Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 4, 2024
Israeli Attacks Kill 42 in Gaza as WHO Cites Progress in Polio Vaccination Efforts
Sep 04, 2024
The Palestinian Ministry of Health says Israel’s latest attacks on Gaza have killed 42 Palestinians while wounding more than 100 others in the past 24 hours. In central Gaza City, nine people were killed as Israel bombed a residential building near a city park. Two children were among the dead. Elsewhere, at least seven Palestinians were killed Tuesday when Israel bombed Namaa College northwest of Gaza City, where hundreds of displaced Palestinians had taken shelter.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization says its mass vaccination campaign against polio has so far reached about a quarter of Gaza’s children, after Israel agreed to eight-hour pauses in its attacks. This is Ghada Judeh, a displaced Gaza resident and volunteer on the vaccination campaign.
Ghada Judeh: “We are displaced from Deir al-Balah. I gave my children the polio vaccine to protect them from disease, but I can’t protect them from strikes and from death, unless you help us, just as you helped us and delivered the medications to us to protect our children. So, please, stand with us to stop the war so that our children can live peacefully and to continue their studies.”
Israeli Raids on West Bank Kill 33 Palestinians in a Week
Sep 04, 2024
Israeli forces have expanded their military offensive in the occupied West Bank, where troops have raided the Jalazone refugee camp, north of Ramallah. Separately, Israeli forces surrounded Hebron for a fourth day, with more raids reported around Qalqilya, Nablus and Bethlehem. The Palestinian Authority reports Israeli assaults on the West Bank over the past week have killed at least 33 Palestinians, including seven children.
Doctors Demand Justice for Palestinian Medical Workers Tortured in Israeli Custody
Sep 04, 2024
Pressure is mounting for Israel to release Dr. Khaled Alser, a highly respected Palestinian surgeon who was abducted by Israeli forces during a raid on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital in March. Colleagues say Dr. Alser has been tortured in Israeli custody at Ofer Prison and at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev Desert, where several Israeli soldiers have been accused of raping Palestinian prisoners. Dr. Alser is the lead author of a journal article just published in the British medical journal The Lancet. Democracy Now! spoke to one of the paper’s co-authors, Dr. Simon Fitzgerald, a Brooklyn trauma surgeon.
Dr. Simon Fitzgerald: “Our lead author, Dr. Khaled Alser, remains forcibly disappeared. And it was only about probably the same week that the piece was published that we got word through Israeli Physicians for Human Rights — we were able to get a lawyer into Ofer Prison, where Dr. Khaled Alser is — at least at the time he was interviewed in July was being held — and were able to get testimony that he indeed was abducted by Israeli forces, abused, maltreated, basically tortured.”
Human Rights Watch reports doctors, nurses and paramedics held by Israel have faced widespread torture, including beatings, rape and sexual abuse, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing, blindfolding and denial of medical care. Click here to see our segment on that report.
Thousands of Israelis Continue Protests Demanding Gaza Ceasefire and Hostage Deal
Sep 04, 2024
Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of major cities across Israel for the fourth day in a row to demand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to a ceasefire and hostage release deal. This morning, families of hostages held by Hamas protested outside of Likud party headquarters in Tel Aviv, following Tuesday evening protests outside the Israeli army headquarters. We’ll have the latest on Israel and Palestine after headlines.
***
Dire: Aid Workers Vaccinate Gaza Children During Pauses in Israeli Attacks, Urge Permanent Ceasefire
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 4, 2024
Healthcare
The World Health Organization has completed the first phase of a critical polio vaccination campaign in central Gaza. After health officials confirmed Gaza’s first polio case in 25 years, the Israeli military agreed to calls for limited humanitarian pauses on its attacks in order for aid organizations to carry out vaccinations. But “there’s real practical, operational problems with this current pause,” says Yanti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children US, whose staff is part of the vaccine drive. “It is not a ceasefire at all. It is an eight-hour pause every day.” As Israel has repeatedly attacked civilians awaiting the provision of aid over the course of its war, it is “difficult to reach normal coverage numbers” — especially for the two-dose vaccine course necessary to vaccinate against polio. Soeripto also discusses outbreaks in other current war zones, including the recent outbreak of mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and warns that “these diseases often cause even more casualties than bombs and bullets.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Amidst Israel’s continued military attacks on Gaza, the World Health Organization says its mass vaccination campaign against polio has so far reached about a quarter of Gaza’s children to protect them from paralysis, after Israel agreed to eight-hour pauses in its attacks in certain areas of Gaza. This comes after health officials recently confirmed Gaza’s first polio case in a quarter of a century, a 10-month-old child. This is Gaza resident Baha al-Arbid.
BAHA AL-ARBID: [translated] We’ve heard about the truce for polio vaccinations, but I want to stay in this area, because I don’t trust this truce that has just begun. We still fear bombing will happen at any moment, as it happened this morning.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is Ghada Judeh, who recently got her children vaccinated at Yafa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where she’s also volunteering with the polio vaccination campaign.
GHADA JUDEH: [translated] We are displaced from Deir al-Balah. I gave my children the polio vaccine to protect them from disease, but I can’t protect them from strikes and from death, unless you help us, just as you helped us and delivered the medications to us to protect our children. So, please, stand with us to stop the war so that our children can live peacefully and to continue their studies.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as residents of Gaza are also facing other diseases and chronic lack of food or access to education. This is Karam Yassin, a 10-year-old Palestinian boy in Deir al-Balah, as well.
KARAM YASSIN: [translated] We want to play with our friends, go to school, eat and drink. But this vaccination is of no use. It’s only useful against polio, but the war has destroyed us. It has destroyed our houses. I wish I can play with my friends, go to school. I wish to eat and drink like I used to before.
AMY GOODMAN: Just before we went to air today, Democracy Now! received this update from Tarneem Hammad in central Gaza, who’s part of the polio vaccination campaign with Medical Aid for Palestinians.
TARNEEM HAMMAD: We would need at least 95% vaccination coverage during each round of the campaign to prevent the spread of polio and reduce the risk of its reemergence. However, we’ve been facing many challenges, given the severely disrupted health system, also water system and sanitation systems. Other requirements for a successful campaign delivery include sufficient cash, fuel and functional telecommunication networks to reach communities with information about the campaign, which has been very, very difficult for all of our healthcare workers and social mobilizers who are working on the ground. Gaza has been polio-free for the last 25 years, so the reemergence, which the humanitarian community has warned about for the last 10 months, is another threat to the children in Gaza and also to the neighboring countries. A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in Gaza and also in the region.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Janti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children US. Its staff is working from Deir al-Balah Primary Health Care Center, a key vaccination site, working there in Gaza.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Janti. Can you explain what is happening, how many people you understand have gotten this vaccine? It’s children that they’re attempting to do.
JANTI SOERIPTO: Thanks, Amy.
Yes, our site, our Primary Health Care Center in Deir al-Balah, is one of the 51 sites where vaccinations are given to children. I’ve understood that on day one we were able to vaccinate 1,825 children already, which is encouraging, of course. And our staff are working around the clock to make sure that people understand, that parents understand where they can go to get vaccinations, that those vaccinations are safe, to make sure that children are prepped and to make sure that healthcare workers are trained in order to do so safely. But, of course, we need much more than just a couple of days to be able to give these vaccinations. Also, you heard the cover rate there between 90 and 95%. But you have to give two doses of these vaccinations, and they have to be four weeks apart. So one dose is not enough.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about how these vaccines are being administered? Israel has agreed to certain pauses in the bombing. We’re reporting about children being vaccinated in this area, and children being killed in this area by Israeli bombs. Explain how it all happens and how the vaccines are getting into Gaza right now.
JANTI SOERIPTO: So, the procedure, getting in through the WHO over the road. But I think, look, you laid out so clearly. You can, say, have an eight-hour pause in the window in which you can vaccinate these children in these 51 designated sites. But then, I mean, in practice, yeah, children then have to be moved to a particular site. Then sometimes they have to move back to where they were displaced, because most of the people in Gaza are displaced anyway. They’re not in their homes. Homes are destroyed. So it’s very hard to say. I can’t imagine. You heard the previous person in Gaza talking how worried they were to actually even travel across roads that are destroyed to some of these clinics.
So, there’s real practical, operational problems with this current pause. It is not a ceasefire at all. It is an eight-hour pause every day. And then, again, the vaccines are oral drops, two or three drops per dose. You have to give them twice with four weeks in between. That means you have to track and trace these children, as well. They’re all displaced. Whatever happens between the intervening four weeks between those doses then also impacts how effective your campaign can be.
AMY GOODMAN: So, according to the World Health Organization, the Israeli military bombardment of Gaza has damaged or destroyed 31 of 36 hospitals in the area.
JANTI SOERIPTO: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of this, and also how polio has reemerged after a quarter of a century in Gaza?
JANTI SOERIPTO: Yeah, it’s just unbelievable. Look, I was there end of March, and I thought it was unbelievably dire then. And clearly, it has gotten much, much worse since, because I was there when people were still congregating in Rafah, and since then, they’ve been displaced from Rafah and the south of Gaza, as well.
So, you know, there is very, very limited access to healthcare. We set up that Primary Health Care Center in Deir Al-Balah. If you look at the people who come there every day, over half of them have to walk more than an hour — walk more than an hour — to get even to that site. So that tells you something about the lack of healthcare, adequate healthcare, in Gaza right now.
And the reemergence of polio doesn’t surprise us. Save the Children and many other organizations and doctors have been warning against this for many, many weeks now. If you look at the sanitation, the sanitary conditions there, solid waste is everywhere in the Gaza Strip. There are not enough toilets. There are no showers. This was a situation just waiting to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you talked about how this is a two-dose regimen, and they’re trying to get, what, just under 700,000 children, to inject them with these vaccines. This never was an issue in the past. But if they are only able to get the first dose, is it ineffective?
JANTI SOERIPTO: That’s not the right level of coverage. I think — and we should also remind ourselves, these are oral drops. Children are already — in Gaza, are already malnourished. They’re weakened. Their immune systems are compromised after almost a year of conflict, displacements, lack of food — you heard it here before — lack of clean water, etc. So, to get adequate protection, they would definitely need those two doses. So we’re concerned that even the current setup, we will do what we can — the WHO is doing what they can — but it’s going to be difficult to reach the coverage numbers in the way that you would normally do it in a campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: So, families have — surviving families in Gaza have to trust that as the polio vaccination campaign makes its way, for example, to Rafah, and then there’s a pause there, that they won’t be bombed if they leave their house or wherever they are currently displaced to, to get this vaccination. That’s in Gaza. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Israelis are continuing their protests calling for a ceasefire and a hostage deal from the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said no so far. The significance of this? And the position of Save the Children on a ceasefire?
JANTI SOERIPTO: We’ve been calling for a ceasefire since October last year, because we know, as humanitarian operators, that that is the only way to get adequate aid, supplies and services to children and families that need it now. In the current scenario, our amazing staff and volunteers in Gaza are doing what they can at the risk of their own lives. We’ve lost colleagues and partners over these past months. But it’s really difficult to get people to come out, whether to get vaccinated, whether to get food, whether to get some level of mental health support or protection when bombs are falling. And deconfliction, so the safety of your convoys, of sending your own staff on the road with supplies to reach people, is not guaranteed at all.
AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to speak with Gershon Baskin, Middle East director of the state International Communities Organization, a back-channel negotiator with Hamas in the past. So I wanted to switch gears just for one minute, Janti, to talk about what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In mid-August, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency in response to mpox. This is Nzigire Lukangira, whose child has been suffering from mpox for days in an isolation ward in Kavumu in the eastern DRC.
NZIGIRE LUKANGIRA: [translated] Since my child got this disease and I brought him here, he only received one injection and some pills. The conditions here are very poor. We have no food, and people are forbidden to visit us because we have a dangerous disease. We are suffering a lot and feel like we will die of hunger here.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, Janti Soeripto, as chair and as president and CEO of Save the Children US, you were just in the DRC. Can you talk about this outbreak of mpox and what people should understand and how difficult it is to get a vaccination right now?
JANTI SOERIPTO: Right. Thanks. Yes, I was there in May. I was actually in South Kivu, which is now the epicenter, I think, of this particular outbreak, with over 50 — with 50% of the cases. It is an incredibly contagious disease. It is very dangerous for children. So, of the cases, I think two-thirds of the cases affect young children.
And again — and we see a pattern here, Amy, whether it’s Gaza or the DRC or Sudan, for that matter. You know, contagious diseases, whether it’s cholera or polio or mpox, you know, wreak havoc on populations that are already vulnerable, that are displaced, and there is no access to proper healthcare, vaccinations, no sanitation. And these diseases often cause even more casualties than bombs and bullets.
So, we’re doing what we can. Again, we’re working with communities to make sure that they understand how to prevent or reduce the risk of spreading — simple hygiene, handwashing. Again, clean water is in short supply. People are weakened because there was already a food insecurity crisis. We’re trying to ascertain where people can have access to healthcare. But as you heard in the previous segment, it is difficult to get access to medicine. And there is currently no — there are vaccines in the DRC, either.
AMY GOODMAN: Janti Soeripto, we want to thank you for being with us, president and CEO of Save the Children US.
Next up, as tens of thousands of Israelis protest for Prime Minister Netanyahu to agree to a Gaza ceasefire, we’ll speak with Gershon Baskin, longtime Israeli back-channel negotiator with Hamas. His new book, In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine. Stay with us.
***
Fmr. Israeli Hostage Negotiator Gershon Baskin Slams Netanyahu for Blocking Ceasefire Deal
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 4, 2024
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects growing domestic and international calls to accept a Gaza ceasefire deal, we go to Jerusalem to speak to Gershon Baskin of the human rights advocacy group International Communities Organization. Baskin has spent years as a back-channel Israeli negotiator with Hamas in ceasefire deals, including throughout Israel’s current war on Gaza. “It’s very clear that Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the war,” says Baskin, who calls for all remaining stakeholders, including Hamas, the United States and Israeli protesters, to increase pressure on the defiant prime minister.
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.
Tens of thousands of Israelis have protested across Israel for the fourth day in a row to demand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal. Today, families of Israeli hostages protested outside the Likud party headquarters in Tel Aviv. This followed a Tuesday evening protest outside the Israeli army headquarters.
Despite the mounting pressure, Netanyahu remains defiant, refusing to accept a ceasefire deal, while putting forward new demands and insisting he would not agree to any deal with Hamas unless Israel maintains control of the Philadelphi Corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt.
President Biden has called on the Israeli leader to do more to secure an agreement with Hamas following the recovery of the bodies of six dead hostages. On Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller addressed the ceasefire negotiations.
MATTHEW MILLER: Over the coming days, the United States will continue to engage with our partners in the region to push for a final agreement. During talks last week, we made progress on dealing with the obstacles that remain, but, ultimately, finalizing an agreement will require both sides to show flexibility. It will require that both sides look for reasons to get to yes, rather than reasons to say no.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the Middle East Eye is reporting an anonymous Turkish Foreign Ministry official is accusing the United States of misleading the public by claiming that the Gaza ceasefire negotiations are progressing favorably, and that Washington is not exerting enough pressure on Israel.
We go now to Jerusalem, where we’re joined by Gershon Baskin, Middle East director of International Communities Organization, a human rights advocacy group. For years, he has been a back-channel Israeli negotiator with Hamas in ceasefire deals, including during Israel’s current war on Gaza; in 2011, when he helped negotiate the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. On Tuesday, Baskin shared a deal Hamas leaders told him they would accept and that would lead to the release of all remaining Israeli hostages. He recently wrote, quote, “Let it be clear that Netanyahu has sentenced the hostages to death. Netanyahu stated that Israel will not leave the Philadelphia corridor … meaning that Israel will occupy Gaza for many more years. … Netanyahu is sacrificing the hostages on an altar of his own personal political survival.”
Gershon Baskin, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out the situation as you understand it at this point and talk about the protests in the streets, what they’re demanding of Netanyahu and why he’s refusing?
GERSHON BASKIN: Right. I think it’s important to point out that, Amy, it isn’t tens of thousands of Israelis who have gone out to the street, it’s hundreds of thousands. To make that equivalent in the United States, it would be like 25 million Americans taking to the streets. That’s the dimension of the protests that we’ve seen in the last days since the bodies of those six hostages were recovered.
We could get many more Israelis on the street if they believe that the Hamas was really willing to release all the hostages, which is why I’ve pleaded with the Hamas to say yes not only to me, but to tell the Egyptians and the Qataris that they agree to the deal that I proposed to them, which is a three-week, end-of-war, full-term ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, release of all the Israeli hostages and a release of an agreed number and list of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. This is a deal that can be made. It is a million times better than the deal that the United States, Qatar and Egypt have been trying to negotiate, unsuccessfully, for the last three months, which would just keep the war going and only release 32 hostages in 42 days. That’s a bad deal. We need to have a good deal put on the table. I’ve communicated this to the White House, to the Qataris, to the Egyptians and, of course, to the Israeli government. Now the officials need to push this through.
AMY GOODMAN: Why is Netanyahu refusing?
GERSHON BASKIN: Well, it’s very clear that Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the war, as one of his top negotiators told me on Saturday. The problem with any agreement that we can put forward is that the bottom line is that Hamas won’t make an agreement that doesn’t end the war, and Netanyahu won’t agree to any agreement that ends the war. He wants to keep this going. He certainly won’t consider ending the war until they find and kill Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza. But I think that the message of this past weekend was that there’s no reason to believe that any hostage will survive if Israel in fact does find and kill Yahya Sinwar. There’s no reason to believe that they won’t simply execute all the remaining hostages.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the state of the negotiations since — well, it’s widely believed that it was Israel who assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the lead negotiator, on Inauguration Day of the new president in Iran. The significance of this?
GERSHON BASKIN: I’m not sure that it had a real impact on the negotiations. Haniyeh was the face of the negotiators from Hamas with the Qatari prime minister, but he wasn’t actually a member of the negotiating team. He wasn’t in the room when negotiations were taking place. Of course, he was the leader of the Hamas politburo and played a significant role there. There are debates of whether or not he was pushing for an agreement or pushing against an agreement. It doesn’t really matter at this time. He’s no longer there, and there are other leaders of Hamas right now. Hamas makes decisions generally in consultation, and they try to reach consensus. When there is consensus or when there is a decision, it’s announced by the Hamas leader in Beirut, Osama Hamdan. And when Osama Hamdan says something in a press conference or on his Telegram page, it’s official, and everyone in Hamas stands behind it.
That’s what we’re waiting for now — that what I’m waiting for now, to Hamas to say that we agree to a three-week deal that will end the war, will release the hostages and release Palestinian prisoners. Of course, increase humanitarian aid into Gaza in a really substantial way, that has to be part of the agreement, as well. But we really need Hamas to signal to the Israeli public that this kind of deal is on the table, so that we can mass the public in the numbers way above a million people on the streets to force Netanyahu to accept it.
AMY GOODMAN: It keeps being said that he wants to keep Israeli soldiers in the Philadelphi Corridor. I spoke to Gideon Levy yesterday, on the editorial board of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and he said it’s not even worth talking about this. No one even knew what this was months ago. Suddenly, it has become so key. What is your assessment of what Netanyahu wants there and why this has become important?
GERSHON BASKIN: Look, last night on one of the main Israeli television stations, Alon Ben-David, a very significant military correspondent, said that in all the past months that the Israelis are searching for tunnels that lead underneath the Philadelphi Corridor, the borderline, 14-kilometer borderline between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, they haven’t found a single tunnel that penetrates the border. We have to recognize that this is an international border. There is a sovereign Egyptian side of the border. The Egyptians are responsible for sealing that border. And I’m certain that with the request from the United States and Israel, the Egyptians would agree to American finance and technology know-how and American supervision or observers on the ground to ensure that the border is closed.
This is a made-up issue by Netanyahu to create a new — I don’t know what we want to call it — a new excuse for Israel to remain in Gaza. Essentially, at the end of the day, what it means is that Israeli soldiers would be sitting ducks along the line of this border, where insurgents from Hamas would be able to kill them. And that’s what we’re facing today. Hamas has been largely decimated in terms of its military power, but they have the ability to engage in armed insurgency and kill Israeli soldiers every single day, Hamas fighters popping out of a tunnel and shooting an RPG at an Israeli tank or an Israeli vehicle. And we should be reminded of 18 years of Israel sitting in southern Lebanon, when soldiers came home every week dead, as well. That should be a lesson for us.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened back when you were involved with the negotiation to release the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a thousand Palestinian prisoners? And do you take any lessons from then to what’s happening today?
GERSHON BASKIN: It’s a very different situation when we’re talking about over a hundred hostages and an active war that’s been fought for 11 months with the total destruction of Gaza and 40,000 to 50,000 Palestinians killed and 1,700 Israelis killed, or more than that, so far. So it’s really different.
But there are some lessons. One is that there’s no replacement to a direct, secret back channel with direct communication between the parties. Even if it’s not an official channel, it’s a way to deliver messages and to brainstorm and find new ideas. There is no doubt that negotiating through third-party mediators, like Qatar and the United States and Egypt, convolutes the situation, makes it much more complex, and each side has its own interest here. There’s great reluctance to make compromises.
What I’ve seen, what I’ve observed over the last 18 years that I’ve been doing these negotiations is that sometimes it’s just unbelievable, the kind of behavior of the people in charge of these negotiations, who sometimes seem to be as if they were in a kindergarten classroom, with bringing up issues and ways of talking to each other, or talking at each other, that resemble what young children would do, rather than being responsible and finding direct ways to resolve the problem, which is ending the war and getting the hostages home. They never deal with it directly. And this is the truth today as it was many years ago when Gilad Shalit was in captivity.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think it would take at this point, in this last minute we have, Gershon?
GERSHON BASKIN: I think it would take an Hamas acknowledgment that they’re ready to release all the hostages, so that we can mobilize the Israeli streets. And it will take extreme American pressure on Netanyahu to make a deal. And the Americans have the pressure, if they were to choose to use it.
AMY GOODMAN: And what would that look like, the U.S. putting pressure on Israel?
GERSHON BASKIN: Well, look, the most obvious are the two things that are the most powerful. One is the shipment of arms to Israel, which is unlikely to happen. The other is the use of the veto in the Security Council and in other international arena. But the American-Israel relationship is so deep and so wide that there are many ways that the United States can use soft power with Israel to get the message across.
And what’s important is that it’s not done just to Prime Minister Netanyahu, but that the Israeli public knows what the United States of America wants and what it’s demanding from Israel. Again, we are still a democracy, or what’s left of a democracy, and the people are the sovereign. And we can mobilize the people if we have the tools to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: Biden, what is the single most important thing he can do as president of the United States?
GERSHON BASKIN: To put a deal on the table which is a good deal, the kind of deal I talked about, and to let the Israeli public know that it’s there. The United States is backing it. Qatar is backing it. Egypt and Hamas will support it. That’s the most important thing that Biden could do right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Gershon Baskin, I want to thank you for being with us, Middle East director of the International Communities Organization, longtime back-channel negotiator with Hamas. His memoir is titled In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine.
When we come back, Dynamite Nashville. Back in 20 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” Sam & Dave, written by Isaac Hayes. A Georgia judge has agreed with a lawsuit by the Hayes family that said the legendary singer would disapprove of Donald Trump’s campaign’s use of his song and ordered the campaign to stop playing it at rallies — the Trump campaign, that is.