorting to animal feed and cactus leaves for sustenance and as experts warn of imminent agricultural collapse. “Every single person in Gaza is hungry,” says Fakhri, who emphasizes that famine in the modern context is a human-made catastrophe. “At this point I'm running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians.”

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: Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid in Gaza are coming under fire from Israeli forces in Gaza as acute hunger and severe malnutrition are spreading. In the latest attack earlier today, over a hundred Palestinians were killed and more than 700 wounded in Gaza City when they came under fire from Israeli tanks and drones.

Over half a million people in Gaza are on the cusp of starvation, while virtually the entire population of 2.3 million people is in desperate need of food as a result of the continued Israeli bombardment, ground attacks and ongoing siege. According to the United Nations, the amount of aid reaching the Palestinian territory dropped by 50% in February compared to the previous month.

This is Ramesh Rajasingham, coordination director of the U.N.’s humanitarian office, speaking at the Security Council on Wednesday.

RAMESH RAJASINGHAM: In December, it was projected that the entire population of 2.2 million people in Gaza would face high levels of acute food insecurity by February 2024 — the highest share of people facing this level of food insecurity ever recorded worldwide. And here we are at the end of February with at least 576,000 people in Gaza, one-quarter of the population, one step away from famine.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, says Israel is intentionally starving Palestinians and should be held accountable for war crimes. Michael Fakhri joins us now from Eugene, Oregon. He’s a professor of law at the University of Oregon.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael Fakhri. Why don’t you lay out what you understand is happening? And what is international law around the right to food?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes. Thank you, Amy.

Every single person in Gaza is hungry right now. A quarter of the population, so that’s a half a million people, are starving. And famine is imminent. We’ve never seen an entire population, 2.2 million people, made to go hungry this quickly and this completely. And people’s health is rapidly declining. What’s really concerning now is we’re starting to hear reports of children dying from dehydration, malnutrition and starvation. We’ve never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly. In the almost five months of war, there have been more children, more journalists, more medical personnel, more U.N. staff killed more than anywhere else in the world in any conflict.

In early October, when this war began, myself, amongst other independent U.N. human rights experts, immediately called for a warning of a risk of genocide, asking that there be an immediate ceasefire to prevent genocide. Unfortunately, what’s happened is the war has gotten worse. Israel’s attacks against civilians has continued and expanded. And I think it’s safe to say this is a genocide. And now we’re in the situation where we’re seeing starvation, and we’re seeing the denial of humanitarian aid and the destruction of the food system itself in Gaza.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Michael, if you could respond to the news from earlier today, authorities in Gaza saying Israeli forces committed a massacre in Gaza City, killing at least 104 Palestinians as they waited for food aid? Gaza’s Health Ministry says over 760 people were wounded, in what Hamas called an unprecedented war crime. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd, who had gathered around humanitarian aid trucks. So, if you could respond to that and, you know, what that means in terms of the very little food aid getting in and people trying to get it and then this is what happens?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes. This isn’t — so, unfortunately, this isn’t the first time people have been shot at by Israeli forces while trying to get access to aid. So, this most recent story has been the most tragic in terms of the number of dead and the number of wounded, but there have been repeated reports of Israeli forces shooting at Palestinian civilians who are waiting to receive aid. We’ve also heard reports of Israel bombarding convoys of aid trucks, even after those routes are coordinated with Israeli forces. So Israeli forces know where those convoys are, and, nevertheless, they are shooting at them.

Moreover, there’s been planned convoys that have been attempted to be sent to northern Gaza, and the last convoy that was sent that Israel allowed to reach northern Gaza was January 23rd. So, not only is Israel shooting at people getting aid, bombarding trucks en route, they’re denying convoys from reaching the north. And they’re making it very difficult for trucks to cross the borders, as we heard from Senator Merkley, whether it’s through Rafah crossing, the border with Egypt, or where most aid is coming through is the Kerem Shalom crossing, which is through Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Fakhri, you’re really explaining a dire situation. I mean, looking on film at people in Gaza, the sunken eyes, how skinny their bodies are, we have reports — Al Jazeera was just doing a report from one of the hospitals in northern Gaza. It was Kamal Adwan Hospital, where they said infants are in the hospital. They no longer have parents. Usually at the hospital there’s a can of milk for every infant. Here, there isn’t a can for the entire ward. What does it mean to be the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food? What kind of power do you have? What kind of reports do you do?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yeah. I mean, at this point I’m running out of words to be able to describe the horror of what’s happening and how vile the actions have been by Israel against the Palestinian civilians. My job is to be — I’m an independent expert. I’m given authority by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. This is a volunteer position. My job is to be the eyes, ears, and sometimes good conscience, for the U.N. system on all matters regarding hunger, malnutrition and famine, from a human rights perspective.

So, what I do is I present reports to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly. I decide what’s on the agenda when I present to them. I decide what is the right-to-food agenda when presenting to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly. So, my most recent report, when I go to the Human Rights Council next week, will be on the role of small-scale fishers. And what I will be doing now, between now and then the General Assembly in October, is my next report will be on starvation, with an emphasis on Gaza, because, unfortunately, we’re seeing a rise in conflict all over the world — conflict is the main source of hunger in the world — and also, for that report, to create a record of what’s going on in Gaza, because we’re seeing starvation, and we’re at the brink of famine.

And what’s the thing to remember about starvation and famine, it’s always, always human-made. It’s always the result of political choices. Never has there been a famine in modern history that was not because people with power made very specific choices and chose and decided to punish civilians. And what we’re seeing in Gaza is no different than that historical record.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Michael Fakhri, could you talk about the International Court of Justice ordering provisional measures? And what’s come of that? To what extent did Israel comply with those provisional measures?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yeah. On January 26th, the International Court of Justice stated in its provisional measures — and here I’m going to quote verbatim — that the state of “Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” What the court also did is it considered the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” — these are their words — in the Gaza Strip is, quote, “at a serious risk of deteriorating.” That’s the International Court of Justice in late January.

What happened instead, Israel did not comply with the court. In fact, it tried to undermine the court’s authority. And what they did, in fact, is they’ve been restricting and denying the delivery of humanitarian aid to people in Gaza. And around that same time, in late January, Israel denied there was even a humanitarian crisis or starvation. And so, what we saw, instead of compliance with the International Court of Justice, is a reduction of humanitarian aid by 50%. And so, to put it in perspective, before the war began, approximately 500 trucks used to enter Gaza a day. Now, if we’re lucky, the average is about a hundred, but that’s an average amount.

The other thing to remember, even before all of this happened, is Israel had a lot of control over the entry of food into Gaza through a 17-year blockade. Because the question we have to ask: How was Israel able to make 2.2 million people go so hungry so quickly and completely? They were already keeping people on the brink of hunger through the 17-year blockade, making it very difficult for fishers to access the sea. And 50% of people in Gaza before the war were already food insecure. Eighty percent relied on humanitarian aid.

So, it’s so clear that not only is Israel not complying with the International Court of Justice, but I would add now that Israel is using humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip. So, not only is it breaching international law and the order of the International Court of Justice, it’s clear now — because what we saw on Tuesday — this is February 27th, this Tuesday — Israel and Hamas began negotiating for a potential 40-day truce. And it’s important to note what has Israel offered in the negotiations. They’ve offered humanitarian relief to Palestinians in Gaza. So, what Israel is offering for — they want concessions from Hamas. They’re offering things like a commitment to bring in 500 trucks per day of humanitarian aid. Israel is potentially committing to providing 200,000 tents and 60,000 caravans. And they’re offering to rehabilitate hospitals and bakeries and to allow for the necessary equipment to enter. This is the bare minimum. What they’re offering as a political negotiation is the basic bare minimum as a legal obligation in terms of international humanitarian law, as a legal obligation to comply with the International Court of Justice, as a legal obligation to meet human rights law. But again, this is the bare minimum. And they’ve been withholding this. They’ve been withholding this. And now that we see the negotiations for a truce, we see how Israel is using it as a bargaining chip to offer something, as if it’s a political choice and not a legal and, I would add, a moral obligation.

AMY GOODMAN: Is Israel committing a war crime, Michael Fakhri?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly, they are committing war crimes. But let me add, a war crime — what’s interesting about war crimes is we can only hold individuals accountable for war crimes. This is something, I think, more existential. This is why we are saying — “we” being the dozens of independent U.N. human rights experts — are saying this is genocide. This is why the International Court of Justice is saying there’s a plausible case for genocide, from their perspective. What we mean by saying this is genocide means that Palestinian people, the people, are being targeted simply because they are Palestinian, simply because of who they are. This is what makes it genocide.

What’s important about framing it genocide is, of course, the remedy that is available. Genocide means the state of Israel itself is culpable, because, to go back to starvation, this is a systemic denial of humanitarian aid. This is a political choice to use the denial of humanitarian aid and starving of people as a political bargaining chip. This means that the entire state of Israel is culpable. But that also means that the remedy is not just throw this individual or that individual in jail maybe at some — a few years in the future. What the remedy is for genocide is fully recognizing the right of the Palestinian people for self-determination. This is why it’s important to understand this as a genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s move from Gaza to the West Bank. Can you talk about the attacks on farmers on the West Bank? What is happening on the ground? Who is responsible, Michael Fakhri?

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yeah. So, what’s also interesting is that when this particular war started in Gaza, immediately we saw an escalation of violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, and specifically against Palestinian farmers, and we saw increased violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the West Bank.

And so, what’s happened now is that the harvest season for olives has passed, and farmers were not able to harvest olives. This has several implications. So, there’s a record number of violence we’re seeing in the West Bank, more than ever in recent times. And attacking the olive trees and olive harvest is not just about olives, which are important for nutrition and for food and for making sure that the land remains fruitful in the future. The olive tree is central to Palestinian identity. It reflects and is a core aspect of the Palestinian people’s relationship to the land, to traditions, to their ancestors and to the future. And so, to attack and undermine and eliminate some olive trees is, again, attack against the Palestinian people at their core.

So, what we’re seeing — again, this is why we’re so concerned that it’s not — this is not just about the war in Gaza. This is escalated violence against Palestinian people. And you can track this when you follow food, when you follow the agriculture, when you look at fishers in Gaza, and if I might turn also to how the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, has been threatened by the lack of funding. So, because of unfounded claims by Israel, claiming that — at first they said 12, and now the number is down to nine employees, out of 30,000 employees, major donors to UNRWA have decided to end funding. This includes the United States, Germany, Canada, Japan, amongst many others — this punishes all Palestinian refugees across the board, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also in Lebanon, in Syria and Jordan. So, time and time again, what we are seeing is this increased rate of violence against all Palestinian people simply because of who they are.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Michael Fakhri, let’s just end with the global hunger crisis, which the World Food Programme has noted is of unprecedented proportions. In just two years, the number of people facing or at risk of acute food insecurity increased from 135 million before the pandemic to 345 million now.

MICHAEL FAKHRI: Yes. So, before the pandemic, we were already seeing a rise in the rates of hunger and malnutrition. This started in 2015. When the pandemic started in 2020, it immediately triggered a hunger crisis in the whole world, so rich countries, poor countries alike. All of a sudden, there was a spike in hunger. Now, when the pandemic then formally ended, what happened is the hunger crisis actually got worse. The reason is because there were temporary measures and social programs that were put in place during the pandemic to deal with the health crisis. This is things like universal school meals for children, sometimes throughout the whole year, not just the academic year; direct cash payments to people; supporting local food markets, local farmers markets. These programs were put in place as temporary measures to deal with the pandemic and the food crisis in the pandemic.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

MICHAEL FAKHRI: So, what needs to be done is to turn those temporary programs into permanent programs; otherwise, this global food crisis is only going to get worse.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Fakhri is the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food and a professor of law at the University of Oregon.

[admin]

The Intercept: New York Times Exposé Lacks Evidence to Claim Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence Oct. 7
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
March 2, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/n ... transcript

We speak with Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim of The Intercept about their exposé of a major New York Times piece into alleged mass rapes committed by Hamas militants on October 7 that raises serious questions about the accuracy of the story. The Times article was headlined “'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” and its release in late December helped the Israeli government to justify the ongoing war on Gaza and to paint pro-Palestine supporters abroad as not caring about sexual violence. One of the reporters of the Times piece, Israeli freelancer Anat Schwartz, is being investigated by the Times for her social media activity, which included dehumanizing language and endorsements of violence against Palestinians in Gaza. ”The New York Times has grave, grave mischaracterizations, sins of omission, reliance on people who have no forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here,” says Scahill, who criticizes the newspaper for not issuing any corrections for their flawed reporting. We also hear from Ryan Grim about how the flawed Times article touched off “extremely intense debate” inside the newsroom. “They’re used to external criticism, but the amount of internal criticism they’re getting has them on the back foot,” he says.

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 New York Times is reportedly conducting an internal investigation to identify the source behind leaked information about its coverage of Israel and Gaza. According to Vanity Fair, the internal investigation follows a report in The Intercept about the Times shelving an episode of its podcast The Daily over doubts regarding the accuracy of a highly controversial blockbuster New York Times article published at the end of December alleging Hamas members committed widespread sexual violence, weaponized it, on October 7th. Vanity Fair reports that in recent weeks management of The New York Times have questioned at least two dozen staffers, including producers of The Daily, the podcast, in an attempt to understand how internal details about the podcast’s editorial process got out.

Democracy Now! asked The New York Times about the internal investigation. The paper’s international editor, Phil Pan, said in a statement, quote, “We aren’t going to comment on internal matters. I can tell you that the work of our newsroom requires trust and collaboration, and we expect all of our colleagues to adhere to these values,” end-quote.

The New York Times article at the center of the controversy was published December 28th. It was headlined “'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” In it, the Times reported they had found evidence of systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas and that their two-month investigation, quote, “uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7,” unquote.

However, not long after the highly publicized article was published, major discrepancies began to emerge, including public comments from the family of a major subject of the article, contradictory claims from a key witness, and criticisms over a lack of solid evidence in the overall investigation. Then news emerged last week that one of the three authors of The New York Times piece, named Anat Schwartz, had liked multiple posts on social media advocating for violence against Palestinians, including one that called for turning Gaza into a slaughterhouse. Anat Schwartz is an Israeli filmmaker who had no prior reporting experience before she was assigned by the Times to work on the major investigation along with her relative Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman.

On Wednesday, The Intercept published another in-depth investigation that further questions the Times article and the reporting process behind it. It’s headlined “'Between the Hammer and the Anvil': The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé,” and the two Intercept reporters who wrote it join us today. Jeremy Scahill is a senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept. He’s joining us from Germany. And Ryan Grim is The Intercept’s bureau chief in Washington, D.C., where he joins us from.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Jeremy, let’s begin with you. Can you lay out first the significance of the New York Times article that’s at the center of the controversy, and then talk about your latest piece, that looks into how it all came about?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, in early December, you had the death toll skyrocketing in Gaza. You had a number of nations, including those that are allies with Israel, starting to speak out about the death toll among women, children, the elderly. And part of a pattern of what we’ve seen throughout the course of these five months of scorched-earth attacks against Gaza is that whenever Israel perceives itself to be losing the narrative war or when it needs to remind the public of its perception that Israel is the only victim in this story, they unload a new round of attacks against a variety of individuals or organizations that are working in Gaza or living in Gaza, human beings. We saw that with the attacks against UNRWA. We saw that with the attacks against Al-Shifa and other hospitals.

And in early December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government really began an intense propaganda campaign to convince the world that Hamas had engaged in a systematic campaign of rape aimed at Jewish women and girls. And then they launched this fake criticism of feminist organizations, saying that they had all systematically failed to stand up and denounce this systematic rape regime that had been intentionally implemented by Hamas in the October 7th attacks. And on the day that Netanyahu made his most prominent statement about this, President Biden was at a fundraising event in Boston, and he issued — he made a statement at his speech that echoed what Netanyahu said, and said the world, you know, can’t turn away and ignore this.

Well, what was happening at that very moment was that The New York Times, with one of its most prominent international correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman, he had recently hit the ground in Israel, and he was working — Gettleman enlisted the help of two individuals that were going to work with him there. And Gettleman had proposed three lines of investigation, and one of them was the issue of sexual violence. And the two individuals that Gettleman was working with, one of them is a very young person who’s only recently gotten into journalism, Adam Sella, and he had mostly been like a food journalist and has a background in looking at agricultural issues, etc. He had started to write some freelance pieces that were dipping into the waters of politics and the conflict, but a quite inexperienced reporter. And then, the other was someone with no reporting experience outside of making some documentary films, and that is Anat Schwartz. It’s unclear how Anat Schwartz, in particular, got involved with this project.

And as you mentioned, she had, early on in the Israeli attacks against Gaza, liked a tweet that actually was cited by the International Court of Justice as a potentially — a statement of potential genocidal incitement. She also liked the tweet from the Israeli government promoting the debunked allegation that 40 babies had been beheaded on October 7th, which is entirely false, as well as another tweet that said, “We must just refer to Hamas as ISIS.”

And so, they start off on this investigation, and our understanding from sources is that the overwhelming majority of the interviews and reporting that was being done on the ground was being handled by Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella.

And we discovered a podcast interview with Anat Schwartz in Hebrew that she gave, where she — it’s a shocking podcast in how much detail she offers about the process that they used when they were reporting it. And just to put it in a nutshell, she describes how the first thing that she did was start to call around to what she describes as all of the Israeli hospitals that have facilities that are called Room 4 facilities. These would be the intake places where people who have been victims of sexual crimes, including assault and rape, etc., where they would be examined or their cases would be referred. And she said that not a single one of them reported that they had any reports of sexual assault or rape on October 7th.

She then started calling around to a rape crisis hotline and describes how she had this, what she described as an intense conversation with the manager of the rape crisis hotline in that part of Israel, where she was dumbfounded when he was saying he didn’t have any calls reporting sexual assault or rape. And she’s saying, “How is this possible?”

And then she starts talking — she goes to a holistic therapeutic center that was established at a former high-end retreat center outside of Tel Aviv, where mostly people from the Nova rave, where there were attacks and where a couple of hundred people were killed — it was a place where people could do alternative medicine and yoga, relaxation therapy — I mean, people who were highly traumatized. And she goes there, and her characterization was that she sensed what she called a “conspiracy of silence” among the therapists, because none of them were telling her, “Yes, we’re treating people who were raped or had experienced sexual assault.”

And so, when she went through all the official channels, the places where you would reach out to see, if you’re exploring if there’s a pattern here, what then happened is she starts to look at who’s been interviewed about alleged rapes during the October 7th attacks, and ends up then going and reinterviewing a handful of people who already had made assertions that they witnessed rapes. And some of these people had told varying versions of their stories — which in and of itself does not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something. I mean, these are people that were in the midst of an incredibly violent episode. But more central to that is that some of the people that The New York Times relied on to assert that there was a systematic, intentional campaign of rape weaponized by Hamas were people that have no forensic credentials, no crime scene credentials. These were people that are not legally permitted in Israel to determine rape, that they relied on these individuals to make this claim that there was a systematic rape regime implemented.

And some of those people, Amy, have well-documented track records of promoting very incendiary narratives about atrocities that occurred on October 7th that were flagrantly false. Just two examples. One of the most prominent or ubiquitous figures that has emerged in Israel’s narrative that Hamas committed systematic rape is an architect from New Jersey named Shari Mendes, who is living in Israel now and is a member of the Israeli Defense Forces rabbinical unit. And she was deployed to prepare women’s bodies for burial in the bases where Hamas attacked military facilities. And she’s been quoted widely saying that they saw widespread evidence of rape and that she personally saw it. She described broken pelvises, not just among, you know, soldiers, but among grandmothers and children. But Shari Mendes also was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying that a pregnant woman had a fetus cut out of her body and that the fetus was beheaded and then the mother was beheaded. This is entirely false. We’ve gone through all of the official records that Israel has put out on people who died that day. There was no pregnant woman killed that day. That’s been thoroughly debunked. She also relied on Yossi Landau, a senior official at Zaka. Zaka has been — it’s an ultra-Orthodox private rescue organization. It’s been exposed by Haaretz, the newspaper in Israel, as one of the leading promoters of false information and also that they contaminated the crime scenes by moving evidence around that actual professionals could have done. They also had promoted the beheaded babies stories, etc.

So, The New York Times, they can’t find anyone who works in the rape crisis centers, at the hospitals, among therapists, that are coming forward and saying, “Yeah, we saw this,” or “We have documentation of this,” so they go to people who already were known to have promoted false information, and then they start relying on their testimony to paint this tapestry, this notion that there was a systematic rape regime. And in the New York Times article, they do not ever disclose that their key witnesses have serious credibility problems. So, this is, at a minimum, we are looking at a New York Times piece that failed to inform its readers about severe credibility issues among some of its premier “witnesses,” quote-unquote, that it put forward in this story.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to part of a podcast interview that Anat Schwartz did on January 3rd, produced by Israel’s Channel 12. It was conducted in Hebrew. Here, Anat talks about the difficulties and pressures in reporting the story.

ANAT SCHWARTZ: [translated] Maybe the standard that we have to meet may not be realistic. Maybe it won’t be this complete big story that is told from beginning to end and is complex and has details and nuances and characters. And maybe we are aiming too high. Then there was the U.N. woman and the silence, and there was a lot of preoccupation with it. So, I said, “We’re missing momentum.” Maybe the U.N. isn’t addressing sexual assault because no outlet will come out with a declaration about what happened there, and that it will no longer be interesting. And at some point, after one of the rewrites, we said, “OK, that’s it.” And then I already informed all the people in the Israeli police who are waiting to see what was going on. What? Was The New York Times not believing there were sexual assaults here? And I’m also in this place. I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for The New York Times. So, all the time, I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Anat Schwartz, speaking on a podcast on January 3rd. She said she felt “between the hammer and the anvil,” which, Jeremy, you choose as the title of your piece. Talk about the significance of that and, again, the relationship between Anat Schwartz and other reporter, the young reporter, Adam Sella.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, another part of this story is that one of the main victims that was featured in this is referred to as “the woman in the black dress.” Gal Abdush is her name. And, in fact, her family members are the individuals in the feature photo on the piece. And another thing that we’ve learned from Israeli researchers who published this is that when Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella went to a woman that had taken photographs of Gal Abdush that day, they told this photographer that it was her duty under Israeli hasbara to cooperate with The New York Times and let them have all of her photos. And ”hasbara” is the term for public diplomacy, but what it really is is the notion that Israel should engage in externally focused propaganda in order to win over international audiences, primarily Western, the United States and powerful countries, to Israel’s point of view. So, she is using this term, going and trying to encourage someone to cooperate with The New York Times, not because The New York Times is, you know, the most important news organization in the world, but because it’s their duty under Israeli hasbara. So, when she talks about being caught between the hammer and the anvil, what she’s saying is she’s caught between her duty to be honest and a journalist and her duty to serve the agenda of the Israeli state.

And her partner in this, Adam Sella, is the nephew of Anat Schwartz’s partner, and they’re not married. In fact, Amy, The New York Times, they requested a correction from us, because we had initially said that it was her nephew, which I think in the context of America and other countries you would say. If you’re somebody’s longtime life partner, you would say, “Oh, yeah, this is my nephew.” OK, they’re not blood relatives, and they emphasize that she’s not married. Fine, we corrected that.

My question is: Where are the corrections in The New York Times piece? The New York Times has grave, grave mischaracterizations, sins of omission, reliance on people who have no forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here. And to publish this article at a moment when Israel was intensifying, after that brief pause where captives were exchanged — intensifying its genocidal attack against the people of Gaza, this played a very, very significant role. And the more we learn about this, the more we discover that the reporting tactics that The New York Times used are certainly not up to the standards that the newspaper claims to be promoting. They will not issue any corrections on what has already been documented to be very problematic sins of commission and omission in this piece.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this conversation. We’re talking to Jeremy Scahill, senior reporter at The Intercept. Next up, he’ll be joined by Ryan Grim, who is the Washington bureau chief of The Intercept, and we want to talk to Ryan about what’s happening in The New York Times now in response to this story, and the leak investigation that’s going on, and why a podcast based on their story, their own podcast, The Daily, didn’t air. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “I’m from Here” by Amal Markus. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We’re speaking with Intercept reporters Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim about their exposé into The New York Times article that was published at the end of December. They published another one in January.

We asked The New York Times for a response to your article, and the international editor, Phil Pan, responded, quote, “Ms. Schwartz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process. She made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work. We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation. But as we have said, her 'likes' of offensive and opinionated social media posts, predating her work with us, are unacceptable,” end-quote.

Ryan, if you can respond to this and talk about what’s going on internally in the Times, and also talk about this leak investigation that’s going on within the paper of record?

RYAN GRIM: [inaudible] by her own admission, in that podcast interview she had, significant violence, because there are two ways to think about what happened on October 7th. The first way is that it was a day of extraordinary mayhem and violence. The Israeli defenses melted away. Not only did you have several thousand Hamas fighters stream across the fence, but you also had hundreds of civilians, some associated with gangs, come across. And in that context, the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands kind of war and violence. That’s one way to think about October 7th.

The other way to think about it is that Hamas intentionally and systematically designed a kind of strategy of weaponizing rape and sexual violence. That was what Anat Schwartz and The New York Times kind of believed going into the investigation. And oftentimes as journalists, we have something that we think we’re going to be able to prove, we report it out, and then we can’t quite get it. Like, it just — we just don’t land the story. But what the Times did is they wrote the story anyway.

But that gets you then to The Daily episode. So, this article comes out at the very end of December. As The New York Times always does, its landmark pieces get turned into episodes of their flagship podcast, The Daily. But immediately after the story came out, it started coming under criticism, because, as Jeremy pointed out, a lot of the named subjects of the story have enormous credibility problems. And so this starts getting pointed out. Inside the Times, the producers of The Daily have their own kind of fact-checking process where they go over the stories. And the original script that was produced for that first episode had to be discarded, because the producers there couldn’t stand behind it, so they redrafted a second script, which had a lot of caveats and was closer to the first version that I laid out just now, which is an interesting podcast episode, and it’s something worth exploring. But if they had aired that, it would have raised questions about why they were walking away from the certainty of the original piece.

So, we reported on the kind of machinations inside The New York Times about this, the controversy, the disputes that were going on. And since then, as Vanity Fair reported, The New York Times has — rather than reviewing the kind of journalism that went into this, they are launching a leak investigation to try to figure out who’s talking to us.

AMY GOODMAN: In February, one of the reporters behind The New York Times investigation, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, spoke at a conference on conflict-related sexual violence hosted by Columbia University. He talked about the piece.

JEFFREY GETTLEMAN: I did some stories about hostages. And pretty soon, I mean, maybe, I don’t know, within the first few days of this attack, we were hearing reports of rape and mutilations of women. We heard it right away. And I don’t — maybe people in this room remember those videos of the female soldiers being taken away and the body of that one woman, Shani Louk, in the back of a pickup truck half-naked. Right away, it just — it just — there was obviously crimes against women that happened.

So, because, sadly, I have some experience doing this, I began looking to see what we could find out. And I worked with two other colleagues, and we interviewed almost 200 people over the course of two months. And what we found, I don’t want to even use the word “evidence,” because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court. That’s not my role. We all have our roles, and my role is to document.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to get a response to what he is saying there. He’s talking, by the way, to Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Meta, Facebook. Jeremy Scahill, if you can talk about what he sees his role as a reporter?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, this is an astonishing comment from Jeffrey Gettleman. I mean, what is he talking about, that it’s not the job of journalists to uncover evidence? If you’re going to have a headline that — by the way, let me just say this. The “Screams Without Words” headline comes from a source named Raz Cohen, who was at the Nova music festival, and he claims to have witnessed a rape of a woman that he said was — and he’s a special forces, Israeli special forces, veteran, and he has been very adamant that the people who he saw committing this crime were not Hamas, that they were ordinary people. And he has said that in numerous interviews. But to have, then — and he’s the one who said it was like “screams without words.” They’re using a headline from a person whose testimony undermines the thesis of their blockbuster story. So, just to put that on the table.

But for Gettleman to say that it’s not the job of journalists to produce evidence, when you’re going to say, in the middle of a war, where civilians are being starved and killed in an operation that is under review now by the International Court of Justice for genocide — if you’re going to then make an allegation that Hamas implemented a systematic rape campaign, and you say it’s not your job to produce evidence, then what is the job of a journalist in a situation like this? Because, honestly, if you really read their piece carefully, much of it is innuendo. Much of it is based on sources who have either credibility issues or lack professional credentials to weigh in on these matters. This is a grave, grave situation. This is one of the most important pieces of journalism that has been produced during this war, and one of the most consequential. And for the lead reporter, who himself has won the Pulitzer and is an experienced war correspondent, to say that it’s not the job of The New York Times to present evidence in an article asserting that Hamas systematically raped women, it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing.

AMY GOODMAN: And also, the prestigious Gorge Polk Award for Foreign Reporting this year was awarded to the staff of The New York Times, the citation reading, in part, quote “for unsurpassed coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. Times reporters used firsthand accounts to demonstrate how brutal and well planned the Hamas attack was,” end-quote. And this article in question that we’re talking about, “'Screams Without Words,'” was apparently part of the package submitted by The New York Times that won the award. Ryan Grim, if you can talk about that and the dissent within the Times itself?

RYAN GRIM: Before I answer that, I did want to add one thing to what Jeremy was saying. It is remarkable that Sheryl Sandberg was on that panel with Jeffrey Gettleman, because on December 4th — and Jeremy talked about how this campaign was rolled out — on December 4th, Sheryl Sandberg and the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations hosted an event at the U.N. that launched the campaign against these feminist organizations for not standing up and condemning, you know, Hamas’s systematic use of rape. The next day, it was Bibi Netanyahu and then Biden who piled on that campaign. That same day, on December 4th, Sheryl Sandberg penned an op-ed in CNN. She also gave interviews or was quoted in The New York Times on that same day in an article by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. So, they were all working together on December 4th to launch this campaign.

The December 4th article in The New York Times had a much softer headline. It said, you know, “What Do We Know About the Use of Sexual Violence” or “About Sexual Violence on October 7th?” And people can go back and read that story. They reported at the time that Israel had enormous amounts of forensic evidence that they were going through that would establish all of the claims that they were making. On December 8th or 9th, they very quietly corrected that story to say, “Correction: Israel does not have forensic evidence to back up these claims. It is relying on eyewitness testimony.” Anat Schwartz had previously reported in the Times that they had, quote, “tens of thousands of eyewitnesses” that they were going to bring forward to make these claims. So, they front-loaded this campaign with these major claims that there was forensic evidence and thousands of witnesses. Then their final article comes out at the end of the month, and, to a casual reader, you would come away from reading it, saying, “Well, they proved it. They made their case. This barbaric terrorist organization did use rape systematically against Israeli women.” And that was used to justify the continuation of the war on Gaza.

But then, as you said, when The Daily tried to look closer at the article, they realized they couldn’t actually stand up the claims that were being made in it. And so, inside the Times, you have this extremely intense debate going on. And I think leaders at the Times have been surprised. They’re used to external criticism, but the amount of internal criticism they’re getting has them on the back foot.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Jeremy, we just have 30 seconds, but even the use of the term “terrorist” within The New York Times and the stepping back of one of the leading editorial directors?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of concern right now, particularly among reporters who do work on an international level, that there has been a politicization of this war internally within the newsroom that is impacting the coverage. And I think it’s pretty clear. You can see that in some of the journalism. And now The New York Times — The New York Times has —

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

JEREMY SCAHILL: — has ended up walking back the major claim that they made, and now they’re saying hedge words: It may have occurred. That’s one of the most significant things we uncovered here.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, they are the co-authors of the piece, “'Between the Hammer and the Anvil.'”

[admin]

"Between the Hammer and the Anvil": The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé
by Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, Daniel Boguslaw
The Intercept
February 28 2024, 11:04 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new ... october-7/

[x]
Graffiti marking the surprise attack by Hamas militants on a music festival and at kibbutzim near the border with Gaza, on Oct. 13, 2023, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

ANAT SCHWARTZ HAD a problem. The Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official had been assigned by the New York Times to work with her partner’s nephew Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman on an investigation into sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 that could reshape the way the world understood Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. By November, global opposition was mounting against Israel’s military campaign, which had already killed thousands of children, women, and the elderly. On her social media feed, which the Times has since said it is reviewing, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.”

“Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”

The New York Times, however, does have rules and norms. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience. Her reporting partner Gettleman explained the basics to her, Schwartz said in a podcast interview on January 3, produced by Israel’s Channel 12 and conducted in Hebrew.

Gettleman, she said, was concerned they “get at least two sources for every detail we put into the article, cross-check information. Do we have forensic evidence? Do we have visual evidence? Apart from telling our reader ‘this happened,’ what can we say? Can we tell what happened to whom?”

Schwartz said she was initially reluctant to take the assignment because she did not want to look at visual images of potential assaults and because she lacked the expertise to conduct such an investigation.

“Victims of sexual assault are women who have experienced something, and then to come and sit in front of such a woman — who am I anyway?” she said. “I have no qualifications.”

Nonetheless, she began working with Gettleman on the story, she explained in the podcast interview. Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is an international correspondent, and when he is sent to a bureau, he works with news assistants and freelancers on stories. In this case, several newsroom sources familiar with the process said, Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing.

The resulting report, published in late December, was headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was a bombshell and galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza. Inside the newsroom, the article was met with praise from editorial leaders but skepticism from other Times journalists. The paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” attempted to turn the article into an episode, but it didn’t manage to get through a fact check, as The Intercept previously reported. (In a statement received after publication, a Times spokesperson said, “No Daily episode was killed due to fact checking failures.”)

The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did.

Schwartz said as much in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. “The New York Times said, ‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’ — it was more a case of them having to convince me,” she said. Her host cut her off: “It was a proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?”

“Unequivocally. Unequivocally. Obviously. Of course,” she said. “The paper stood behind us 200 percent and gave us the time, the investment, the resources to go in-depth with this investigation as much as needed.”

Shortly after the war broke out, some editors and reporters complained that Times standards barred them from referring to Hamas as “terrorists.” The rationale from the standards department, run for 14 years by Philip Corbett, had long been that Hamas was the de facto administrator of a specific territory, rather than a stateless terror group. Deliberately killing civilians, went the argument, was not enough to label a group terrorists, as that label could apply quite broadly.

Corbett, after October 7, defended the policy in the face of pressure, newsroom sources said, but he lost. On October 19, an email went out on behalf of Executive Editor Joe Kahn saying that Corbett had asked to step back from his position. “After 14 years as the embodiment of Times standards, Phil Corbett has told us he’d like to step back a bit and let someone else take the leading role in this crucial effort,” Times leadership explained. Three newsroom sources said the move was tied to the pressure he was under to soften coverage in Israel’s favor. One of the social media posts that Schwartz liked, triggering the Times review, made the case that, for Israeli propaganda purposes, Hamas should be likened at all times to the Islamic State. A Times spokesperson told The Intercept, “Your understanding about Phil Corbett is flatly untrue.” In a statement received after publication, “Phil had asked to change roles before Joe Kahn even became executive editor in June 2022. And it had absolutely nothing to do with a dispute over coverage.”

Since the revelations regarding Schwartz’s recent social media activity, her byline has not appeared in the paper and she has not attended editorial meetings. The paper said that a review into her social media “likes” is ongoing. “Those ‘likes’’ are unacceptable violations of our company policy,” said a Times spokesperson.

The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to have exposed.

Another frustrated Times reporter who has also worked as an editor there said, “A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision making that undermines all the other great work being tirelessly done across the paper — both related and completely unrelated to the war — that manages to challenge our readers and meet our standards.”

“A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision.”

The Channel 12 podcast interview with Schwartz, which The Intercept translated from Hebrew, opens a window into the reporting process on the controversial story and suggests that The New York Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined narrative.

In a response to The Intercept’s questions about Schwartz’s podcast interview, a spokesperson for the New York Times walked back the blockbuster article’s framing that evidence shows Hamas had weaponized sexual violence to a softer claim that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.”

Times International editor Phil Pan said in a statement that he stands by the work. “Ms. Schwartz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process,” he said. “She made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work. We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation. But as we have said, her ‘likes’ of offensive and opinionated social media posts, predating her work with us, are unacceptable.”

After this story was published, Schwartz, who did not respond to a request for comment, tweeted to thank the Times for “standing behind the important stories we have published.” She added, “The recent attacks against me will not deter me from continuing my work.” Addressing her social media activity, Schwartz said, “I understand why people who do not know me were offended by the inadvertent ‘like’ I pressed on 10/7 and I apologize for that.” At least three of her “likes” have been the subject of public scrutiny.

In the podcast interview, Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. “She was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,” the Times spokesperson acknowledged after The Intercept brought the Channel 12 podcast episode to the paper’s attention. “This however was just the very first step of her research. She then describes the unfolding of evidence, testimonies, and eventual evidence that there may have been systematic use of sexual assault,” the spokesperson asserted. “She details her research steps and emphasizes the Times’s strict standards to corroborate evidence, and meetings with reporters and editors to discuss probing questions and think critically about the story.”

The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a “second wave,” contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details “establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” — a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war.

SCHWARTZ BEGAN HER work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trash can has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.

After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.”She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets, which she says convinced her there was a systematic nature to the sexual violence. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.

Schwartz said she then began a series of extensive conversations with Israeli officials from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of October 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies and cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body. Its workers are not trained forensic scientists or crime scene experts. “When we go into a house, we use our imagination,” said Yossi Landau, a senior Zaka official, describing the group’s work at the October 7 attack sites. “The bodies were telling us what happened, that’s what happened.” Landau is featured in the Times report, though no mention is made of his well-documented track record of disseminating sensational stories of atrocities that were later proven false. Schwartz said that in her initial interviews, Zaka members did not make any specific allegations of rape, but described the general condition of bodies they said they saw. “They told me, ‘Yes, we saw naked women,’ or ‘We saw a woman without underwear.’ Both naked without underwear, and tied with zip ties. And sometimes not zip ties, sometimes a rope or a string of a hoodie.”

Schwartz continued to look for evidence at various sites of attack and found no witnesses to corroborate stories of rape. “And so I searched a lot in the kibbutzim, and apart from this testimony of [the Israeli military paramedic] and additionally, here and there, Zaka people — the stories, like, didn’t emerge from there,” she said.

As she continued to work the phones with rescue officials, Schwartz then saw interviews that international news channels began airing with Shari Mendes, an American architect who serves in a rabbinical unit of the Israel Defense Forces. Mendes, who was deployed to a morgue to prepare bodies for burial after the October 7 attacks, claimed to have seen voluminous evidence of sexual assaults.

“We saw evidence of rape,” Mendes stated in one interview. “Pelvises were broken, and it probably takes a lot to break a pelvis … and this was also among grandmothers down to small children. This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.” Mendes has been a ubiquitous figure in the Israeli government and major media narratives on sexual violence on October 7, despite the fact that she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape. She had also spoken about other violence on October 7, telling the Daily Mail in October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” No pregnant woman died that day, according to the official Israeli list of those killed in the attacks, and the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check said Mendes’s story was false.

“I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that’s just because I’m leading toward that.”

After Schwartz saw interviews with Mendes, she was further convinced that the systematic rape narrative was true. “I’m like — wow, what is this?” she recalled. “And it feels to me like it’s starting to approach a plurality, even if you don’t know which numbers to put on it yet.”

At the same time, Schwartz said that she felt conflicted at times, wondering if she was becoming convinced of the truth of the overarching story precisely because she was looking for evidence to support the claim. “I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that’s just because I’m leading toward that,” she said. She pushed those doubts aside. By the time Schwartz interviewed Mendes, the IDF reservist’s story had ricocheted around the world and been conclusively debunked: No baby was cut from a mother and beheaded. Yet Schwartz and the New York Times would go on to rely on Mendes’s testimony, as well as those of other witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials. No mention was made of questions about Mendes’s credibility.

HOW SCHWARTZ LANDED in such an extraordinary position at a crucial moment in the war is not entirely clear. Prior to joining the Times as a stringer last fall, Sella was a freelance journalist covering stories on issues ranging from “food, photography, and culture to peace efforts, economics, and the occupation,” according to his LinkedIn profile. Sella’s first collaboration with Gettleman, published on October 14, was a look at the trauma experienced by students at a university in southern Israel. For Schwartz, her first byline landed on November 14.

“Israeli police officials shared more evidence on Tuesday of atrocities committed during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, saying they had collected testimonies from more than a thousand witnesses and survivors about sexual violence and other abuses,” Schwartz reported. The story went on to quote Israel’s police chief, Kobi Shabtai, explaining a litany of evidence of gruesome killings and sexual assaults on October 7.

“This is the most extensive investigation the State of Israel has ever known,” Shabtai said in the Schwartz article, promising ample evidence would soon be provided.

When the Times later produced its definitive “Screams Without Words” investigation, however, Schwartz and her partners reported that, contrary to Shabtai’s claim, forensic evidence of sexual violence was non-existent. Without acknowledging the past statements by Shabtai in the Times, the paper reported that quick funerals in accordance with Jewish tradition meant evidence was not preserved. Experts told the Times that sexual violence in wars often leaves “limited forensic evidence.”

On the podcast, Schwartz said her next step was to go to a new holistic therapy facility established to address the trauma of October 7 victims, particularly those who endured the carnage at the Nova music festival. Opened a week after the attacks, the facility began welcoming hundreds of survivors where they could seek counseling, do yoga, and receive alternative medicine, as well as acupuncture, sound healing, and reflexology treatments. They called it Merhav Marpe, or Healing Space.

In multiple visits to Merhav Marpe, Schwartz again said in the podcast interview that she found no direct evidence of rapes or sexual violence. She expressed frustration with the therapists and counselors at the facility, saying they engaged in “a conspiracy of silence.” “Everyone, even those who heard these kinds of things from people, they felt very committed to their patients, or even just to people who assisted their patients, not to reveal things,” she said.

In the end, Schwartz came away with only innuendo and general statements from the therapists about how people process trauma, including sexual violence and rape. She said potential victims might be ashamed to speak out, experiencing survivors’ guilt, or were still in shock. “Perhaps also because Israeli society is conservative, there was some inclination to keep silent about this issue of sexual abuse,” Schwartz speculated. “On top of this, there is probably the added dimension of the religious-national aspect, that this was done by a terrorist, by someone from Hamas,” she added. “There were lots and lots of layers that made it so that they didn’t speak.”

According to the published Times article, “Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.”

Schwartz said she had focused on the kibbutzim because she had initially determined it was unlikely sexual assaults had occurred at the Nova music festival. “I was very skeptical that it happened at the area of the party, because everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place,” she recalled. “How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like — it is impossible. Either you hide, or you — or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”

SCHWARTZ WATCHED INTERVIEWS given to international media outlets by Raz Cohen, who attended the Nova festival. A veteran of Israel’s special forces, Cohen did multiple interviews about a rape he claimed to have witnessed. A few days after the attacks, he told PBS NewsHour that he had witnessed multiple rapes. “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that,” he said. At an appearance on CNN on January 4, he described seeing one rape and said the assailants were “five guys — five civilians from Gaza, normal guys, not soldiers, not Nukhba,” referring to Hamas’s elite commando force. “It was regular people from Gaza with normal clothes.”

In Cohen’s interview with Schwartz for the Times:

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

‘They all gather around her,’ Mr. Cohen said. ‘She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

It was this interview that gave the Times its title: “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” That Cohen had described alleged assailants as not being members of Hamas undermines the headline, but it remains unchanged. The Times did not address Cohen’s earlier claims that he witnessed multiple rapes.

Schwartz said in the podcast interview that, since the Times insisted on at least two sources, she asked Cohen to give her the contact information of the other people he was hiding with in the bush, so she could corroborate his story of the rape. She recalled, “Raz hides. In the bush next to him lies his friend Shoam. They get to this bush. There are two other people on the other side looking to the other direction, and another, fifth, person. Five people in the same bush. Only Raz sees all the things he sees, everyone else is looking in a different direction.”

Despite saying on the podcast that only Cohen witnessed the event and the others were looking in different directions, in the Times story Shoam Gueta is presented as a corroborating witness to the rape: “He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up ‘between their legs.’ He said that they were ‘talking, giggling and shouting,’ and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, ‘literally butchering her.’” Gueta did not mention witnessing a rape in an interview he did with NBC News on October 8, a day after the attack, but he did describe seeing a woman murdered with a knife. “We saw terrorists killing people, burning cars, shouting everywhere,” Gueta told NBC. “If you just say something, if you make any noise, you’ll be murdered.” Gueta subsequently deployed to Gaza with the IDF and has posted many videos on TikTok of himself rummaging through Palestinian homes. Cohen and Gueta did not respond to requests for comment.

The independent site October 7 Fact Check, Mondoweiss, and journalists Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone have flagged numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the stories told in the Times report, including the account of Cohen, who had initially said “he chose not to look, but he could hear them laughing constantly.”

Under pressure internally to defend the veracity of the story, the Times reassigned Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella to effectively re-report the story, resulting in an article published on January 29. Cohen declined to speak to them, they reported: “Asked this month why he had not mentioned rape at first, Mr. Cohen cited the stress of his experience, and said in a text message that he had not realized then that he was one of the few surviving witnesses. He declined to be interviewed again, saying he was working to recover from the trauma he suffered.”

In addition to Cohen’s testimony, Schwartz said on the Channel 12 podcast that she also watched video of an interrogation of a Palestinian prisoner taken by the IDF whom she said described “girls” being dragged by Palestinian attackers into the woods near the Nova festival. She was also moved, she said, by a clip of an interview she watched in November at a press conference hosted by Israeli officials, the one that became the focus of her first Times article.

An accountant named Sapir described a lurid scene of rape and mutilation, and Schwartz said she became fully convinced there was a systematic program of sexual violence by Hamas. “Her testimony is crazy, and hair-raising, and huge, and barbaric,” Schwartz said. “And it’s not just rape — it’s rape, and amputation, and … and I realize it’s a bigger story than I imagined, [with] many locations, and then the picture starts to emerge, What is going on here?”

The Times report states they interviewed Sapir for two hours at a cafe in southern Israel, and she described witnessing multiple rapes, including an incident where one attacker rapes a woman as another cuts off her breast with a box cutter.

At the press conference in November, Israeli authorities said they were collecting and examining forensic materials that would confirm Sapir’s specifically detailed accounts. “Police say they are still gathering evidence (DNA etc) from rape victims in addition to eyewitnesses to build the strongest case possible,” said a correspondent who covered the press event. Such a scene would produce significant amounts of physical evidence, yet Israeli officials have, to date, been unable to provide it. “I have circumstantial evidence, but in the end, it’s my duty to find supporting evidence for her story and discover the victims’ identities,” said Superintendent Adi Edri, the Israeli official leading the investigation into sexual violence on October 7, a week after the Times report went online. “At this stage, I have no specific bodies.”

In the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz is asked if firsthand testimonies of women who survived rape on October 7 exist. “I can’t really speak about this, but the vast majority of women who have been sexually assaulted on October 7 were shot immediately after, and that’s [where] the big numbers [are],” she replied. “The majority are corpses. Some women managed to escape and survive.” She added, “I do know that there is a very significant element of dissociation when it comes to sexual assault. So a lot of times they don’t remember. They don’t remember everything. They remember fragments of the events, and they can’t always describe how they ended up on the road and [how they were] rescued.”

In early December, Israeli officials launched an intensive public campaign, accusing the international community and specifically feminist leaders of standing silent in the face of the widespread, systemic sexual violence of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The PR effort was rolled out at the United Nations on December 4, with an event hosted by the Israeli ambassador and the former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. The feminist organizations targeted by the pro-Israel figures were caught flat-footed, as charges of sexual violence had not yet circulated widely.

Sandberg was also quoted attacking women’s rights organizations in a December 4 New York Times article, headlined “What We Know About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks on Israel” and whose publication coincided with the launch of the PR campaign at the U.N. The article, also reported by Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella, relied on claims made by Israeli officials and acknowledged the Times had not yet been able to corroborate the allegations. A revealing correction was subsequently appended to the story: “An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of evidence Israeli police have gathered in investigating accusations of sexual violence committed on Oct. 7 in the attack by Hamas against Israel. The police are relying mainly on witness testimony, not on autopsies or forensic evidence.”

Israel promised it had extraordinary amounts of eyewitness testimony. “Investigators have gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli police, including at the site of a music festival that was attacked,” Schwartz, Gettleman, and Stella reported on December 4. Those testimonies never materialized.

“I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times. So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hammered on the theme in a December 5 speech in Tel Aviv. “I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?” The same day, President Joe Biden gave a speech in which he said, “The world can’t just look away — what’s going on. It’s on all of us — the government, international organizations, civil society, individual citizens — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation — without equivocation, without exception.”

The two-month-long Times investigation was still being edited and revised, Schwartz said in the podcast, when she started to feel concerned about the timing. “So I said, ‘We’re missing momentum. Maybe the U.N. isn’t addressing sexual assault because no [media outlet] will come out with a declaration about what happened there.’” If the Times story doesn’t publish soon, she said, “it may no longer be interesting.” Schwartz said the delay was explained to her internally as, “We don’t want to make people sad before Christmas.”

She also said that Israeli police sources were pressuring her to move quickly to publish. She said they asked her, “What, does the New York Times not believe there were sexual assaults here?” Schwartz felt like she was in the middle.

“I’m also in this place, I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times,” she said. “So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.”

THE DECEMBER 28 article “Screams Without Words” opened with the story of Gal Abdush, described by the Times as “the woman in the black dress.” Video of her charred body appeared to show her bottomless. “Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped,” the Times reported. The article labeled Abdush “a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7 attacks.” The Times report mentions WhatsApp messages from Abdush and her husband to their family, but doesn’t mention that some family members believe that the crucial messages make the Israeli officials’ claims implausible. As Mondoweiss later reported, Abdush texted the family at 6:51 a.m., saying they were in trouble at the border. At 7:00, her husband messaged to say she’d been killed. Her family said the charring came from a grenade.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Abdush’s sister, that in a short timespan “they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?” Speaking about the rape allegation, her brother-in-law said: “The media invented it.”

Another relative suggested the family was pressured, under false pretenses, to speak with the reporters. Abdush’s sister wrote on Instagram that the Times reporters “mentioned they want to write a report in memory of Gal, and that’s it. If we knew that the title would be about rape and butchery, we’d never accept that.” In its follow-up story, the Times sought to discredit her initial comment, quoting Abdush’s sister as saying she “had been ‘confused about what happened’ and was trying to ‘protect my sister.’”

The woman who filmed Abdush on October 7 told the Israeli site YNet that Schwartz and Sella had pressured her into giving the paper access to her photos and videos for the purposes of serving Israeli propaganda. “They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” she recalled, using the term for public diplomacy, which in practice refers to Israeli propaganda efforts directed at international audiences.

At every turn, when the New York Times reporters ran into obstacles confirming tips, they turned to anonymous Israeli officials or witnesses who’d already been interviewed repeatedly in the press. Months after setting off on their assignment, the reporters found themselves exactly where they had begun, relying overwhelmingly on the word of Israeli officials, soldiers, and Zaka workers to substantiate their claim that more than 30 bodies of women and girls were discovered with signs of sexual abuse. On the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz said the last remaining piece she needed for the story was a solid number from the Israeli authorities about any possible survivors of sexual violence. “We have four and we can stand behind that number,” she said she was told by the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. No details were provided. The Times story ultimately reported there were “at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived.”

When the story was finally published on December 28 Schwartz described the flood of emotions and reactions online and in Israel. “First of all, in the paper, we gave it a very, very prominent place, which is, apropos all my fears — there is no greater show of confidence than being put on the front page,” she said. “In Israel, the reactions are amazing. Here I think I was given closure, seeing that all the media treat the article and treat it as something of [a] thank you for putting a number on it. Thank you for saying there were many cases, that it was a pattern. Thank you for giving it a title which suggests that maybe there is some organizing logic behind it, that this is not some isolated act of some person acting on his own initiative.”

Times staffers who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal described the “Screams Without Words” article as the product of the same mistakes that led to the disastrous editor’s note and retraction on Rukmini Callimachi’s podcast “Caliphate” and print series on the Islamic State group. Kahn, the current executive editor, was widely known as a promoter and protector of Callimachi. The reporting, which the Times determined in an internal review was not subjected to sufficient scrutiny by top editors and fell short of the paper’s standards on ensuring accuracy, had been a finalist for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize. That honor, along with other prestigious awards, was rescinded in the wake of the scandal.

Margaret Sullivan, the last public editor for the New York Times to serve a full term before the paper discarded the position in 2017, said that she hopes such an investigation will be launched into the “Screams Without Words” story. “I sometimes joke ‘it’s another good day not to be the New York Times public editor’ but the organization could *really* use one right now to investigate on behalf of the readers,” she wrote.

At some story meetings, Schwartz said on the Channel 12 podcast, editors with Middle East expertise were there to offer probing questions. “We had a weekly meeting, and you bring out the status of your work on your project,” she said. “And Times writers and editors who are concerned with Middle Eastern affairs coming from all kinds of places in the world, they ask you questions that challenge you, and it’s excellent that they do that, because you yourself, all the time, like — you don’t believe yourself for a moment.”

Those questions were challenging to answer, she said: “One of the questions you get asked — and it’s the hardest ones to not be able to answer — if this has happened in so many places, how can it be that there is no forensic evidence? How can it be that there is no documentation? How can it be that there are no records? A report? An Excel spreadsheet? You are telling me about Shari [Mendes]? That’s someone who saw with her own eyes, and is now speaking to you — is there no [written] report to make what she’s saying authoritative?”

The host interjected. “And you went at that stage to those official Israeli authorities, and asked that they give you — something, anything. And how did they respond?”

“‘There is nothing,’” Schwartz said she was told. “‘There was no collection of evidence from the scene.’”

But broadly, she said, the editors were fully behind the project. “There was no skepticism on their part, ever,” she claimed. “It still doesn’t mean I had [the story], because I didn’t have a ‘second source’ for many things.”

A Times spokesperson pointed to this portion of the interview as evidence of the paper’s rigorous process: “We have reviewed the wider transcript and it’s clear you’re persisting in taking quotes out of context. In the portion of the interview you refer to, Anat describes being encouraged by editors to corroborate evidence and sources before we’d publish the investigation. Later, she discusses regular meetings with editors where they would ask ‘hard’ and ‘challenging’ questions, and the time it took to undertake the second and third stages of sourcing. This is all part of a rigorous reporting process and one which we continue to stand behind.”

In her interview with the Channel 12 podcast, Schwartz said she began working with Gettleman soon after October 7. “My job was to help him. He had all kinds of thoughts about things, about articles he wanted to do,” she recalled. “On the first day, there were already three things on [his] lineup, and then I saw that at number three was ‘Sexual Violence.’” Schwartz said that in the initial aftermath of the October 7 attacks, there was not much focus on sexual assaults, but by the time she began working for Gettleman, rumors began spreading that such acts had taken place, most of it based on the commentary of Zaka workers and IDF officials and soldiers.

After the article was published, Gettleman was invited to speak on a panel about sexual violence at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His efforts were lauded by the panel and its host, Sandberg, the former Facebook executive. Instead of doubling down on reporting that helped win the New York Times a prestigious Polk Award, Gettleman dismissed the need for reporters to provide “evidence.”

“What we found — I don’t want to even use the word ‘evidence,’ because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court,” Gettleman told Sandberg. “That’s not my role. We all have our roles. And my role is to document, is to present information, is to give people a voice. And we found information along the entire chain of violence, so of sexual violence.”

Gettleman said his mission was to move people. “It’s really difficult to get this information and then to shape it,” he said. “That’s our job as journalists: to get the information and to share the story in a way that makes people care. Not just to inform, but to move people. And that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time.”[/u]

One Times reporter said colleagues are wondering what a balanced approach might look like: “I am waiting to see if the paper will report in depth, deploying the same kind of resources and means, on the United Nations’ report that documented the horrors committed against Palestinian women.”

Update: February 29, 2024
This story has been updated to include comments tweeted after publication by Anat Schwartz. This story has also been updated to include a statement from the Times, received after publication, that standards editor Phil Corbett planned to leave as of June 2022 and regarding an episode of “The Daily” that never aired.

Correction: February 29, 2024
This story has been corrected to remove an errant reference to unnamed experts in a New York Times article; the Times named one expert. A reference to guests at a Times editorial meeting, made due to a translation error, has been removed; the attendees were editors. This story has been corrected to reflect that Adam Sella is the nephew of Anat Schwartz’s partner, not Schwartz.


CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Jeremy Scahill
[email protected]
@jeremyscahill
on X

Ryan Grim
[email protected]
@ryangrim
on X

Daniel Boguslaw
[email protected]
@DRBoguslaw
on X

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Report from Rafah: U.S. Airdrops Food to Gaza While Arming Israel to Drop Bombs
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
March 4, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/4/g ... transcript

The death toll from Israel’s assault on Gaza has surpassed 30,000 as health officials say at least 16 Palestinian children have died in recent days from starvation and dehydration. UNICEF is warning the number of child deaths will likely “rapidly increase” unless the war ends. As Palestinians desperately seek aid being withheld by Israel, officials have accused Israeli forces of attacking crowds gathered to retrieve the little humanitarian supplies entering the besieged territory. Live from Rafah, Gaza-based journalist Akram al-Satarri shares his brother’s account of surviving an Israeli attack while attempting to secure food for his kids. “It looks like the objective is to continue the starvation of the people of Gaza and to kill them when they dare to think that they can secure something to feed their children,” says al-Satarri, who reports that U.S. airdrops of aid are doing little to relieve the suffering of millions in Gaza while U.S. military aid supports Israeli attacks. “In one hand, they are providing people with food, and in the other hand, they are providing people with death.”

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where Palestinian health officials say at least 16 children have died in recent days from starvation and dehydration as Israel’s assault continues. UNICEF warns the number of child deaths will likely “rapidly increase” unless the war ends.

Palestinians in Rafah searched Sunday under the rubble of a family home hit by an Israeli airstrike the night before that killed as many as 14 people, including a father and twin babies born in the last few months.

PALESTINIAN WOMAN: [translated] We want the United States to get away from us. We don’t want anything from them. We don’t want anything from the United States. They are lying and conspiring against us. God is my suffice and the best deputy.

AMY GOODMAN: Here in the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris Sunday called for a ceasefire in Gaza. She made the comments in a speech in Selma, Alabama, marking the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire, for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table. This will get the hostages out and get a significant amount of aid in. This would allow us to build something more enduring to ensure Israel is secure and to respect the right of the Palestinian people to dignity, freedom and self-determination. Hamas claims it wants a ceasefire. Well, there is a deal on the table. And as we have said, Hamas needs to agree to that deal. Let’s get a ceasefire. Let’s reunite the hostages with their families. And let’s provide immediate relief to the people of Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Vice President Harris spoke three days after the United States blocked a U.N. Security Council statement condemning Israel after Israeli soldiers opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza City, in a massacre that left at least 118 people dead. On Sunday, officials in Gaza accused Israeli forces of killing and wounding dozens more aid seekers who had gathered at the Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City. Facing growing international criticism, President Biden Friday announced the United States would begin airdropping food aid into Gaza.

Negotiations for a temporary ceasefire faced another setback Sunday when Israel boycotted talks in Cairo after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accused Hamas of failing to provide a list of all living Israeli hostages.

Meanwhile, Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz is in the U.S. for what’s being described as an unauthorized trip to hold talks with Vice President Harris, Tony Blinken and other top officials. Gantz is seen as a rival to Netanyahu, who reportedly lashed out at Gantz for making the trip without his approval.

All of this comes as the official death toll in Gaza has topped 30,500.

For more, we go to Rafah for an update from Akram al-Satarri, the Gaza-based journalist.

Akram, your brother was at the aid convoy when Israeli soldiers opened fire. What did he explain to you happened, what’s being now called the flour massacre, for the flour that people were coming to get to make bread?

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Good morning, Amy.

Yes, indeed, my brother was one of the people who were targeted by the Israeli tanks and artillery fire in that area of al-Rashid Street, particularly al-Nabulsi roundabout, when they were trying to seek food for their children. To start with, it is the very personal story of my brother in mind, who was in direct contact with me, seeking to secure any help whatsoever for his children. He was taking that unsafe trip towards al-Nabulsi roundabout. He was waiting there. He was waiting from 3:00 in the afternoon. He was hoping that he would get at least some wheat flour for his children, because they have not eaten bread for around 25 days or even more than 25 days. He saw many people there coming from the Gaza north, as well, in the hope that they can secure some food for their children.

All of a sudden, the bombardment started — not the bombardment; rather, the tanks’ gunfire started. And, of course, the tanks are using 1.5-millimeter caliber guns, and those guns are very lethal. They can split a person into two halves. The fire started. The tanks never stopped shooting at them. And the observation that was — the observation that was made by the people who were there, including my brother, that the number of the tanks that were present in that particular time was [inaudible], in the sense that in the last few days they knew tanks were like there, but not in the large number that was in that particular day. The fire started. The fire never stopped. People were shot. People were falling on the ground. People were running. And some of the wounded people were grabbing the legs of the other people, asking them to save and help them. The ones even whose legs were pulled were shot, as well, and were killed. So, people were crawling. My brother told me that he was crawling for around 1.5 kilometers, from this al-Nabulsi roundabout up to al-Shalihat roundabout, which is an area that is around 1 kilometer or 1.2 kilometers far away from the area that they were in. The firing never stopped.

And to him, it looked like that was preplanned and that the massacre that was planned, according to the description of my brother and any other people, was intentional. And the firing never stopped 'til that very large number of people were killed. And a very large number of people also was injured. Some of them are dying every day. And this specific incident was replicated the day after this massacre took place and the day, three days or even four days after that. So it looks like this is a policy that is followed by the Israeli occupation army, and it looks like the objective is to continue the starvation of the people of Gaza and to kill them when they dare to think that they can secure something to feed their children. So they were killed when they're trying to get the wheat flour. They were killed while they were seeking life.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the Israeli military says it started a preliminary review and that Israeli forces did not attack the convoy, but that most of the fatalities were caused by a stampede. At the same time, the director of the Al-Awda Hospital told the United Nations some 80% of the wounded brought into the hospital had been shot. If you could respond further, Akram?

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Well, according to the preliminary diagnoses of the hospital and of the people who were there, most of the people who were there were suffering from upper body parts injuries, which is indicative of the gun that was used, of the fire that was used against them. Some were hit also by shrapnel because of the — by artillery fire that was hit at them.

Of course, if I were Israel or if I were the occupation, I would tell the world that I have already started a preliminary investigation, and they might also [inaudible] came from us, and shoot the Palestinians, who were not using any arms and who were seeking to feed their children. That’s typical. That’s normal. This is the Israeli habit. They will say — because they targeted the Baptist Hospital, and they also said that was not them, that was an Islamic Jihad rocket, missile, that hit the people and killed around 600 people. That’s normal.

But the issue now, if the international community is failing to compel Israel to conduct a scrutiny into the things that happened, I think the international community failed before and is still failing to stop the ongoing atrocities and is helping somehow. When they are condoning the ongoing bombardment, they are failing to do justice for the people of Palestine, and they are failing to observe the international humanitarian law coordinates — the international humanitarian law dictates, that asks the government to take whatever precautions are needed to protect the civilian population, civilian population that is living in Gaza, extremely difficult conditions [inaudible] food [inaudible]. They were not [inaudible] in a fire exchange. They were seeking food for their families and for their children and for themselves, and they ended up being killed.

So, Israel will deny. And I wouldn’t be surprised also if Israel said that they were killed by other Palestinians. That is a scenario, I think, that is extremely acceptable for Israel. And Israel allies would buy anything from Israel. So, no need. The ones who were killed are just Palestinians, Palestinians who were treated as second-grade humans, who are still besieged, who are still starving, who are still killed, who are still displaced for around second or six or seven or eight times, and who are expecting more of the misery and the death and displacement.

So, the international community is failing, and I don’t think the Palestinians trust any statements made by the Israeli army about any preliminary investigation, because there were many preliminary investigations to be done, but they were never done, and there was many justice that is expected to be done for the Palestinians but was not done.

AMY GOODMAN: Akram, if you can comment on the United States working with the Jordanian Air Force, dropping 38,000 ready-to-eat meals, largely on the beach in Gaza? If you can respond to — we just played clips of mass protest, that there was protest around the world, but one person in Washington, D.C., commented on the fact that while the U.S. is providing, is dropping this food, they should stop providing Israel with the bombs they drop on Palestinians.

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: The clear analysis of this situation when it comes to the cause-and-effect relationship between Israel and the misery that the Palestinians have been living, the United States and the misery that Palestinians have been living, three C-103 planes were dropping food on the Palestinians, while countless number of F-16s, F-15s, F-22s and F-35s, also with the most advanced technology and with the ammunition that are provided by the United States to the Israel — so, in one hand, they are providing people with food, and in the other hand, they are providing people with death, taking their lives.

I think the United States should be reconsidering its position when it comes to providing Israel with killing ammunitions and thinking that they are providing people in Gaza with around 35,000 or 36,000 meals that are ready to eat. The Palestinians might not be able to eat them. And some of the airdropped assistance that was dropped in Gaza went to the sea. And one of the people that I was talking to, he was joking and mocking the whole situation we are living in. He was saying the fish is very grateful for the American administration because they dropped the food that was sent to Gaza to the fish in the Gaza Sea. And I think a president that is dropping the aid for the Ukrainians while the Gaza is the target is, in a way — needs to reconsider everything about that, and they need to make sure that they provide unhindered access through the recognized crossings of Gaza for the people who are displaced, in the Gaza south and in the Gaza north. So, somehow, it’s — Palestinians find it ridiculous. Palestinians find it a way that needs to be reviewed and changed.

AMY GOODMAN: What word are you getting of ceasefire negotiations? And also, what is happening on the ground where you are, in Rafah, right now? Al Jazeera reporting at least 11 were killed, 50 wounded, after an Israeli air attack on a tent housing displaced people next to an entrance to a hospital in Rafah city, not far from where you are standing.

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Well, the negotiations are still underway. It looks like Israel has some demands to make. Some of them were not agreed upon in the past, but now they are coming up with them. Palestinians don’t have high expectations when it comes to the negotiation.

Palestinians are extremely busy now trying to survive because of the expansion of the ground operation. In Khan Younis area, they have already targeted — the Israeli occupation targeted Hamad City area and also the al-Qarara area, which is an expansion of the ground operation that has been already starting in Khan Younis for the last — have been already rolling in Khan Younis for the last three months. The Israeli occupation forces targeted a tent by a hospital in the Rafah west area, and they also targeted a home. The number of people who were killed in Rafah for the last 24 hours is more than 50 people in different incidents taking place in different parts of Rafah.

So, the misery is continuous, and the bombardment is continuous. And the number of Palestinians who are killed because of that and the number of people who are displaced because of that is increasing, I would say, by the second, not by the minute.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has the negotiating team boycotting the negotiations now in — the ceasefire negotiations in Cairo, because he says Hamas has refused, as part of the deal, to provide the list of living hostages. Your thoughts on this and where these negotiations stand?

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: As a matter of fact, that — I’ve been following the news about this from the Israeli media sources and from the Palestinian media sources, as well. That specific request was not made by the Israeli security forces, security agencies in the past. Now Netanyahu is inventing something new for the sake of just continuing the delay.

It looks like this delay is taking place for some purely political reasons where Netanyahu is interested in prolonging the war. They have disputes. They have issues. One of the top leaders is now in the U.S.A. Netanyahu is busy calling Blinken and calling other people, telling them that it is an unauthorized trip. It looks like there is something that is internally happening in the Israeli political arena that Netanyahu wants to stop and prevent from happening. And that’s why everything that he wants to do eventually reflects on the Palestinians, now more killing, more displacement, now refusing the request to provide some names — now asking to provide some names.

So, I think we will see a great deal of procrastination like the one that we have been seeing for the past few months. Netanyahu is interested in his personal safety when it comes to his political career, political life, and I think that’s why even the Israeli security forces, that are not being able to end this military confrontation with the Palestinian factions in Gaza, are now trying to, through the political means, to come to, I would say, honorable end for this, but they are failing to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about Benny Gantz being in Washington now to meet with today Kamala Harris, Tony Blinken — she’ll be meeting with — and other officials. I wanted to, finally, ask you about the issue of famine, about the number of children who are dying of hunger and dehydration, and how the Palestinians are dealing with this at this point.

AKRAM AL-SATARRI: Well, according to the statistics that were released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, around 1 million Palestinians have developed some diseases of any kind, be them some diseases that have to do with the digestive system, with the respiratory system, with the upper respiratory system, which is indicative of the quality of life, where quality of life has reached in Gaza, and what is the situation of the public health. When you don’t have water desalination plants, when you destroy the water purification systems, when you destroy the solar panels that are on top of the houses of the people, when you destroy the heavy vehicles that are used by the municipalities to remove the waste, when you are destroying everything that has to do with the life of the Palestinians, this result is normal and is projected, and it will continue to deteriorate.

Now, with the children, 18 children have died in northern Gaza. More children are dying in southern Gaza. People cannot get decent food for their children. When people are drinking the water, the water is polluted, and it causes them some serious public health issues. And now the children are the most vulnerable people within the community. We have 1 million child in Gaza, 1 million child that do not have appropriate shelter, do not have appropriate feeding systems. They don’t have appropriate water systems, and they end up consuming water that is polluted, food that is polluted. They end up exposed. The twins that were killed yesterday, they were just twins. They were children. They were killed with their father. So they were deprived from the right to live, and they are still deprived from the right to access decent water, shelter and food supplies. So this is the situation in Gaza as it is. It is an ongoing suffering because of the fact that the Israeli occupation denied them the right to be treated as humans. This is the whole issue.

AMY GOODMAN: Akram al-Satarri, we want to thank you so much for being with us, a Gaza-based journalist, speaking to us today from Rafah. Please be safe.

[admin]

The DESPERATE Calls From Hostages Before Israeli Troops Killed Them
by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian
Young Turks
Mar 5, 2024

Alon Shamriz and Yotam Haim can be heard crying out for help days before IDF soldiers killed them. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.



Transcript

new audio from a December IDF operation
in the Gaza Strip captured Israeli
hostages literally begging for help just
days before Israeli forces had mistook
them uh for Hamas Fighters and
tragically and fatally shot them now in
the recording that was released by
Israel's con news on Sunday 26-year-old
Alan samri shamri uh and 28-year-old
yotam Heim uh who being held hostage by
Hamas along with a 22-year-old by the
name of uh Samir Talala uh can be heard
shouting in an attempt to alert the IDF
soldiers to their presence so this story
is just so tragic and now we have you
know some audio as a result of a k9 uh
that the IDF was using the K9 had a
GoPro attached to it and uh they speak
in Hebrew but we'll tell you what
they're yelling out after you hear uh
this recording
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
so the words the men are shouting in
between the gunfire uh reads as follows
uh so We're translating here and it
might not be perfect but they're saying
Help uh we are by the stairs under the
stairs under the stairs please help
hostages and then they say their names
help so they identified themselves and
they're hoping that the IDF soldiers
will come in and help them but the IDF
soldiers were under the impression that
they were really Hamas militants uh
seeking to trick them and they as a
result uh did not end up saving them
they actually did the opposite the most
damning part of this whole incident is
that soldiers had heard shouting of help
and hostages in Hebrew from the building
but they believed it was an attempt by
Hamas to lure them into an ambush
according to an IDF probe they found
signs left by hostages trying to get
soldiers attention also dismissed as
part of a ploy now they heard the
hostages cries with their own ears they
didn't help and the recording was picked
up by a GoPro camera mounted on a dog
from the military's canine unit this is
super tragic as well uh the dog was then
sent um into Gaza at the Gaza City
building during the gun battle the dog
was killed uh allegedly by Hamas
terrorists and the camera was recovered
days later which is why we have this
audio now but by then IDF troops had
already killed uh the three escaped
hostages which is also an incredible
part of the story they were able to
escape their captors and uh they
unfortunately didn't make it out alive
even after being able to do that um so
let's take a look at the uh individuals
who lost their lives as a result of the
IDF um mistaking them as threats and uh
back in December days after the young
men were killed sham R's father a shamri
Spoke out saying the following quote the
IDF abandoned my son on October 7th and
the IDF murdered my son on December 14th
that's what happened it's just really
heartbreaking that's of course an
Israeli citizen saying that um so uh two
interesting parts of the story number
one uh Israel right now is at minus one
hostages recovered by the
IDF they have recovered three and killed
four through their military operations
through their military operations and
those are only the four we know of
because a lot more might have died
through the bombings the massive
indiscriminate bombing they did of
buildings that might have contained
hostages so but as far as we know they
have rescued negative one hostages that
is unbelievable for the and to this day
all the Israeli Defenders say they're
main goal is to they have to keep going
they have to keep killing more
Palestinians because they're trying so
hard to rescue hostages are they cuz it
certainly doesn't look like it I don't
think they trying to rescue hostages at
all it looks a lot more like they're
trying to indiscriminately kill anyone
inside Gaza so now they haven't killed
everyone yes they can congratulations
Israeli supporters they haven't used a
nuke yet to kill every single person
they literally brag about that these
days that's a talking point for them
well we could have killed them all we
didn't kill all every single one of them
congratulations wow you sound really
humanitarian that's how they believe
their debunking allegations of genocide
because their argument is well if we
wanted to do a genocide by just wiping
them all out in one Fell Swoop we could
do that by the way again I've used this
example a hundred times but literally
what the Turks said about the Armenians
they said well we didn't kill the ones
uh on the west side of turkey and in
Istanbul and in the big cities we just
killed the ones in the East see it's not
a genocide that is just wrong
understanding of the word genocide
Holocaust is when you try to kill every
single person in that race okay or
ethnicity or religion genocide is when
you target a group specifically and kill
an enormous number of innocent civilians
and usually has telltale signs like
ethnic cleansing moving people from One
Direction to another uh denying them
food indiscriminate killing of civilians
this is a textbook genocide what's
happening in Gaza right now so and and
what drives me crazy about it and why we
cover it so much is because it's
happening right now and there's nothing
that we're that America is doing about
it other than funding it and making it
more POS and defending it yeah I want to
elaborate it drives me nuts I want to
elaborate on that a little bit more
because I've been noticing this weird
and it might be Bots because it's a
similar Point that's being made over and
over again and it doesn't make any sense
to me so supporters of Joe Biden are
increasingly frustrated by voters
typically Democratic voters who see his
handling of the war in Gaza as so
inhumane that they just can't get
themselves to cast a ballot for him
right and it's not just arab-americans
although arab-americans have been the
most vocal certainly in States like
Michigan so Trump support I'm sorry
Biden supporters foran slip there uh are
arguing well I don't understand there
are far more civilians dying in Ukraine
because of what's happening with Russia
or far more civilians have already died
in Ukraine first of all I haven't fact
checked that but that's what they're
claiming but guys the reason why there
is a moral issue with Israel versus
what's happening in Ukraine is we're not
supporting Putin right like we're not
supporting Putin's Invasion into Ukraine
or the slaughter of civilians in Ukraine
we're doing the opposite right the US
government is helping Ukraine defend
itself against Putin and his illegal
Invasion into their sovereign country
when you look at the Israel Gaza War
it's totally flipped where right now the
side that's carrying out the mass
civilian deaths or killings is the side
that we're funding and supporting and
just today John Kirby had a press
conference and was asked okay well it's
very clear that Israel is continuing the
blockade of humanitarian Aid into the
Gaza Strip and so as a result has the
Biden White House maybe reconsider the
military aid that they want to provide
to Israel and Kirby's like no no we
haven't reconsidered they need defend
themselves now never mind they have the
Iron Dome they have um defense
capabilities and Military capabilities
that Palestinians could only dream of
but you know that's the argument they uh
need the weapons and so no matter what
Israel does even if they're breaking
International laws even if they're
committing war crimes they're our Ally
and we are going to prevent them U
present them with the weapons that they
want so a couple things here um just a a
un controversial unacceptable question
and I'll leave it there so are the
Palestinians allowed to defend
themselves no apparently not or are do
they just sit there and get murdered and
but if they ever fight back it's
obviously
terrorism okay I hear you on that and
I've accepted that many times so isn't
it terrorism when Israel kills 25 30
times more civilians no no they're
angels angels when we murder Palestinian
civilians that's because we're the good
guys and had a right to defend ourselves
nonsense total garbage when you kill 25
times the number of people that Hamas
killed you're not defending yourself
anymore you're just murdering people so
you can say ah no how do you like it we
crushed you and we're going to occupy
you for the rest of your goddamn lives
oh wow you guys seem like real
humanitarians show me when you're going
to end the occupation you Liars everyone
in the right-wing government of Israel
is a bunch of fascist lying religious
zealots okay did I just call them
fascist yes you're goddamn right I did
when you killed this number of civilians
and you do it on purpose and you openly
and brazenly talk about how you're going
to move them out of Gaza how you're
going to take Gaza how you're going to
just crush the spirit the soul to
humanity and the lives of these people
that is exactly what fascists do anyway
now to the casualties by the way I just
looked it up to wow this is a big number
it really is and a little over 2 years
in 25 months
10,582 civilians have been killed in
Ukraine in under 5 months 20% of the
time Israel has killed over 30,000 Jesus
so three times as much I know I know IDF
will say no seven of those were Hamas we
got I think I think I think maybe we got
a couple of Hamas Fighters I mean bombs
bombs bombs buildings schools hospitals
everything we just destroyed entire Gaza
I think we got a couple of Hamas guys
yeah yeah yeah yeah so you did three
times as bad as the Russians when they
invaded Ukraine and and and you did it
in five months as opposed to 25 months
so look you see somebody defending
Israel online on Twitter especially
there's an enormous chance that it's a
IDF troll or bot okay yeah there's some
real people but like 90% of them all
repeat the same talking points we've
seen this movie a thousand times last
thing most important story about the
hostage is is it shows you what the
rules of engagement are in Gaza for the
IDF that is what Military Officers tell
their soldiers hey how do you handle a
situation uh if someone's coming up to
you what do you do do are Etc right and
obviously what they've told them is
don't even look for half a second if
they are males let alone the females let
alone the children right and now you
know tens of thousands of women and
children have been killed but if you see
a male don't look twice shoot kill
murder murder murder murder murder oh no
it was Israelis ah their lives matter
when we killed uh 10 20 100 200 times
2,000 times as many Palestinians no one
even cared Palestinian men who cares
they're all terrorists oh no oh no it
was an Israeli their lives are a billion
times more valuable than Palestinians oh
no if it was Palestinians they would
probably would have celebrated that
night you think they wouldn't have
partied that night if it was
Palestinians so don't tell me that your
Rules of Engagement are to protect
civilians that's a joke it's a horrific

[admin]

Jordan’s government struggles to contain unrest as Gaza protests grow
by Sarah Dadouch
The Washington Post
March 28, 2024 at 8:51 a.m. EDT

Thousands of Jordanians continue protests near Israeli embassy in Amman
Associated Press
Mar 27, 2024 #israelhamaswar #israel #jordan

Jordanian security forces dispersed angry demonstrators who again tried to reach the Israeli embassy in Amman on Tuesday evening and during the early hours of Wednesday. Several thousand demonstrators flocked to more than one location close to the embassy for the third day in a row, for an event that activists call the siege of the embassy, in response to the Israeli war on Gaza. #jordan #israel #israelhamaswar

Abu Obaida Posters Near Israeli Embassy, Pro-Palestine Protesters Attacked | Jordan Erupts For Gaza
Hindustan Times
Mar 27, 2024 #occupiedwestbank #alaqsaflood #israelhamaswar

Jordanian anti-riot police beat and arrested dozens of demonstrators trying to march towards the heavily guarded Israeli embassy in the capital Amman, witnesses and residents said on Wednesday. More than two thousand protesters gathered late on Tuesday, the third day of demonstrations which have been marred with clashes, after baton wielding police pushed back hundreds of angry crowds seeking to storm the embassy compound. Many demonstrators chanted slogans in support of the militant Islamist Hamas. Watch.

Jordanian security forces clashed with protesters trying to reach the Israeli embassy in Amman on March 25. (Video: AP)

Hundreds of protesters gathered in the Jordanian capital Tuesday for a third straight night to call for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza, clashing with baton-carrying riot police before tear gas rained down on them.

On Wednesday night, demonstrators were back on the streets. “Open the borders,” they chanted.

Though there have been regular protests in Amman throughout the nearly six-month war, the government has largely managed to contain the situation by aligning itself with public sentiment — harshly criticizing Israel’s conduct of the war and championing the Palestinian cause. But the scenes this week appeared more spontaneous, the crowds larger and the anger more raw, sending shock waves through the country’s powerful security establishment.

“Jordan is in an unenviable position,” said Saud al-Sharafat, a former brigadier general in the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate and founder of the Sharafat ِCenter for the Study of Globalization and Terrorism. The grinding conflict in Gaza, and the soaring Palestinian death toll, are testing the state’s “ability to maintain the tempo that exists now, so that [things] do not get out of control.”

The Kingdom of Jordan occupies a unique position in the Middle East. It is a close and longtime ally of the United States, receiving more than $1 billion annually in economic and military aid. In 1994, Jordan signed a peace treaty with neighboring Israel. But the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war — known to Arabs as the “nakba,” or catastrophe — forever altered the country’s demographics.

Jordan is home to more than 2 million Palestinian refugees, most of whom have Jordanian citizenship. Analysts estimate that half of the population is of Palestinian descent. For many in the country, geographically and emotionally, the war in Gaza feels very close.

Jordanian authorities — who typically show little tolerance for public demonstrations — have sanctioned weekly protests after Friday prayers.

“It seems, over time, government institutions learned their lessons and started giving space [for people] to relieve tension,” Sharafat said.


Demonstrators carry banners and flags as a flare burns during a protest in support of Palestinians in Gaza, outside al-Kalouti Mosque near the Israeli Embassy in Amman, Jordan, on Wednesday. (Alaa Al-Sukhn/Reuters)

Yet the government has also tried to contain the unrest, forbidding any crowding near, or storming of, the border zone with Israel. Several attempts by protesters in early October to reach the country’s border with the West Bank were thwarted by riot police.

That same month, Jordan’s Public Security Directorate said protesters assaulted and injured public security personnel, threw molotov cocktails and damaged public and private property.

Jordanian lawyers representing detainees told Human Rights Watch this month that hundreds of people have likely been arrested for their involvement in protests or online Palestinian advocacy.

“Jordanian authorities are trampling the right to free expression and assembly in an effort to tamp down Gaza-related activism,” said Lama Fakih, the group’s Middle East director.

The government’s public advocacy for war-battered Gaza has also helped keep a lid on public anger.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi was one of the first Arab officials to say that Israel’s war in Gaza met the “legal definition of genocide,” an accusation Israel called “outrageous.” In November, he announced the cancellation of a controversial economic pact with Israel, under which Jordan would have provided energy to its neighbor in exchange for water.

Such regional projects “will not proceed” while the war continues, he told Al Jazeera at the time, adding that Jordan was focused entirely on ending Israel’s “retaliatory barbarism” in Gaza.

But there are limits to how far the government is willing to go, having “tied its political and economic vision to close relations with the United States and Israel,” said Jillian Schwedler, a professor at Hunter College and author of a book on protests in Jordan. Those ties, she added, “are not easily untangled.”

After a meeting at the White House last month, Jordan’s King Abdullah was blunt: “We cannot stand by and let this continue,” he said, with President Biden at his side. “We need a lasting cease-fire now. This war must end.”

In the six weeks since, multiple rounds of shuttle diplomacy by American, Arab and Israeli officials have failed to produce even a temporary cease-fire.


A demonstration in support of Palestinians in Gaza, near the Israeli Embassy in Amman on Wednesday.

As public discontent grows, Jordan’s security establishment is getting jittery. Unemployment was over 22 percent last year; many young men are out of work. There are fears that the Muslim Brotherhood, a long-suppressed opposition group and a Hamas ally, is playing a role in the protests, hoping to garner support ahead of general elections in August.

“We are your men, Sinwar,” some protesters chanted Tuesday night, a reference to Yehiya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and remains at large in Gaza.

On Saturday, Jordan’s Foreign Ministry announced that its embassy in Tel Aviv was following up on reports in Israeli media that two armed men were detained near al-Fasayil village in the West Bank, having allegedly crossed the Jordanian border.

The alarm is palpable among decision-makers in the government, Sharafat said. Regularly dispatching riot police is a financial drain on Jordan’s small and struggling economy, he said. And there is the emotional burden on police themselves, he added, many of whom are also Palestinian. After fasting from sunrise to sunset for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, their nights are now spent clashing with protesters.

As the war has worn on, demonstrators have gotten bolder: The cancellation of the water-for-energy deal was followed by growing public demands for annulling Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel. With the Israeli military now threatening an invasion of Rafah, home to some 1.4 million displaced Palestinians, Sharafat said popular pressure will only increase.

“The Jordanian position is currently in crisis … in figuring out how to deal with the next stage, how to deal with the protests,” he said. “The space the government has to maneuver is very tight.”

Schwedler said she expects “more of the same” — “sharp condemnation of Israel, strained formal diplomatic relations for a while, but little change in policy or ties with Israel.”

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Israel Vs Palestine | Israeli 'Executions’ at Al-Shifa Hospital | Israel Vs Gaza | N18V | News18
CNN-News18
Premiered 5 hours ago #israel #palestine #gaza

The Israeli army reportedly threatened on Saturday to destroy the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza city, despite the presence of hundreds of people inside, according to a statement from the Gaza government media office.

[admin]

“Like Lying in a Coffin”: UNICEF Spokesperson Warns of Devastating Toll on Gaza’s Children
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
MARCH 29, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/29/ ... transcript

As the death toll in Gaza tops 32,600, we speak with UNICEF spokesperson James Elder in Rafah near the Egyptian border, now home to some 1.5 million Palestinians seeking shelter from the fighting. He says Israel’s continued obstruction of aid into the territory is a “man-made and preventable” crisis of hunger and acute malnutrition that could be ended if Israel just opened access to more aid trucks, especially in northern Gaza, where desperate people could be reached in as little as 10 minutes. “When I’m on the street, every person, the first thing they want to tell me, in English or Arabic, is 'We need food, we need food,'” Elder tells Democracy Now! “They are saying that because their assumption is the world doesn’t know, because how would this be allowed to happen if the world knew?” He also reiterates UNICEF’s call for a full ceasefire and warns against Israel’s planned ground invasion of Rafah, which he describes as “a city of children.”

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.

In Gaza, the death toll has now topped 32,600, including 14,000 children, with over 75,000 people wounded. At least 31 people, including 27 children, have already died of malnutrition and dehydration.

For more, we go to Rafah in Gaza, where we’re joined by James Elder, spokesperson for UNICEF, which stands for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, James Elder. Thank you so much for joining us as you stand outside a hospital in Rafah. Talk about where you’ve been in Gaza and what’ve you found.

JAMES ELDER: Amy, hi there.

Look, I’ve been south to north, north to south. If we start here in the south, in Rafah, this is a city that’s normally 300,000 people, and it’s now about 1.5 million, so you can imagine the congestion. I’m looking now at a field hospital. The number of times, Amy, well, I’ll walk around and just think this place feels like a war zone. Now, of course, it is a war zone. So, if I’m in a hospital, you’re talking about being in a hospital, and it is absolutely heaving with people. So, the corridors are now no longer corridors. They are tented up, people using blankets, whatever they can, thousands and thousands of people trying to take refuge in hospitals, and, of course, thousands and thousands of people with the wounds of war in hospitals. So, here, Rafah, this is a city of children, Amy. This is where most people from Gaza have now fled, with a very real fear of an offensive here.

When you go further north, to the very north, as I’ve been to Jabaliya and Gaza City, well, first you see the devastation. I’m seeing, Amy, entire cities turned to rubble, more or less, things I’ve never seen before, every street. When I go with people from that city, drivers who — drivers who grew up in that city, and who simply don’t know how to get around anymore, Amy, because they’ve lost those landmarks to direct them. And then you see the nutritional status, those children you spoke about. More children died overnight in the last couple of days, dehydration, malnutrition. I see those families, Amy. I see mothers in tears, crouched over cots with children and babies who are paper thin, thousands of people on the street doing that universal sign: food now.

That’s some sense, north to south. Whatever it is, it’s desperation, and it’s exhaustion. People have done everything. They break their last piece of bread to share if they have four or five families stay with them. But I’ve sat with families this morning that I can speak to. They’re exhausted. And yeah, they’re confused as to why they don’t have the world’s attention.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to the latest news, James Elder.

JAMES ELDER: I’ve got no hearing, guys.

AMY GOODMAN: The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to ensure unhindered aid could get into Gaza. The legally binding order was issued after a request by South Africa, which brought the genocide case to Israel in January. The court noted in its latest order, “Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing only a risk of famine, but … famine is setting in.” The judges also cited U.N. data which finds at least 31 people, including 27 children, having already died of malnutrition and dehydration. The court is ordering Israel to submit a report within a month showing how it’s implemented the order. The significance of this, as the U.N. warns famine is imminent in northern Gaza? And the number of children who have been affected, James?

JAMES ELDER: Yes. I mean, we saw a report, Amy, almost two weeks ago by the most respected nutrition body in terms of crises on the planet, and it is talking about more people now being in that, what we call catastrophic food insecurity than in their 20 years of reporting. If we look at the north of Gaza, where before this war, less than 1% of children under the age of 5, less than 1%, suffered acute malnutrition. Now if we look at those north, to 2-year-olds, the most vulnerable, Amy, it’s one in three. One in three. This is the speed at which we’ve seen this catastrophic decline.

So, yes, at the United Nations, from my own executive director to the secretary-general, have been calling for months and months for unhindered, safe — sort of very difficult place to work — safe access for aid. Now, that’s road access. The most efficient and effective way to get supplies, lifesaving supplies, food — food, water, medicines, to people is on the road network, not just from the south, because that can be difficult. It’s 30 or 40 — 30 miles, doesn’t sound like a long way. It is a long way when you’ve got tens of thousands of people on the street. Amy, there are crossings that are 10 minutes away from those people who are hand to mouth, from those mothers who are cradling children who are severely malnourished. Ten minutes away.

So, in the same way that this crisis, this nutritional crisis affecting children and civilians in Gaza, is man-made and preventable, it can be turned around. Now, if you want to be a glass half-full, that’s good news. This can be reversed. But we do need those decisions to be made. We need all hindrances gone, all obstructions gone. We need safety. You know, we know that more my United Nations colleagues have been killed in this war than in any war since the creation of the United Nations. We’ve seen those horrendous videos of desperate people, desperate because they see a truck of food once a week — there is no consistency — desperate people being killed accessing food. There are crossings in the north. If those are opened, we can flood the Gaza Strip with aid, and this is solved within a matter of weeks, magic pace that UNICEF has, changes their lives dramatically.

But we’re not seeing that. Instead, UNRWA, the biggest U.N. agency here, the backbone of humanitarian aid on the Gaza Strip, that was sending 50% — Amy, 50% of the food to the north, they’ve been blocked. So we have to be very clear and very, very honest in terms of what the restrictions are. The restrictions currently are why we are seeing this level of malnutrition, particularly among children.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why — what is Israel saying to you, to the international body, the United Nations, to you particularly at UNICEF, why they’re not letting this aid go, and particularly saying they will not work with UNRWA at all in northern Gaza?

JAMES ELDER: Yes. Look, obviously, you know, we function here based on our impartiality, and we talk to anyone. So you’re right to ask. I’m not privy to the exact conversations. Like anyone else, you hear the statements made that there is, you know, limitless access here. The reality on the ground says differently. In the first three weeks of March, one-quarter of aid convoys were denied. As I say, the restrictions on UNRWA are immense.

I can speak to my own experience of the complexities of even getting that food aid to the north, which is why if you come in from the north in those crossings, that’s a game changer. In the same way that the world has focused a little bit on airdrops and ships, obviously, right now the desperation is so great that those people who have been forcibly put into this position will take food aid wherever it comes from. It shouldn’t be the case, when, I mean, in the north, you’re talking about an area that was famed for strawberries — not for malnutrition, for strawberries. But we have to be clear that when a ship comes in, it has the equivalent tonnage of around 12 trucks. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trucks, you know, five miles from where I am now. You could get hundreds and hundreds of trucks within 10 minutes, if that border crossing was open in the north, to those people who are cut off. That’s an important thing to remember.

When I was in the north, Amy, those people are cut off. You’re past the last checkpoint when we access those people. When I’m on the street, every person, the first thing they want to tell me, in English or Arabic, is “We need food. We need food.” Now, I know this, of course. This is my work. But of course I listen to them. What was revealing is why they’re saying that. They are saying that because their assumption is the world doesn’t know, because how would this be allowed to happen if the world knew?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the effects on children of malnutrition? If they don’t die of hunger, the effects of the dehydration and malnutrition that they’re experiencing now?

JAMES ELDER: Yeah, look, in one sense, it’s one of the saddest things you’ll see, because a malnourished child, literally, their body starts to feed on itself in its last desperate acts. As my executive director said when she was — she’s been in malnutrition centers around the world. Remember, in UNICEF, we are serving children around the world, and critical, critical scenarios for children particularly on nutrition, from places from Sudan to Ethiopia. And she spoke of just the silence in a malnutrition ward, because babies do not have the energy to cry.

But what usually kills children with this most severe form of malnutrition is a disease, a simple thing, pneumonia, a simple childhood disease. Children with severe acute malnutrition are 10 times more likely to be killed by that. And that is something that UNICEF has been warning about here for months. Because now Rafah has become a city of children, because the water system and the sanitation system have been devastated, it’s impossible to have the services here that children need. I mean healthcare. Never before in Gaza have so many children needed healthcare. Only one-third, one in three, hospitals are partially functioning. Toilets — toilets, both in terms of dignity but in terms of sanitation, Amy — the global standard in an emergency is one toilet for 20 people. Here we’re looking at about one toilet for 800. For a shower, multiply that by four, one shower for three-and-a-half thousand people. Imagine for a teenage girl, much less, yes, a pregnant woman or a child. So, our great fear, which we are starting to see, is when you have severe malnutrition and you add in disease, this is the perfect storm. This is when this horror show for children becomes just as lethal on the ground as it currently is from the skies.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, this is aside from the — I think the number has topped 14,000 of children who have died, uncounted number of them still in the rubble. If you can talk about this death toll, and also compare Gaza to other conflict zones you’ve been in, James Elder? You’ve been all over the world, to say the least.

JAMES ELDER: Yeah, look, for me, Amy, in a way, I’m loath to make the comparison, simply because, for UNICEF and myself, of course, a child is a child wherever they are. And when you see what’s happened to children, you know, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, it’s horrendous, and that’s why my colleagues are frontline workers in all of these places.

Yes, though, there is something particular here, the intensity of devastation. Obviously, it’s such a big child population in a compact space with, let’s be clear, indiscriminate attacks. The numbers you’re sharing there, it’s unprecedented. And when you see in a hospital those wounds of war to children, Amy, remembering that when there is a missile or a bomb on a family home, it’s not just one injury to a child. It’s the broken bones. It’s the burns. It’s very hard to look, but we must keep looking, the burns on a child. And it’s the shrapnel. These are the images that I turn, every time I turn around in a hospital, and I don’t think I’ve seen that, that consistency.

You have these rare moments, Amy, of clutching onto some hope. And once was a moment in a hospital, a little boy Mohamed, now, he had bad burns, but as I walked in to Mohamed, he made this little effort — it hurt him — to put a little thumbs-up, an unsolicited movement. And I just thought, “Wow! What a character!” And then the adult with him explained that Mohamed was also the best student in his school, showed me photographs of this beautiful little boy receiving awards. And I thought, “This little guy’s going to be OK.” And you hold onto these moments. Then that adult explained to me that when the missile hit Mohamed’s home, it killed everyone. And because families are hunkering down, I mean everyone — mother, father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Mohamed didn’t know this yet, but Mohamed is now the last surviving member of his entire family.

These horror stories, Amy, are being normalized here. I didn’t think I’d ever hear such a thing in Gaza, but I’m hearing it time and again, time and again. So, yes, and these wounds of war, I should add, you know, in the last two days, I made a point to go to hospitals since the ceasefire decision, which was a cause of great hope here. Great hope. Well, that hope has been well and truly drowned out right now by bombs. And I saw many children who doctors did not think would still be alive today based on the bombings that have occurred since Monday’s decision.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re standing, James Elder, in Rafah. If you can talk about what’s happening right now in Rafah? You have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying, absolutely, an invasion, ground invasion, will happen. It’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when.” You have talked about a possible ground invasion in Rafah. What would this mean?

JAMES ELDER: The horrors in Gaza do start to outstrip our ability to describe them. And it would be a catastrophe. But, of course, that word has been rightly used many times. But this is a city of children, as I say. This city, Rafah, now has twice the population density of New York City, but — I don’t know what you can see, OK, but that’s as tall as they get. This is ground level. And most people — most people are in tents. They’re in street corners. They’re on beaches. They’re in what was agriculture, what was agriculture. They’re ground level, 600,000 children here.

And what they’ve endured, I mean, we’re in uncharted territory when it comes to the mental health of these children. Amy. Night after night, even for me — and I get to leave this place — for me, I lie in bed, and you hear the bombardments that wake you, and your building shakes, and you lie there feeling like lying in a coffin. Like, what are the chances of waking tomorrow morning? Children here go through that with their families every night. Every night with a mother and child, there’s no lullaby you sing to a child to drown that out.

And so, for those people here, not only are they just holding on, their coping mechanisms at a wit’s end, they have nowhere to go. We have to understand that. It’s not — the social services are devastated. Khan Younis, the city next door, as I say, I’ve never seen that level of annihilation. Gaza City, further north, the same. There’s talk of an area near here, al-Mawasi. It’s a beach. You know, literally, you’d be doubling the population density again. So, it’s a terrifying thought, Amy. I didn’t imagine it would come to this, but, yes, as you rightly say, the conversation is very commonplace now. I just wish people could see the density of people here, could see the exhaustion, could listen to a doctor as I speak to him in a hospital as he’s treating a child with massive head wounds, and the doctor’s in tears, saying, “What did this child do?” Well, we will see that on a scale I don’t think any of us, certainly not me, can imagine.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, what would an immediate ceasefire mean for the children of Gaza, for the whole population there?

JAMES ELDER: You know, I’m glad you end like that, because that gives me a chill. Everyone asks still: Do we have hope? Is there hope? And most people hold on to this idea, Amy, of like, as a mother said, “I’ve lost my — I’ve lost two children. I’ve lost my home. I’ve lost my ability to earn income. I’ve lost my ability to feed my remaining child. All I have is hope.”

Now, a ceasefire is a game changer. Ceasefire. Firstly, let’s get the hostages home. There are children somewhere, after five-and-a-half months. End the torment. End the torment for they and their families. A ceasefire enables us finally to flood the Gaza Strip with aid and bring this nutritional crisis, imminent famine — make no doubt about it, imminent famine. And a ceasefire, Amy, means that those families that I spoke of, who tonight again will endure what I mentioned there, they will go to bed, if there’s a ceasefire, a mother and her child, and they will know, for the first time in months, that they will wake up tomorrow.

AMY GOODMAN: James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson — UNICEF stands for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund — joining us today from Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Thank you so much, and be safe.

When we come back, we speak with the head of a corporate activist group who was just subpoenaed before Jim Jordan’s House panel. We’ll talk about shareholder and corporate responsibility. Stay with us.

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IDF Drone Bombed World Central Kitchen Aid Convoy Three Times, Targeting Armed Hamas Member Who Wasn't There: The strike on the aid convoy, which travelled along a route approved by the Israeli army, killed seven workers of the World Central Kitchen – but the target, an armed man thought to be a terrorist, never left the warehouse with the cars
by Yaniv Kubovich
Haaretz
Apr 2, 2024 3:03 pm IDT
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... ff29360000

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One of the vehicles hit in the airstrike near Deir al-Balah, on Tuesday.Credit: Ahmed Zakot/ Reuters

The Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in the Gaza Strip on Monday night was launched because of suspicion that a terrorist was travelling with the convoy.

An Israeli drone fired three missiles one after the other at a World Central Kitchen aid convoy, that left Monday night to escort an aid truck to a food warehouse in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, according to defense sources familiar with the details.

According to the defense sources, the cars were clearly marked on the roof and sides as belonging to the organization, but the war room of the unit responsible for security of the route that the convoy travelled identified an armed man on the truck and suspected that he was a terrorist.

[x]
John Hudson @John_Hudson
Munition dropped right through the World Central Kitchen logo

4:01 AM · Apr 2, 2024

Until the actions that preceded the strike, carried out by a Hermes 450 drone, were completed, the truck reached the warehouse with the World Central Kitchen's three cars, with seven volunteers in them – two dual-national Palestinians (U.S. and Canada) and five citizens of Australia, the UK, and Poland.

A few minutes later, the three cars left the warehouse without the truck, on which the ostensibly armed man was located. According to the defense sources, that armed man did not leave the warehouse. The cars travelled along a route preapproved and coordinated with the IDF.

At some point, when the convoy was driving along the approved route, the war room of the unit responsible for security of the route ordered the drone operators to attack one of the cars with a missile.

Some of the passengers were seen leaving the car after it was hit and switching to one of the other two cars. They continued to drive and even notified the people responsible that they were attacked, but, seconds later, another missile hit their car.

The third car in the convoy approached, and the passengers began to transfer to it the wounded who had survived the second strike – in order to get them out of danger. But then a third missile struck them. All seven World Central Kitchen volunteers were killed in the strike.

On Tuesday morning, World Central Kitchen executives announced a temporary halt to its operations in Gaza, and that the ship that had departed to Gaza with aid shipments would return to Cyprus.

"It's frustrating," one of the defense sources told Haaretz. "We're trying our hardest to accurately hit terrorists, and utilizing every thread of intelligence, and in the end the units in the field decide to launch attacks without any preparation, in cases that have nothing to do with protecting our forces."

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One of the cars in the convoy that was targeted, with a World Central Kitchen label on its windshield and roof.Credit: Ahmed Zakot/ Reuters

The IDF understands that this is a serious incident that is liable to have far-reaching effects on the continued combat in Gaza, because of deteriorating international legitimacy in recent weeks. The defense establishment is preparing to send representatives to the dead volunteers' countries, to personally present to senior government officials the findings of the investigation that the army announced on Monday night.

The strike is not the first incident in which World Central Kitchen staff were wounded in Gaza. On Saturday, an IDF sniper fired at a car headed to a food warehouse in the Khan Yunis area. He hit the car's windshield, but the volunteer inside was unharmed.

The World Central Kitchen immediately filed a complaint with the IDF after the incident, and demanded the army stop the fire toward its staff, and guarantee their safety when distributing food in the Gaza Strip, which is carried out with full coordination. The IDF did not comment on the organization's inquiry about that incident.

IDF Spokesman rear adm. Daniel Hagari has spoken of the incident on Tuesday, expressing his "sincere sorrow," saying that "as a professional military committed to international law", The IDF is committed to examining its operations "thoroughly and transparently," he said, speaking to foreign press.

Hagari further said he has spoken to WCK founder, Chef Jose Andres, and expressed the IDF's "deepest condolences."

[x]
צבא ההגנה לישראל
@idfonline
מצורף תרגום:
הלילה התרחש אירוע בעזה שהוביל למותם הטראגי של עובדי המטבח העולמי המרכזי, בעת שהם מילאו את שליחותם החיונית – להביא מזון לזקוקים לכך.
כצבא מקצועי המחויב לחוק הבינלאומי, אנחנו מחוייבים לבחון את פעולותינו באופן מעמיק ושקוף>>

3:22 AM · Apr 2, 2024

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the event and said that the incident was a "tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip. This happens in war, and we will investigate it to the end. We are in contact with the governments involved, and we will do everything to insure that this does not happen again."

According to Deir al-Balah residents, who were in the area when the convoy was hit, the attack happened near the temporary pier set up to unload goods that reach Gaza by sea, like the shipments organized by WCK from Cyprus.

Some of the residents were skeptical about the army's stance that the event was a mistake and would be investigated, as the cars in the convoy were clearly identified as belonging to the humanitarian organization.

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“The Zone of Interest”: Oscar-Nominated Film Producer on the Holocaust, Gaza & “Walls That Separate Us”
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
March 5, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/5/t ... transcript

Update: During the Oscars ceremony, filmmaker Jonathan Glazer condemned the Israeli occupation after his Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” won an Oscar for best international film.

Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re joined by James Wilson, producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, who raised Israel’s assault on Gaza in his BAFTA Award acceptance speech last month. The film follows the fictionalized family of real-life Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss as they live idyllically next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Wilson says the film serves as a metaphor for the occlusion of “systemic violence, injustice, oppression, from our lives,” and challenges audiences’ complicity by asking them to identify with Höss and his wife Hedwig. “The idea of this film was to look for the similarities, rather than the differences, between us and the perpetrator,” says Wilson.

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 end today’s show with the producer of the Oscar-nominated Holocaust film, Zone of Interest, about the family of Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss living a tranquil life on the opposite side of the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp. First, this is the film’s trailer.

LINNA HENSEL: [played by Imogen Kogge] [translated] These flowers are so beautiful.

HEDWIG HÖSS: [played by Sandra Hüller] [translated] The azaleas there. There are also vegetables. A few herbs. Rosemary. Beetroot. This is fennel. Sunflowers. And here is kohlrabi. The children love to eat it.

UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: [translated] The heartfelt time we spent in the Höss house will always be among our most beautiful holiday memories. In the east lies our tomorrow. Thanks for you National Socialist hospitality.

AMY GOODMAN: The Zone of Interest just won three BAFTA Awards last month for best sound, best British film and best film not in the English language. During his acceptance speech, producer James Wilson raised Israel’s assault on Gaza.

JAMES WILSON: A friend — a friend wrote me after seeing the film the other day that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives, which we choose not to look behind. Those walls aren’t new from before or during or since the Holocaust. And it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Mariupol or in Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by James Wilson, producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, nominated for best picture, among others. The Oscar ceremony is Sunday — best international picture.

Congratulations, James Wilson, on all the nominations and what you won at the BAFTAs. Talk about that experience and why you related what’s happening now with Israel’s assault on Gaza to this Holocaust film, and talk specifically about that wall that separated the commandant’s home from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

JAMES WILSON: Well, thank you, Amy. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me on the show.

Well, I mean, why I said that? I mean, as you heard in the clip, I mean, I related the film both to the — in the present moment of the Israeli assault on Gaza, but also the innocent victims in Israel on October the 7th. And I mentioned Yemen, and I mentioned Ukraine, too, Mariupol, too. So, the context of that, which felt — it felt organic to the idea of the film, the questions of the film. You know, I know politics in film award speeches can grate sometimes, but this — as I said, this felt very pertinent to what the film is about, which is that — yeah, as you say, the walls that separate us from things that we choose not to look at, just as the friend who had messaged me about the film saying he couldn’t stop thinking about that in his own daily life. And all of that just came together. I was obviously thinking about it beforehand. You know, I felt — you know, it was a nervous moment just to speak in front of a lot of people. I’ve never won an award for a film I’ve worked on. But it felt organic to the idea of the film.

And you mentioned the wall in the film. And, of course, the film stages an absolutely real situation, which is the Höss — the family of, you know, the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife and the family, and the life they led in a nice house and garden that exactly abutted Auschwitz in full operation in the early 1940s. And that wall, which is in the film and in that situation, was absolutely real. It’s of course also a metaphor for, as my friend’s message said, the way we can sort of occlude and tune out systematic violence, injustice, oppression, all sorts of things, from our lives in order that we go on with them. And I suppose the film asks that question: What are the walls in our lives? Do we have walls like that in our life? Are there groups of people whom we care about more than others, as groups of people socially, not as friends and family? And it seems quite clear that that is the case.

And I suppose the other thing about the film is we always wanted it to be — feel modern and feel about the present. Everything about how we made it, how Jon Glaze, the writer/director of the film, wanted to make it, was to make it feel like it was happening in the present and it reflected the present. And that was, you know, through the tools of filmmaking — cinematography, acting, music, sound design — to create this immersive feeling of present tenseness, which was a means to an hopeful end, which was to reflect us in the present.

And Jon has also spoken about how it’s a political film. And one of the things that’s happening in the present is this extraordinary, staggering loss of innocent life and killing of innocent people in Gaza in the Occupied Territories, that is a response to the heinous mass killing of October the 7th. But it just seems very stark in the world that we have, politically, our governments at least, have a different level of care and attitude to those innocent people being killed in Gaza and in Yemen and, of course, in other — you know, this selective empathy, I think, marks hundreds of years of human history — and I mentioned that in the — I spoke to that in the brief speech I was able to make — and isn’t just something that was happening, you know, from 1940 to ’45 in Germany. So, all of those things sort of came together in that moment in that speech.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, James Wilson, you mentioned the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. What was the challenge in getting the audience to identify with these main characters, with this idyllic family, up against this incomprehensible terror and destruction that was happening right — or, that was occurring and he was presiding over?

JAMES WILSON: Well, I mean, in a way, you’ve — I mean, the challenge — the challenge that you identify sort of is the core of the film, I think, the questions of the film. It’s not a polemical film. There’s not like a message where we’re trying to pin it, you know, tie it up with a neat bow. But I think the whole — I think the whole question of the film and the idea, the thinking space of the film, it’s a film, I think, that asks you to — tries to make a space in which you can think, was to lean into some kind of identification with those people, as you say, the commandant of Auschwitz and his partner, his wife, to look for the similarities, not the differences. The typical way the Holocaust is narrated is of a sort of — you know, sort of is of something — it’s the discourse of what’s called Holocaust exceptionalism, right? That the Holocaust stands apart from history, outside of history, as this sort of mythic, almost evil, mystical event. And there’s something apolitical and ahistorical in that idea. So the idea of this film was to look for the similarities, rather than the differences, between us and the perpetrator, which is not —

AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to go to a clip from your film, when Nazi commandant —

JAMES WILSON: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: — Rudolf Höss’s wife Hedwig Hensel speaks to her mother.

LINNA HENSEL: [played by Imogen Kogge] [translated] Is that tahe camp wall?

HEDWIG HÖSS: [played by Sandra Hüller] [translated] Yes, that’s the camp wall. We planted more vines at the back to grow and cover it.

LINNA HENSEL: [translated] Maybe Esther Silberman is over there.

HEDWIG HÖSS: [translated] Which one was she?

LINNA HENSEL: [translated] The one I used to clean for.

AMY GOODMAN: James Wilson, 10 seconds to wrap.

JAMES WILSON: Well, I mean, just to pick up that last point, it was to look for all those details and aspects of our lives in terms of our aspirations, our desire for household comfort, the things that motivated and drove them that reflect in different ways our life.

AMY GOODMAN: James Wilson, we’re going to leave it there. Congratulations on your Oscar nominations for international film at the Oscars, The Zone of Interest. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.