AMY GOODMAN: As the US and Iran prepared to hold ceasefire talks in Pakistan today, Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon.

The death toll from Israel’s massive attack on Wednesday topped 300. More than 1150 people were injured. In a span of 10 minutes, Israel struck 100 sites across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The Financial Times described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as, “one of the deadliest single bombing campaigns in the history of a country wracked by decades of war and destruction”.

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Israel and the US have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal does not include Lebanon, but numerous other nations disagree — and the ceasefire mediator Pakistan provided written evidence that Lebanon was included.

Foreign ministers of Pakistan and France condemned what they called “serious ceasefire violations made in Lebanon”. CBS News reports Trump initially agreed Lebanon was included in the ceasefire, but his position changed after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US is expected to host talks between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday. As Israel continues to attack Lebanon, Hezbollah has retaliated by firing missiles at Israel.

At the United Nations, a spokesperson for the secretary-general spoke.

STÉPHANE DUJARRIC: With the announcements of the ceasefire between Iran and the United States, the ongoing military activity in Lebanon poses a grave risk to the ceasefire and efforts towards a lasting and comprehensive peace in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: Since the war began in late February, Israel has killed more than 1530 people in Lebanon, including at least 130 children. In Beirut, grieving families gathered at hospitals to identify bodies after Israel’s attacks on Wednesday.

MOHAMMED: [translated] I had dropped off my sister. She went up into the house. I went on a little trip, and they hid. I came back and didn’t find the building.

I didn’t find my sister, and I didn’t find my family, any of them. I found my brother, and his son was in the rubble.

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s an award-winning Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her books include No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. Her latest piece in New York magazine, headlined “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Rania. Why don’t you describe those scenes of a day of carnage in Beirut? We have a four-second delay, so we will wait.

Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s Black Wednesday    Video: Democracy Now

RANIA ABOUZEID: It was 10 minutes of terror, a day that the Lebanese are calling Black Wednesday. It was hard to tell what was blowing up where, because those hundred or so attacks were all happening simultaneously, and not just in the capital Beirut, but also in other parts of the country.

They targeted very densely populated parts of the capital, neighbourhoods in the capital that were themselves hosting people who had been displaced from other parts of the country. In the Beqaa, mourners at a funeral in a cemetery were targeted. In Beirut, workers at a well-known roastery were removed by Civil Defence personnel as charred corpses.

So, it was a very, very ugly day. And as we speak, the — I can’t say “rescue,” because there’s — unfortunately, the people are dead, but search teams continue to try and locate and find and retrieve the remains of people who were killed in the rubble of their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel will “continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required,” but later said he’s approved direct talks with Lebanon as soon as possible. Can you talk about what’s happening with these negotiations?

You had the Belgian foreign minister who had come to Beirut to meet with the Lebanese President Aoun, and the bombing hit very close to their quarters, as he was congratulating the Lebanese president on saying that he would directly negotiate with Israel, then condemned the attack and said Lebanon had to be included with the ceasefire.

Can you take it from there? What’s happening now? Where do you understand these talks will take place?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the first thing is that the talks remove Lebanon from the wider ceasefire talks that are due to take place between Iran and America tomorrow. That has many Lebanese worried, because they wonder: What sort of leverage does Lebanon have? It doesn’t exactly have a Strait of Hormuz, whereas Iran seems to have a stronger negotiating position.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam made it quite clear. He said that Lebanon, the Lebanese government, will negotiate for Lebanon, and that nobody else will do so.

So he has very clearly drawn the line between whatever Iran negotiates and what he hopes his government will be able to negotiate with the Israelis. Now, the Iranian foreign minister has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition of tomorrow’s talks, so it’s unclear whether or not they are going to go ahead.

So, in addition to the question of what sort of leverage does Lebanon have, some Lebanese are also worried because there is a precedent. There is a 15-month so-called ceasefire, where the — this is the second war in less than two years — and there was a 15-month ceasefire between the two.

During that period, the Lebanese government was supposed to negotiate indirectly with Israel, through something called a “mechanism” — which was US and French-led — to ensure that each side fulfilled its requirements under the terms of that ceasefire. During those 15 months, Israel continued to occupy five hilltop positions that it had newly seized in the war.

It was supposed to withdraw from them under the ceasefire. It didn’t. It was supposed to withdraw its troops back across its border under the ceasefire. It didn’t. So the Lebanese government was unable to get Israel to adhere to any of the conditions of the ceasefire. So some Lebanese wonder what it will be able to achieve now.

In addition, I have to say that the — just the mere fact of direct talks not only breaks a taboo here in Lebanon, it also breaks a very longstanding law. Since the mid-1950s here, it is considered an act of treason to have any direct interaction with an Israeli.

But the Lebanese president himself, General Joseph Aoun, about a month ago, called for direct talks with Israel, breaking that massive, massive taboo. He had four conditions for these talks that were supposed to be followed sequentially. The first condition was an immediate and complete ceasefire.

Condition number two was that the Lebanese Army is strengthened. Third was that the Lebanese Army would continue its efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

And then fourth was the direct negotiation. So it looks like the Lebanese state has jumped over the president’s own — you know, three of his conditions to go straight to the fourth one.

So, Hezbollah, for its part, has said it does not think that Lebanon should be negotiating under fire, because it puts it in the weaker position. Some Lebanese fear that this is a ploy by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prolong the war under the pretext of, you know, having these talks under fire.

The proponents of the talks, I have to say, say that it is an issue of Lebanese sovereignty that Lebanon will negotiate any sort of deal with the Israelis. They also say that Lebanon is not a card for the Iranians to wield or to use in any negotiations. And they point out that, well, you don’t exactly talk to your friends to make deals; you talk to your enemies.

So, it’s a very, very divisive issue. The Hezbollah secretary-general is due to give a speech where he will, no doubt, address the issue of the talks. And there’s supposed to be a protest here in Lebanon, just behind me, actually, in front of the Grand Serail, which is where the prime minister’s office is, against the idea of these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to the questions you raise in your latest New York magazine piece, “The Iran War Is Not Over: Scenes from a day of carnage in Beirut.” First of all, “How much of Lebanon is Israel prepared to destroy while claiming to target Hezbollah and its infrastructure, and will the world just watch as it does so?”

And your second question: “Can Israel even defeat Hezbollah militarily or is it, as many Lebanese suspect, trying to exact so painful a price from fellow Lebanese that they turn on the group, plunging the country into civil strife?”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Israelis have made no secret of what they want to do in Lebanon. Officials, from the defence minister, Smotrich, the finance minister, they have all talked about Lebanon being part of their Greater Israel project. They have talked about seizing and occupying southern Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, which, at its deepest, is about 30 km away from the Israeli border.

Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said that he wants to turn that area, that lush, verdant agricultural area, into a wasteland that resembles what the Israelis did in Gaza. He has threatened that the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced from there will not be allowed to return.

So, that’s what the Israelis have indicated that they want to do.

In terms of what they’re able to do, they have, according to Israeli media reports, had to scale back some of those ambitions because of the fierce resistance that they’re facing on the ground from Hezbollah fighters.

Let me give you the example of a town in southern Lebanon called Khiam, where there are Israeli forces in this town, but they have been fighting for weeks and weeks to try and take control of it, and they have been unable to.

So, according to the Israeli media reports, they now say that they want to occupy about a three-to-four-kilometre strip of territory. And Hezbollah will, no doubt, fight and try and prevent them from doing that, too. So, that’s what the Israelis want to do.

In terms of Lebanese turning on each other, Israeli officials called up — there are a couple of Christian villages down in the south. There are also Sunni. There are Druze, as well as the Shiite villages down south. It’s a mixed area.

And the Israeli officials called up some of those Christian towns, where the people refuse to leave their territory, and told them, “Listen, do not shelter your Shiite neighbours; otherwise, you will come under attack.”

So, that’s a very clear sort of indication of what the Israelis are sort of hoping to foment in terms of civil strife and turning, literally, neighbour against neighbour.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play a clip from a Beirut resident. Naim Chebbo survived a bombing on Wednesday, said he’s now afraid to sleep. He said he wants the fighting to stop, and blamed Hezbollah.

NAIM CHEBBO: [translated] We want peace. We don’t want problems with anyone anymore. Eighty percent of Arab countries have peace with Israel. Why doesn’t Lebanon have peace, so that we can end all these problems?

As long as Hezbollah is in Lebanon, Israel will strike Lebanon. That’s it. Hezbollah is not defending Lebanon. It’s defending Iran’s agenda. That’s it.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, how common or typical is this comment of a Lebanese who survived the bombing on Wednesday, Israel’s bombing?

RANIA ABOUZEID: The Lebanese are very divided over the issue of Hezbollah and its weapons, and they always have been, but more so now in this recent war, because it started on March 2, and Hezbollah lobbed about six rockets into Israel, claiming that it was in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as, “in defense of Lebanon.”

So, many Lebanese saw it as a war of choice almost by Hezbollah.

Now, Hezbollah and its supporters say that after those 15 months of a ceasefire — that wasn’t really a ceasefire, because, according to the UN, Israel violated Lebanon’s sovereignty about 15,000 times during that period. There were thousands of attacks, resulting in the deaths of more than 350 Lebanese.

So, Hezbollah supporters say they were patient for those 15 months, and now they have chosen to respond.

But, certainly, there are Lebanese who are very angry with Hezbollah. They don’t want any war. I mean, no Lebanese wants war, even the hundreds of thousands of displaced, many of whom might be Hezbollah supporters. Everybody wants to go home.

You know, war is not the option for anybody. But it’s a question of: Under what circumstances, for example, will Lebanon negotiate with Israel? Will it be under the Iranian umbrella in these talks tomorrow, or will it try and forge another path? And which is better?

I mean, look, there are some Lebanese who don’t care if aliens will negotiate on behalf of Lebanon as long as it can secure a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to, finally, ask you about what’s happening on the ground. According to the World Health Organisation, some of Lebanon’s hospitals may run out of lifesaving medical supplies within days and attempt to treat patients wounded by the Israeli airstrikes. This is WHO representative in Lebanon, Dr Abdinasir Abubakar.

DR. ABDINASIR ABUBAKAR: There are some shortages, some of those essential chronic medications, the insulin, but also some of the, you know, dialysis supplies.

If the current situation and the current demand actually continue and the current escalation continue, probably the country may be facing a very real risk of critical shortage, including trauma supplies, surgical materials, blood products, chronic medications.

And any other further disruption could seriously hinder the ability of providing timely, adequate care for both emergency and ongoing health needs.

AMY GOODMAN: Rania Abouzeid, your final comments on what you think is about to happen? And do you think Iran will insist on including this in the ceasefire, joined by many countries around the world who are saying Lebanon has to be included, or, as you write in your column, “many Lebanese are wondering whether Iran will forsake Hezbollah and allow Lebanon to be pounded”?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Very difficult to tell, Amy. That’s the honest truth. But, you know, Iran also has its considerations. If it does forsake Hezbollah and goes it alone, well, then, you know, Hezbollah is part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. There are other allies in the region who will see this and wonder if Iran might forsake it, too.

So it’s a question of its broader network. There are the Houthis in Yemen. There are various militia groups in Iraq who will be watching very carefully to see what Iran does, if it stands by its ally, Hezbollah, or if it doesn’t.

There are also — it also has domestic considerations. You know, Iranians have been pounded now for weeks and weeks. They want a reprieve. They don’t want to return to war.

So, the Iranians will be juggling those, their own sort of conditions, as well, in terms of what their ultimate stance is with regard to heading to the negotiations with or without a ceasefire in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Rania, I mean, you are there in Beirut. Israel struck central Beirut, southern Beirut, gone beyond the Litani River to the Zahrani River, some are wondering if they’ll take over that whole land, about a fifth of Lebanon. But you, yourself, are you afraid to walk in the streets?

RANIA ABOUZEID: It depends on what streets, Amy. It depends on where, what part of Lebanon, because that’s the thing about Wednesday’s attack, is that it shattered the sense that any place is safe, because you just don’t know.

The neighbourhoods that were targeted were very far, for example, from the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has some institutions — not that that justifies striking a very densely, you know, populated area. The southern suburbs are home to hundreds of thousands of people.

But it was anybody’s guess. Like, why target a street with a roastery? Why target during rush hour when children were leaving school and civil servants were heading home? So, that’s the thing. The sense of safety anywhere has been shattered.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by, for the first time in six years except for yesterday, Juan González, also in New York. It’s great to be with you again, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thanks, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

As the US and Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran enters its 25th day, President Trump is claiming that Iran has begun negotiations with the United States, but the Iranian government has dismissed the claim as “fake news”, accusing Trump of trying to manipulate financial and oil markets.

Over the weekend, Trump threatened to, quote, “obliterate” Iranian power plants if Iran did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Monday night. But on Monday, Trump reversed course, extended his deadline to five days and repeatedly claimed the US was now in productive conversations with Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “With Iran, we’ve been negotiating for a long time. And this time, they mean business. And it’s only because of the great job that our military did, is the reason they mean business. They want to settle, and we’re going to get it done, I hope.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Earlier in the day, President Trump claimed he might personally take joint control of the Strait of Hormuz with Iran’s next ayatollah.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “It will be jointly controlled.”

REPORTER: “By whom?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Maybe me. Maybe me.”

REPORTER: “You want the United States to be in control of the Strait of Hormuz?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Me and the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is, whoever the next ayatollah — look, and there’ll also be a form of a — a very serious form of a regime change.

“Now, in all fairness, everybody has been killed from the regime. They’re really starting off. There’s automatically a regime change.

“But we’re dealing with some people that I find to be very reasonable, very solid. The people within know who they are. They’re very respected.

“And maybe one of them will be exactly what we’re looking for. Look at Venezuela, how well that’s working out. We are doing so well in Venezuela with oil and with the relationship between the president-elect and us. And maybe we find somebody like that in Iran.”

AMY GOODMAN: Despite Trump’s claims of US-Iran negotiations, US Central Command says US forces, “continue to aggressively strike,” Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran has retaliated by striking other Gulf nations and Israel. Israeli officials said Iran has launched seven missile barrages since midnight, targeting Tel Aviv and other cities. The Israeli military said one of the missiles that hit Tel Aviv carried a 220-pound warhead. Israel’s Health Ministry said nearly 4800 people have been injured by Iran’s attacks on Israel since the war began.

We go now to London, where we’re joined by Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. His recent piece for Zeteo is headlined “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.”

Well, Daniel Levy, thanks so much for being with us again. Why don’t you explain that headline?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, good to be with you, Amy and Juan.

Netanyahu himself and other Israeli leaders, although he’s been at the helm for much of the last three decades, have, during an awfully long period, told us Iran is at the precipice of becoming a nuclear power.

By the way, we should always remind ourselves, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. But they’ve been telling us, “It’s imminent. We have to act now.” And they’ve been trying to pull successive American presidents into that war, to launch such a military campaign.

They’ve never succeeded. You have had American presidents across the decades, from whichever party has been in power, who have created an extremely indulgent, permissive environment for Israel in the region, and in particular when it comes to Israel’s consistent war crimes against the Palestinians.

What you have not had is a president who could be led into this kind of a military operation. And we’re seeing right now, in almost the last month of this war, precisely why. But this president is made of different stuff, less serious stuff, apparently, and Netanyahu saw his opportunity.

But the reason, I think, why this was of such significance for Netanyahu is we are in a new era. It’s not an era of a Pax Americana with — alongside all that indulgence of Israel, there were still certain brake mechanisms. This time, Israel sees us in an era of what I would call a Pax Greater Israel.

This is about how far Israel can extend its dominion, how much of a hard-power, dominant hegemon it can be in the region, seizing parts of Syria or of Lebanon, trying to finish an eradicationist approach to the Palestinians. And crucially, to do that, you have to weaken Iran militarily, to remove some kind of deterrent.

You can only do that with the US, so you need to pull the US into this war. If that means further accelerating American decline and even accelerating Israel’s loss of support in America, then it’s a price to pay. It’s kind of “use it or lose it,” because those things are happening anyway.

In saying all of this, I don’t want to suggest that America has no agency in this. There are things to do with the Trump administration, the neocons, the people who still have positions of influence in the US that have brought them into this. But that’s what Netanyahu is trying to achieve, to achieve Greater Israel, domination in the region, including the weakening of the Gulf, which is intentional, at the expense of America bleeding further reputational, political, economic assets in this war.

Trump’s ‘Israel First’ Iran War                       Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Daniel Levy, you’ve also written that, quote, “The idea that this is a war to serve American rather than Israeli interests resonates primarily in three spaces: the gullible, the true believers (especially of end times religious [thinking]), or those who are paid-up members of Israel’s echo chamber.” Could you elaborate?

DANIEL LEVY: Yes. I think there is a lot of attention being paid to this question of who does this serve. Now, you can make the case that you also have a US government that is locked into its own kind of logic of war.

You have, if I may suggest, a decline anxiety in the US. You have an attempt to reassert primacy and preponderance. I don’t think that is or can go well. You have Marco Rubio, for instance, telling the Europeans, “Join us in the next Western century of imperial domination.”

That can perhaps play out in the Western Hemisphere — the crime committed with the kidnapping of a leader in Venezuela, the illegal blockade on Cuba. But if you travel too far afield to find monsters to slay, and if you have an incoherent strategy and an incompetent administration implementing that strategy, then things are going to go very badly wrong, which was entirely predictable in this illegal war of choice launched by the US and Israel.

And therefore, if you look at this, and even if you factor in the attempt to assert American interest, this war would not have happened if Israel’s leader had not been there whispering in the president’s ear, making the case.

[There were] seven bilateral meetings in the first 13 months of the second Trump term between Trump and Netanyahu, two meetings in the eight weeks leading up to the launching of this illegal war, daily phone calls, we are told, now information coming out in The New York Times that the Mossad apparently bamboozled Americans with the idea that if you could decapitate some of the regime leadership, the Mossad could foment a coup on the streets, that you could arm Kurdish groups from the outside to take geographical parts of Iran to start dismantling the central state.

You really have to be, therefore, either extremely gullible, as I suggested, or a true believer that, well, this is high risk, but it’s worth it, because what maybe you’re ideologically committed to, the Greater Israel cause, maybe that comes from a place of evangelical dispensationalist belief in the end times, or you simply are part of an echo chamber whose wheels are greased very consistently.

And we see that play out over so many years in American politics. That’s what I’m suggesting. And I do think that the attempt to suggest this is more than Israel first, that somehow this serves America’s interest, are not going to go well, and Israel will pay a tremendous price for that over time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also — there appears to have been a shift in the last few days in how the Israeli government permits damage within Israel from Iranian attacks to be publicised by the press, because, clearly, during the first two weeks of the war, Israel essentially prevented any kind of images, from the US media especially, going out to the world.

Now, in the last few days, it’s almost as if Netanyahu and the government want their own people and the rest of the world to see some of this damage. I’m wondering your thoughts about this. Has there been a change in approach or tactics by the Israeli government?

DANIEL LEVY: So, I’m not so sure. I think it’s an interesting question to dwell upon. But what one might be seeing is an inability, and therefore a degradation of credibility if Israel tries to claim that none of this destruction is happening — in other words, an inability to prevent those images from coming out — when those strikes are now causing very significant damage. I don’t want to exaggerate that, either. I don’t think that is what causes this unnecessary war to come to an end.

But what one perhaps has to look to is, if you remember, early on in the war, one of the real questions, as this became a war of endurance, almost a war of attrition, was: Could the US and Israeli side sufficiently deplete Iran’s missile-launching capacity before Iran both sufficiently degraded the interception capacity on the Israeli and US side — so they have to be a bit more selective in terms of what they use the interceptors for, because they can’t take everything out and they are going to run out — and also Iran apparently holding back some of its heavier kit, because in its strategy, it assumed this could go on for a long time, and it had to have a plan for week one, week two, week three? And so, I think, to the extent to which we’re seeing more images, it is likely because that equation hasn’t played well for the US and Israel, and because we’re seeing more damage being done.

I think you have a war where Israel has a strategy. It’s an extremely ambitious overreach strategy in terms of not regime change, but regime collapse, state collapse, implosion, the dismantling of the Iranian state, where Iran has a strategy of escalating horizontally, testing American endurance and holding out and winning that way.

But I think you’d be really hard pushed to find a coherent strategy on the US side.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip of President Trump speaking to reporters about US aims in negotiations.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “No nuclear bomb, no nuclear weapon, not even close to it, low key on the missiles. We want to see peace in the Middle East. We want the nuclear dust.

“We’re going to want that, and I think we’re going to get that. We’ve agreed to that. … If this happens, it’s a great start for Iran to build itself back, and it’s everything that we want.

“And it’s also great for Israel, and it’s great for the other Middle Eastern countries.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Daniel Levy, you are a former Israeli negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers. If you can respond to what he’s saying, and also to what Iran is saying, that the idea that there’s any negotiation going on is fake news intended to “manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped,” said the speaker of Iran’s parliament?

DANIEL LEVY: So, there are a couple of things going on here, and I want to try and disentangle those. First of all, the question of: Are negotiations taking place? And what I think is very clear is that there are channels of communication via third countries.

Those have been available all the time. Partly, one has to understand that countries in the region, who were not a party to launching this war nor to the decision to go to war, who, in fact, cautioned against this war, in the Gulf and elsewhere, they are feeling tremendous blowback and taking hits from this war, and they are keen to bring it to an end.

There may be some who, for some reason, still believe America can do the job and that they should trust America’s competence and coherence in attempting to do so. I think most are not in that camp. They know the cost is too high, and they are experiencing daily what it means to rely on America for your security, and the answer is not good.

So, there are a number of states, also beyond that — Türkiye has been super active, Pakistan, for instance, Egypt — who are maintaining open channels with both parties and obviously sending messages, because, by the way, the whole world is suffering from this — higher fuel, food, fertiliser prices, etc. So there are active channels. Are they talking directly? I don’t know. I doubt it. But I also think it doesn’t matter very much.

What matters is the question you kind of raise there, Amy, which is: Are these talks, first of all, intended to produce an outcome? Was this another American deployment of diplomacy as a ruse?

We saw in the lead-up to this war that America played with negotiations, attempted that as a distraction, but actually intended to go for the military option. So, is this trying to buy some time while the US waits for a third aircraft carrier, more of your taxpayer dollars, to be deployed in the West Asia-Middle East region?

Was this a Monday-morning pre-stock market intervention on the part of the president? Because if there’s one thing he does pay attention to, it’s that. So, was he trying to calm the markets, give himself a few more days, or is this a serious attempt to chart a path to deescalation?

If it is the latter, then that would have to include an acknowledgment that in negotiations you have to listen to the other side. You have to take into account their interests. If you go in with maximalist positions, often designed by the worst elements of maximalism in your administration and by the Israelis intentionally trying to make sure that talks cannot succeed, then — guess what — the talks won’t succeed.

So, if you think you can impose on Iran in these talks things that you couldn’t achieve in your military assault or things that they weren’t willing to accept beforehand, then the talks are doomed to fail.

The one thing that may be working to our benefit is not who might host these talks. It’s certainly not the fact that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff might be involved, because that would be very bad news indeed, given their record of failure, if they’re the only people.

But the one piece of good news is that the loose and perhaps nonexistent relationship between what Trump says and the realities out there in the real world, that relationship means that Trump can claim what he likes, because what we’re probably looking for is three victory speeches, given in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington, DC.

They won’t align. They won’t match up. But they might allow for a cessation and then for some of these issues to be addressed afterwards.

But as long as that doesn’t happen, we still have to contend with the fact that Israel has been driving a lot of the escalatory logic in this war. It will continue to attempt to prevent a ceasefire. It’s not alone. There are certainly American sources trying to do that, as well.

Israel is still on the impunity high from its Gaza genocide, which has led us here. And we have to contend with the fact that each time you try and get a “mission accomplished” victory image, you might escalate, leading to a further cycle of escalation, and then that can collapse any putative path out of this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Daniel Levy, we only have about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you — while the war is continuing in Iran and Israeli forces are in Lebanon, the settlers in the West Bank continue to perpetuate violence against Palestinians, and the IDF continues to attack Palestinians in Gaza. I’m wondering your sense of how this has basically faded from the international view while the war against Iran continues.

DANIEL LEVY: Well, I wish I could say that it needed the war in Iran in order to shift attention away from this, in order for Israel to be able to continue to not be held accountable and to get away with these daily violations of international law and with these appalling atrocities against the Palestinians, but it didn’t take the war.

Israel is doing that, and it will continue to do that unless and until it is held to account, it is contained and deterred. And, of course, you also see 1 million displaced in Lebanon and the attempt, apparently, to reestablish a zone of Israeli domination there, still in control of territory in Syria, as well.

But I also want to challenge this notion that the problem in the West Bank is the settlers. There is no armed settler militia without the IDF. The settlers roam the West Bank with the active backing of Israel’s military.

Occasionally, they may call a handful of people to account and say, “No. Stop.” But most of the occupation and the entrenchment of a matrix of control and an apartheid regime, that is run not by lone settlers. That is run by the Israeli state. That is run by the IDF.

It is the IDF and the Israeli state that run that regime of control, that also, as you mentioned, despite the so-called ceasefire, are in control of about 60 percent directly of Gaza, carrying out daily military assaults, daily killings of Palestinians in Gaza, still not allowing the necessary humanitarian assistance or shelter into Gaza, and, in parallel, conducting the largest military intervention in the West Bank, the largest displacement and destruction, often focused on refugee camps, like Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur al-Shams, that we have seen since 1967.

I think this will ultimately end very badly for Israel and generate tremendous blowback. But in the meantime, it is again the Palestinians bearing the brunt.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, we want to thank you so much for being with us, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. We’ll link to your piece in Zeteo, “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.” You can follow Levy’s writings on his Substack.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Global oil and natural gas prices are soaring after Israel bombed a massive natural gas reserve in Iran, the largest in the world. Iran retaliated by twice attacking the world’s largest liquid natural gas production facility, located in Qatar.

Iran also attacked key energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. At one point, the price of oil reached US$118 a barrel, a 60 percent jump since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran.

• READ MORE: US-Israel attack Iran’s Natanz nuclear site as Diego Garcia base targeted
• Israel – the parasite state sabotaging peace in the Middle East
• Trump says no ceasefire as Khamenei tells of ‘dizzying blow’ to US, Israel
• Other US-Israeli war on Iran reports

In a post online, Trump threatened to blow up the entire South Pars gas field if Iran continued to target the Qatari facility. Trump also claimed the US, “knew nothing” about the Israeli attack on the South Pars gas field, but The Wall Street Journal reports Trump approved the strike to pressure Iran to open up the critical Strait of Hormuz.

AMY GOODMAN: About 20 percent of the world’s oil exports flows through the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump has asked other countries to send warships to help force open the strait, but many nations are rejecting the request.

We’re joined now by Laleh Khalili, professor of Gulf studies at University of Exeter and the author of several books, including her latest, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. She also wrote Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula.

Professor Khalili, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by talking about the state of the Strait of Hormuz right now, its closure; President Trump, according to Reuters, perhaps sending in thousands of troops, what exactly this means; and the Israeli bombing of the South Pars gas field, the largest in the world?

President Trump said, in a rare rebuke, the US didn’t know. Most people are saying that is highly unlikely, that is probably untrue.

The end of the petrodollar?             Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript:

LALEH KHALILI: So, the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important choke points for oil — a choke point being an area during which, if it’s closed down, you end up getting a major disruption in the flow of global trade.

So, the Strait of Hormuz is one. The Suez Canal is another one. The Panama Canal is another one.

And there are a number of these different choke points all around the world. Now, what’s specific about Hormuz and what’s distinctive about it is that it is the choke point where the quantity of oil that goes through is higher than any other commodity that actually flows across the strait.

As you just mentioned, about 30 percent of the global oil flows through that. And part of the reason for that is, of course, that the world’s biggest oil producers — some of the biggest oil producers are all sitting around the Persian/Arabian Gulf, so Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Abu Dhabi, which all are huge producers of oil in the first place, and then natural gas in the case of Qatar and Iran in second place.

Now, what has been fascinating is that anybody who has one of these apps that you can put on your phone, like MarineTraffic or VesselFinder, you can actually take a look at the flow of traffic, the flow of vessel traffic, flow of ship traffic, through these different seas in the world.

And if you zoom in on the Strait of Hormuz, what you’ll find is that instead of seeing actually a steady traffic of little usually pink or green arrows going through, which indicate tankers, what you end up seeing are major clusters of ships that are bunched up very near ports where oil is produced and usually put on ships.

What that indicates is that, basically, for a number of different reasons — and I’m going to go into that in a minute — the flow of ships, the flow of ship traffic, has basically come to a halt.

Now, the reasons behind this are multifold. Of course, there is, number one, that Iran is attacking a number of the ships that are going through, and the way that it’s attacking them is through the use of very cheap either drones or sea mines, and that means that it’s basically almost impossible to deal with this particular threat, because the drones are produced so extensively in terms of number and they’re so inexpensive that they can basically be replenished even if they are destroyed.

Also being smaller, they’re much harder to target, etc. So, there has been a number of drone attacks against ships carrying oil through the channel, and so, of course, that scares a lot of carriers, a lot of tankers.

The second reason, which I actually think is perhaps even more significant, in part because it is actually not something that either the US or Iran can control, is that the moment something like this happens, the moment that there is a threat against ships, what you end up having is that insurance brokers, primarily situated in London, but there are, of course, some also in the US, China and in Europe, but really the centre for provision of maritime insurance is London, at Lloyd’s, and the ship brokers end up putting a specific war risk premium on ships.

And that means that going from something like 1 percent of the cost of the hull, meaning the ship’s body, or the cargo, meaning what it’s carrying, goes to something like 5 percent, or it goes from one fraction of 1 percent to, say, 5 percent. So that means that suddenly, instead of paying in the hundreds of thousands for insurance for a super tanker, what you’re looking at is millions in insurance, which, of course, increases the cost of the oil that is traveling. So, that’s the second reason.

The third reason is something that the Houthis noticed when they were blockading the Red Sea in support of the Palestinians when Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. And that is that sometimes the threat alone suffices in getting the ships to stop going through or, indeed, to make declarations that allows for them a degree of protection.

So, the Houthis, when they had blockaded the sea, had asked that any ships that claimed that they were not touching Israel, meaning they were not delivering to or picking up from Israel, could be allowed to go through the canal.

And so, it happened that this automatic identification system that a lot of ships — well, all ships carry — it’s called the AIS system, and the AIS system indicates what ship is in the vicinity of the system, what it’s carrying and what flag it has, meaning which authorities it responds to.

So, now what we’re seeing is that apparently Iran has mentioned that any ship, for example, that is going to China will be let through, or any ship that is not coming from one of these allied states to the US will be allowed through. Of course, there is a lot of variation in what kind of thing they have requested or what is being reported, so it’s a lot harder to see what exactly the AIS systems are being on these ships.

As I said, we are mostly seeing them clustering and waiting in these locations, one of the main ones being the Port of Fujairah, which is actually not in the Persian Gulf. It is in the Gulf of Oman.

And oil from Abu Dhabi, which is on the Persian Gulf side, is shipped to Fujaira through a pipeline. So we’re seeing a cluster of ships near Fujaira.

Iran, of course, also attacked Fujaira port. And then we’re seeing a cluster of ships near Ras Laffan, which is the main gas production and gas lifting port in Qatar. The third is, of course, around the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, a little bit further up the Persian Gulf. And so, these clusters of ships are waiting there and hoping to be able to at some point pick up oil to be carried out.

But we’re not seeing much of that flow anywhere at all.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Khalili, you mentioned that there are — they are looking for, the Iranians, to see which vessels in the Strait of Hormuz — to what countries they’re affiliated, looking at their flags. Chinese vessels have reportedly been permitted to pass through the strait. China imports about 40 percent of its oil from the Middle East and has been one of the largest buyers of Iranian oil. There are also reports that the Iranians are suggesting they’d consider allowing a small number of oil tankers to pass through the strait if the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan rather than —

LALEH KHALILI: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — US dollars. If you could comment on that?

LALEH KHALILI: This is really fascinating, because, of course, we know that the fundamental basis of the US imperial order since the end of the Second World War has been, on the one hand, petroleum and, on the other hand, the US dollar. The globe’s production and finance worlds are dependent on the petroleum that the US has guaranteed the flow of since the end of the Second World War, and which, until the nationalisation of oil in the 1970s and 1980s, basically controlled something like 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

After nationalisation, that percentage dropped dramatically, but the US dollar continues to be, and the financial channels that the US has crafted, continue to be a very significant bolster for the empire.

So, the fact that Iran is actually looking for alternatives to the dollar in order to challenge the petrodollar regime, which is, you know, as I said, one of the fundamentals of the US empire, is a really interesting and quite clever indication of how the Iranians are hoping to influence the crafting of a world post this war, or a new world order post this war, where there’s a multipolar financial system, where, for example, the dollar is no longer a single currency that rules the world and the US is the only channel that controls — or, the only power that controls financial channels, because, of course, the US has used this inordinate power to strong-arm various states, to institute sanctions, to make it difficult for its enemies, for example, to purchase oil.

And, of course, it has used it to coerce a lot of countries, as we see, for example, in the case of Cuba or Iran, or indeed Russia, to do its bidding. So, the fact that Iran is calling for petroyuans to become an alternative to petrodollars is actually quite significant also in indicating that the Iranians are well aware of how extensively the US has used its coercive sanction capabilities, through its control of the financial channels and through its mastery of the petrodollar, and are trying to erode that power.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Khalili, you know, the US is now the world’s largest oil producer, but because oil is a globally priced commodity, the price goes up in the US if the world market price goes up. But —

LALEH KHALILI: That’s right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — how important do you think this might be in Trump’s calculation? Because another consideration, another aspect of this, may be that as oil supplies diminish from the Middle East, the US could benefit, because it is the world’s largest oil producer, and the price of its oil will go up, and the demand for its oil.

LALEH KHALILI: Absolutely. What a fantastic question, because, in fact, we have seen that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began and the Nord Stream gas, natural gas, pipelines to Europe were sabotaged, we now — there are now indications that this may have been done at the behest of the US.and its Ukrainian allies. But nevertheless, when that sabotage happened, it actually translated into massive gains for US natural gas production.

The thing is that there are a number of reasons why oil is not — why the US cannot become the sole oil producer for the whole of the world. One is the question of proximity, for example. The second is the question of capacity that the US has in order to actually replace, for example, the oil that is produced by Saudi Arabia or by Iran or, indeed, by Russia.

But the third factor — and I think that this is the one that I think we should look out for — is that in the last 10 or 15 years, China has actually begun generating an alternative set of fuels, sustainable fuels, and developing technologies, particularly of electric and battery technologies, that will allow for, for example, solar or wind energy to displace fossil fuels.

And the more that the price of oil goes up, which, of course, we’ve seen that happen, as you mentioned earlier — and, in fact, this also translates into major windfalls for US oil companies. This oil prices going up benefits Chevron. It benefits Exxon. It doesn’t benefit the average US citizen at the petrol stations, at the gas stations, but it does benefit the oil companies.

So, it definitely does — that does happen. But the higher the price of oil goes up, the relatively cheaper it becomes to actually have sustainable alternatives, which, of course, that means that it benefits China in a major way, since China is way ahead of the rest of the world in producing these technologies and in producing them cheaply.

The solar panels that are being produced in China are a fraction of the price of solar panels that were being produced something like 15 or 20 years ago. And I think this shift is actually a major long-term concern for the oil companies.

In the short term, they’re taking all the windfall that they can get. But this, again, is — the kind of a postwar order that will likely also have major implications for the kind of energy people are paying to use or people are willing to use, actually.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 20 seconds. But the effect of the bombing of the South Pars facility, the largest gas facility in the world, what it means for Iran, what it means for the world, and President Trump denying the US had anything to do with, which most do not believe?

LALEH KHALILI: No, absolutely not. There is no way that Israel would have actually done this without coordination with the United States. And, in fact, the channels that deny, for example, that the US coordinated, or report Trump’s denials, are the channels that are often used to feed us the kinds of lies that the administration tells us.

But what is quite significant about South Pars — and I know it’s a very short time left, so I’m going to be very quick about it — is that the South Pars field is actually shared between Iran and Qatar.

The North Dome, which is on the south part of the Persian Gulf, is Qatar’s share of this major field, and Iran’s bit is in the northern part of the Persian Gulf.

And so, the destruction of the infrastructure there will not only have an effect on Iranians’ ability to produce electricity and fuel their various kinds of industries and/or homes, but it will also have an effect on the infrastructures that are used by the Qataris and which the Iranians and Qataris have been using in an extraordinary degree — to an extraordinary degree of coordination since the fields have been used. So, this actually also affects Qatar.

The bombing itself also affects Qatar. And I don’t think that this is a calculation that the rather know-nothing Trump administration has taken into account.

AMY GOODMAN: Laleh Khalili, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of Gulf studies at University of Exeter, author of several books, including her latest, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. Thanks so much for being there.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Democracy Now! speaks with Iranian Israeli political activist Orly Noy, editor of the Hebrew-language news site Local Call, about her recent article, “Longing for My Tehran.”

“It’s been a very emotional time since the beginning of the war, not just because we are constantly running in and out of shelters,” says Noy, “but because this time, the footage of the bombing that I grew accustomed to seeing for over two years from the genocide in Gaza was now coming from my homeland.”

Noy also comments on Israeli political support for the war on Iran, saying “the very few attempts to protest against the war were brutally crushed by the Israeli police.”

• READ MORE: Trump scolds allies over Strait of Hormuz operation; UAE closes airspace
• Chris Hedges: The world according to Gaza – it’s only the start
• War on Iran: Australia should put trust in its neighbours not a modern Titanic rogue state
• Other US-Israel War on Iran reports

Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is also increasing. “Up until now, our worry was about the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Now it is just about executing Palestinians, both by the army and by the settlers,” says Noy.

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the arrests of two American journalists for covering a protest at the Cities Church [in the Minnesota Twin City of] St Paul, where a top ICE official serves as pastor.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort from the Twin Cities were released last Friday after initial court hearings.

A federal grand jury in Minnesota indicted Lemon and Fort for violating two laws, an 1871 law originally designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan and the FACE Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which was written to protect abortion clinics.

The indictment names a total of nine people, including the two journalists. US Attorney General Pam Bondi took personal credit for the arrests of Fort and Lemon and two others on Friday, posting on X that the arrests occurred at her direction.

Don Lemon, who was arrested late Thursday night by the FBI in Los Angeles, had been reporting on the church protest in St Paul in January as an independent journalist.

His attorney, Abbe Lowell, described the arrest as an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration.”

On Friday afternoon, Don Lemon vowed to continue reporting after appearing court in Los Angeles.

DON LEMON: “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now.

“In fact, there is no more important time than right now, this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable.

“Again, I will not stop now. I will not stop ever. … The First Amendment of the Constitution protects that work for me and for countless of other journalists who do what I do.

“I stand with all of them, and I will not be silent. I look forward to my day in court. Thank you all.”

AMY GOODMAN: Don Lemon attended the Grammys on Sunday night.

Also arrested Friday was Georgia Fort, an independent journalist from the Twin Cities. She posted a video to Facebook just as federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration were about to arrest her and take her to the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis.

GEORGIA FORT: “I wanted to alert the public that agents are at my door right now.

“They’re saying that they were able to go before a grand jury sometime, I guess, in the last 24 hours and that they have a warrant for my arrest.

“I’ve talked to my attorney, and I’m being advised to go with them, I guess, down to Whipple. And my children are here. They are impacted by this.

“This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media. We are supposed to have our constitutional right of the freedom to film, to be a member of the press.

“I don’t feel like I have my First Amendment right as a member of the press, because now federal agents are at my door arresting me for filming the church protest a few weeks ago.”

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined now from Minneapolis by that longtime independent journalist Georgia Fort, whose reporting has been recognised with three Midwest Emmys.

‘Journalism Is Not A Crime’                Video: Democracy Now!

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence. Republished under Creative Commons.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s Democracy Now! show looking at US-China relations and President Trump’s threat to resume nuclear weapons testing.

President Trump and President Xi Jinping met in South Korea and agreed to a one-year trade truce, but the trade deal was overshadowed by Trump’s announcement that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992.

Just before his meeting with Xi, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Because of other countries testing programmes, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”

AMY GOODMAN: It’s unclear what President Trump was referring to. Russia and China have not tested a nuclear weapon in decades; North Korea last tested one in 2017. Trump spoke briefly with reporters after his meeting with Xi, flying back to the United States.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It had to do with others. They seem to all be nuclear testing.

REPORTER 1: Russia?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don’t do testing, and we’ve halted it years — many years ago.

But with others doing testing, I think it’s appropriate that we do also.

REPORTER 1: Did Israel — did Israel —

REPORTER 2: Any details around the testing, sir? Like where, when?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will be — it’ll be announced. You know, we have test sites. It’ll be announced.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s threat to resume nuclear tests comes just months before the last major nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expires. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, expires February of next year.

We go right now to Dr Ira Helfand. He’s an expert on the medical consequences of nuclear war, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He also serves on the steering committee of the Back from the Brink campaign. He’s today joining us from Winnipeg, Canada, where he’s speaking at the 5th Youth Nuclear Peace Summit.

Dr Helfand, welcome back to Democracy Now! You must have been shocked last night when, just before the certainly globally touted meeting between Trump and Xi, Trump sent out on social media that he’s going to begin testing nuclear weapons, comparing it, saying that we have to test them on an equal basis, referring to countries like Russia and China.

Can you explain what he is talking about? They, like the United States, haven’t tested nuclear weapons in decades.

DR IRA HELFAND: Good morning, Amy.

Actually, I can’t explain what he’s talking about, because it doesn’t make any sense. As you pointed out, Russia and China have not tested nuclear weapons for decades. And I think the most important thing right now is that the White House has got to clarify what President Trump is talking about.

If we really are going to resume explosive nuclear testing, this is an extraordinarily destabilising decision, and one which will increase even more the already great danger that we have of stumbling into a nuclear conflict. But they need to clarify this, because, as you pointed out, the statement doesn’t make sense in terms of what’s actually happening in the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr Helfand, what would these tests entail, were this to actually occur the way that Trump has said?

DR IRA HELFAND: Well, again, it’s not clear what he’s talking about. If he’s — if he is speaking about resuming explosive nuclear testing, presumably this would not be in the atmosphere, which is prohibited by a treaty which the United States did sign and ratify in 1963, but it would be underground nuclear explosions. And the principal danger there, I think, is political.

This will undoubtedly trigger response by other countries that have nuclear weapons, and dramatically accelerate the already very dangerous arms race that the world finds itself in today.

The one, perhaps, value of this statement is that it helps to draw attention to the fact that the nuclear problem has not gone away, as so many of us would like to believe. We are facing the gravest danger of nuclear war that has existed on the planet since the end of the Cold War, and possibly worse than it was during the Cold War.

And this comes at a time when the best science we have shows that even a very limited nuclear war, one that might take place between India and Pakistan, has the potential to trigger a global famine that could kill a quarter of the human race in two years.

We have to recognise that reality, and we need to change our nuclear policy so that it is no longer based on the idea that nuclear weapons make us safe, but that it recognises the fact that nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to our safety.

And for citizens in the United States in particular, I think this means doing things like are advocated by the Back from the Brink campaign, calling on the United States to stop this tit-for-tat exchange of threats with our nuclear adversaries and to enter into negotiations with all eight of the nuclear-armed states for a verifiable, enforceable agreement that will allow them to eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to an agreed-upon timetable, and so they can all join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at some point when they have completed this task.

This idea is dismissed sometimes as being unrealistic. I think what’s unrealistic is the belief that we can continue to maintain these enormous nuclear arsenals and expect that nothing is going to go wrong.

We’ve been lucky over and over again. This year alone, five of the nine countries which have nuclear weapons have been engaged in active military conflict. India and Pakistan were fighting each other. That could easily have escalated into a nuclear war between them, which could have had devastating consequences for the entire planet.

And we keep dodging bullets, and we keep acting as though that’s going to keep happening. It isn’t. Our luck is going to run out at some point, and we have to recognise that. We have to recognise the only way to guarantee our safety is to get rid of these weapons once and for all.

President Trump’s post announcing the U.S. would resume nuclear testing featured some inaccuracies, and introduced quite a bit of uncertainty. https://t.co/wRbnOxuaBU

— Axios (@axios) October 31, 2025

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr Helfand, before we conclude, just about the timing of Trump’s comment, which came just days after Russia said it had successfully tested a nuclear-armed missile, which it said could penetrate US defences.

Do you think Trump was responding to that, without perhaps understanding that there was a difference between that and carrying out explosive nuclear tests?

DR IRA HELFAND: It’s certainly possible, and the timing suggests that may be what’s happening. But again, the White House needs to clarify this statement, because, as it stands, it was an explicit instruction to begin testing at the test sites, which suggests nuclear explosive testing.

I suspect that is not what the president meant, but at this point, who knows?

AMY GOODMAN: Right. It was nuclear-capable, not nuclear-armed. And finally, I mean, he’s talking about doing this immediately, instructing what he called the War Department, the Department of War.

Isn’t the Energy Department in charge of the nuclear stockpile? And aren’t scores of nuclear scientists now furloughed during the government shutdown? Who is maintaining this very dangerous stockpile?

DR IRA HELFAND: That was another striking inconsistency in that statement. It is not the Pentagon, which he referred to as the Department of War, that would be conducting nuclear testing if it recurs. It is, Amy, as you suggested, it’s the Department of Energy that is responsible for this activity.

So, again, another area in which the statement is just confusing, puzzling and needs clarification. And I think, you know, this is a really urgent matter, because, as it stands, the statement itself is destabilising.

It raises tension. It creates further problems. And we don’t need that anymore. We need to —

AMY GOODMAN: And opens the door for other countries, is that right, to test nuclear weapons?

DR IRA HELFAND: Well, absolutely. And that would be — you know, there would be absolutely nothing the US could do that would more undermine our security at this point with regards to nuclear weapons than to resume testing. It would give a green light to many other countries to resume testing, as well, and lead to markedly increased instability in the global situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr Ira Helfand, we thank you so much for being with us, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, won the Nobel Peace Prize, PSR, in 1985, serving on the steering committee of the Back from the Brink campaign, joining us, interestingly, from Winnipeg, Canada, where he is speaking at the 5th Youth Nuclear Peace Summit.

The original content of this programme on 30 October 2025 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

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

As we’ve reported, the Gaza ceasefire deal is in effect. Phase one of the US.-backed 20-point plan is underway. Hamas has released all 20 living captives. Israel has released almost 2000 Palestinians in Ramallah and now in Khan Younis in Gaza.

Yesterday, President Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset and then co-chaired a so-called peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not among the 20 or more world leaders who attend. He was invited but said he was not going.

• READ MORE: Opposition Israeli lawmakers interrupt Trump and call for recognition of Palestinian statehood
• Joy as Palestinians prisoners freed after Israeli captives released
• Trump addresses the Knesset and speaks of ‘historic dawn for new Middle East’

For more, we’re joined by the Israeli historian, author and professor Ilan Pappé, professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and the chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. Among his books, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, almost 20 years ago, and Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Noam Chomsky. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

We thank you so much for being with us. Professor Pappé, if you could start off by responding to what has happened? We’re watching, in Khan Younis, prisoners being released, Palestinian prisoners, up to 2000, and in the occupied West Bank, though there families were told if they dare celebrate the release of their loved ones, they might be arrested.

And we saw the release of the 20 Israeli hostages as they returned to Israel. Hamas says they’re returning the dead hostages, the remains, over the next few days. Israel has not said they will return the dead prisoners, of which it’s believed there are nearly 200 in Israeli prisons.

Your response overall, and now to the summit in Egypt?

ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes. First of all, there is some joy in knowing that the bombing of the people in Gaza has stopped for a while. And there is joy knowing that Palestinian political prisoners have been reunited with their families, and, similarly, that Israeli hostages were reunited with their families.

But except from that, I don’t think we are in such an historical moment as President Trump claimed in his speech in the Knesset and beforehand. We are not at the end of the terrible chapter that we have been in for the last two years.

And that chapter is an Israeli attempt by a particularly fanatic, extremely rightwing Israeli government to try and use ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza to downsize the number of Palestinians in Palestine and impose Israel’s will in a way that they hope would be at least endorsed by some Arab governments and the world.

So far, they have an alliance of Trump and some extreme rightwing parties in Europe.

And now I hope that the world will not be misled that Israel is now ready to open a different kind of page in its relationship with the Palestinians. And what you told us about the way that the celebrations were dealt with in the West Bank and the incineration of the sanitation center shows you that nothing has changed in the dehumanisation and the attitude of this particular Israeli government and its belief that it has the power to wipe out Palestine as a nation, as a people and as a country.

I hope the world will not stand by, because up to now it did stand by when the genocide occurred in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: We have just heard President Trump’s address to the Israeli Knesset. He followed the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. I’m not sure, but in listening to Netanyahu, I don’t think he used the word “Palestinian.” President Trump has just called on the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu.

Your thoughts on this, and also the possibility of why Netanyahu has not joined this summit that President Trump is co-chairing? Many are speculating for different reasons — didn’t want to anger the right, that’s further right than him. Others are saying the possibility of his arrest, not on corruption charges, but on crimes against humanity, the whole case before the International Criminal Court.

ILAN PAPPÉ: It could be a mixture of all of it, but I think at the center of it is the nature of the Israeli government that was elected in November 2022, this alliance between a very opportunistic politician, who’s only interested in surviving and keeping his position as a prime minister, alongside messianic, neo-Zionist politicians who really believe that God has given them the opportunity to create the Greater Israel, maybe even beyond the borders of Palestine, and, in the process, eliminate Palestinians.

I think that his consideration should all — are always about his chances of survival. So, whatever went in his mind, he came to the conclusion that going to Cairo is not going to help his chances of being reelected.

My great worry is not that he didn’t go to Cairo. My greatest worry is that he does believe that his only chance of being reelected is still to have a war going on, either in Gaza or in the West Bank or against Iran or in the north with Lebanon.

We are dealing here with a reckless, irresponsible politician, who is even willing to drown his own state in the process of saving his skin and his neck. And the victims will always be, from this adventurous policy, the Palestinians.

I hope the world understands that, really, the urgent need of — and I’m talking about world leaders rather than societies. You already discussed what is the level of solidarity among civil societies. But I do hope that political elites will understand — especially in the West — their role now is not to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their role now is to protect the Palestinians from destruction, elimination, genocide and ethnic cleansing. And nothing of that duty, especially of Europe, that is complicit with what happened, and the United States, that are complicit with what happened in the last two years — nothing that we heard in the speeches so far in the — in preparation for the summit in Egypt, and I have a feeling that we won’t hear anything about it also later on.

There is a different way in which our civil societies refer to Palestine as a place that has to be saved and protected, and still this irrelevant conversation among our political elites about a peace deal, a two-state solution, all of that, that has nothing to do with what we are experiencing in the way that the Israeli government thinks it has an historical moment to totally de-Arabise Palestine and eliminate and expunge the Palestinians from history and the area.

AMY GOODMAN: Ilan Pappé, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli historian, professor of history, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.

According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.

Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.

• READ MORE: Hamas releases captives held in Gaza; Trump to address Israeli parliament
• Jubilation as Hamas releases first batch of Israeli captives under ceasefire deal

Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.

The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.

Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.

FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.

I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.

What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?

AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.

On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.

KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …

This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.

If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.

Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.

And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.

Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.

So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.

And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.

This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.

DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.

But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.

These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.

And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.

What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.

I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?

AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.

And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.

The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.

And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.

We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.

And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.

But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.

Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.

The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?

Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?

AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.

There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.

Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.

There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.

And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?

How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.

AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.

But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.

And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.

But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.

And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.

There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.

But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.

This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.

AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.

You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.

And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.

But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.

I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.

In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.

And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.

Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.

We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.

This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.

As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.

But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.

Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Democracy Now!

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, held talks with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom yesterday in Geneva as Israel’s attacks on Iran entered a second week.

A US-based Iranian human rights group reports the Israeli attacks have killed at least 639 people. Israeli war planes have repeatedly pummeled Tehran and other parts of Iran. Iran is responded by continuing to launch missile strikes into Israel.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have protested in Iran against Israel. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to give mixed messages on whether the US will join Israel’s attack on Iran.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “I may do it, I may not do it”. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a new statement from the President.

KAROLINE LEAVITT: “Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, I know there has been a lot of speculation among all of you in the media regarding the president’s decision-making and whether or not the United States will be directly involved.

“In light of that news, I have a message directly from the president. And I quote, ‘Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.’”

AMY GOODMAN, The War and Peace Report: President Trump has repeatedly used that term, “two weeks,” when being questioned about decisions in this term and his first term as president. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after President Trump met with his former adviser, Steve Bannon, who has publicly warned against war with Iran.

Bannon recently said, “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq,” Bannon said.

This comes as Trump’s reportedly sidelined National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard from key discussions on Iran. In March, Gabbard told lawmakers the intelligence community, “Continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

But on Tuesday, Trump dismissed her statement, saying, “I don’t care what she said.”

Earlier Thursday, an Iranian missile hit the main hospital in Southern Israel in Beersheba. After the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei, saying Iran’s supreme leader, “Cannot continue to exist.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the hospital and likened Iran’s attack to the London Blitz. Netanyahu stunned many in Israel by saying, “Each of us bears a personal cost. My family has not been exempt. This is the second time my son Avner has cancelled a wedding due to missile threats.”

We’re joined now by William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new article for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.”

Can you talk about what’s going on right now, Bill, the whole question of whether the U.S. is going to use a bunker-buster bomb that has to be delivered by a B-2 bomber, which only the US has?

Another Iraq: Military expert warns US has no real plan    Video: Democracy Now!

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah. This is a case of undue trust in technology. The US is always getting in trouble when they think there’s this miracle solution. A lot of experts aren’t sure this would even work, or if it did, it would take multiple bombings.

And of course, Iran’s not going to sit on its hands. They’ll respond possibly by killing US troops in the region, then we’ll have escalation from there. It’s reminiscent of the beginning of the Iraq War, when they said, “It’s going to be a cakewalk. It’s not going to cost anything.”

Couple of trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of casualties, many US veterans coming home with PTSD, a regime that was sectarian that paved the way for ISIS, it couldn’t have gone worse.

And so, this is a different beginning, but the end is uncertain, and I don’t think we want to go there.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the GBU-57, the bunker-buster bomb, and how is it that this discussion going on within the White House about the use of the bomb — and of course, the US has gone back and forth — I should say President Trump has gone back and forth whether he’s fully involved with this war.

At first he was saying they knew about it, but Israel was doing it, then saying, “We have total control of the skies over Tehran,” saying we, not Israel, and what exactly it would mean if the US dropped this bomb and the fleet that the US is moving in?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, the notion is, it’s heavy steel, it’s more explosive power than any conventional bomb. But it only goes so deep, and they don’t actually know how deep this facility is buried. And if it’s going in a straight line, and it’s to one side, it’s just not clear that it’s going to work.

And of course, if it does, Iran is going to rebuild, they’re going to go straight for a nuclear weapon. They’re not going to trust negotiations anymore.

So, apparently, the two weeks is partly because Trump’s getting conflicting reports from his own people about this. Now, if he had actual independent military folks, like Mark Milley in the first term, I think we’d be less likely to go in.

But they made sure to have loyalists. Pete Hegseth is not a profile in courage. He’s not going to stand up to Trump on this. He might not even know the consequences. So, a lot of the press coverage is about this bomb, not about the consequences of an active war.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, about using it. In your recent piece, you wrote, “Israeli officials suggested their attacks may result in regime change in Iran, despite the devastating destabilising impact such efforts in the region would have.”

Can you talk about the significance of Israel putting forward and then Trump going back and forth on whether or not Ali Khamenei will be targeted?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, I think my colleague Trita Parsi put it well. There’s been no example of regime change in the region that has come out with a better result. They don’t know what kind of regime would come in.

Could be to the right of the current one. Could just be chaos that would fuel terrorism, who knows what else.

So, they’re just talking — they’re winging it. They have no idea what they’re getting into. And I think Trump, he doesn’t want to seem like Netanyahu’s pulling him by the nose, so when he gets out in front of Trump, Trump says, “Oh, that was my idea.”

But it’s almost as if Benjamin Netanyahu is running US foreign policy, and Trump is kind of following along.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Netanyahu back in 2002 saying, “Iran is imminently going to have a nuclear bomb.” That was more than two decades ago.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Exactly. That’s just a cover for wanting to take out the regime. And he spoke to the US Congress, he’s made presentations all over the world, and his intelligence has been proven wrong over, and over, and over.

And when we had the Iran deal, he had European allies, he had China, he had Russia. There hadn’t been a deal like that where all these countries were on the same page in living memory, and it was working.

And Trump trashed it and now has to start over.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the War Powers Act. The Virginia Senator Kaine has said that — has just put forward a bill around saying it must be — Congress that must vote on this. Where is [Senator] Chuck Schumer [Senate minority leader]? Where is [Hakeem] Jeffries [Congress minoroity leader] on this, the Democratic House and Senate leaders?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, a lot of the so-called leaders are not leading. When is the moment that you should step forward if we’re possibly going to get into another disastrous war? But I think they’re concerned about being viewed as critical of Israel.

They don’t want to go out on a limb. So, you’ve got a progressive group that’s saying, “This has to be authorised by Congress.” You’ve got Republicans who are doubtful, but they don’t want to stand up to Trump because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

“Risk your job. This is a huge thing. Don’t just sort of be a time-server.

AMY GOODMAN: So, according to a report from IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, released in May, Iran has accumulated roughly 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, which is 30 percent away from weapons-grade level of 90 percent. You have Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, saying this week that they do not have evidence that Iran has the system for a nuclear bomb.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, a lot of the discussion points out — they don’t talk about, when you’ve got the uranium, you have to build the weapon, you have to make it work on a missile.

It’s not you get the uranium, you have a weapon overnight, so there’s time to deal with that should they go forward through negotiations. And we had a deal that was working, which Trump threw aside in his first term.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the foreign minister of Iran, Araghchi, in Geneva now speaking with his counterparts from Britain, France, the EU.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I don’t think US allies in Europe want to go along with this, and I think he’s looking for some leverage over Trump. And of course, Trump is very hard to read, but even his own base, the majority of Trump supporters, don’t want to go to war.

You’ve got people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon saying it would be a disaster. But ultimately, it comes down to Trump. He’s unpredictable, he’s transactional, he’ll calculate what he thinks it’ll mean for him.

AMY GOODMAN: And what impact does protests have around the country, as we wrap up?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think taking the stand is infectious. So many institutions were caving in to Trump. And the more people stand up, 2000 demonstrations around the country, the more the folks sitting on the fence, the millions of people who, they’re against Trump, but they don’t know what to do, the more of us that get involved, the better chance we have of turning this thing around.

So, we should not let them discourage us. We need to build power to push back against all these horrible things.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, if the US were to bomb the nuclear site that it would require the bunker-buster bomb to hit below ground, underground. Are we talking about nuclear fallout here?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: I think there would certainly be radiation that would of course affect the Iranian people. They’ve already had many civilian deaths. It’s not this kind of precise thing that’s only hitting military targets.

And that, too, has to affect Iran’s view of this. They were shortly away from another negotiation, and now their country’s being devastated, so can they trust us?

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung is senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.”

Republished from Democracy Now! under Creative Commons.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show looking at Israel’s ongoing targeting of Palestinian journalists. A recent report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University described the war in Gaza as the “worst ever conflict for reporters” in history.

By one count, Israel has killed 214 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past 18 months, including two journalists killed on Wednesday — Yahya Subaih and Nour El-Din Abdo. Yahya Subaih died just hours after his wife gave birth to their first child.

Meanwhile, new details have emerged about the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist who was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier three years ago on 11 May 2022.

She was killed while covering an Israeli army assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Shireen and another reporter were against a stone wall, wearing blue helmets and blue flak jackets clearly emblazoned with the word “Press”.

Shireen was shot in the head. She was known throughout the Arab world for her decades of tireless reporting on Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel initially claimed she had been shot by Palestinian militants, but later acknowledged she was most likely shot by an Israeli soldier. But Israel has never identified the soldier who fired the fatal shot, or allowed the soldier to be questioned by US investigators.

But a new documentary just released by Zeteo has identified and named the Israeli soldier for the first time. This is the trailer to the documentary Who Killed Shireen?

DION NISSENBAUM: That soldier looked down his scope and could see the blue vest and that it said “press.”

ISRAELI SOLDIER: That’s what I think, yes.

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: US personnel have never had access to those who are believed to have committed those shootings.

DION NISSENBAUM: No one has been held to account. Justice has not been served.

FATIMA ABDULKARIM: She is the first American Palestinian journalist who has been killed by Israeli forces.

DION NISSENBAUM: I want to know: Who killed Shireen?

CONOR POWELL: Are we going to find the shooter?

DION NISSENBAUM: He’s got a phone call set up with this Israeli soldier that was there that day.

CONOR POWELL: We just have to go over to Israel.

DION NISSENBAUM: Did you ever talk to the guy who fired those shots?

ISRAELI SOLDIER: Of course. I know him personally. The US should have actually come forward and actually pressed the fact that an American citizen was killed intentionally by IDF.

FATIMA ABDULKARIM: The drones are still ongoing, the explosions going off.

CONOR POWELL: Holy [bleep]! We’ve got a name.

DION NISSENBAUM: But here’s the twist.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The trailer for the new Zeteo documentary Who Killed Shireen? The film identifies the Israeli soldier who allegedly killed Shireen Abu Akleh as Alon Scagio, who would later be killed during an Israeli military operation last June in Jenin, the same city where Shireen was fatally shot.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by four guests, including two members of Shireen Abu Akleh’s family: her brother Anton, or Tony, and her niece Lina. They’re both in North Bergen, New Jersey. We’re also joined by Mehdi Hasan, the founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo, and by Dion Nissenbaum, the executive producer of Who Killed Shireen?, the correspondent on the documentary, longtime Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem and other cities, a former foreign correspondent. He was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Dion, we’re going to begin with you. This is the third anniversary, May 11th exactly, of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. Talk about your revelation, what you exposed in this documentary.

DION NISSENBAUM: Well, there were two things that were very important for the documentary. The first thing was we wanted to find the soldier who killed Shireen. It had been one of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel. US officials said that if they wanted to determine if there was a crime here, if there was a human rights violation, they needed to talk to this soldier to find out what he was thinking when he shot her.

And we set out to find him. And we did. We did what the US government never did. And it turned out he had been killed, so we were never able to answer that question — what he was thinking.

But the other revelation that I think is as significant in this documentary is that the initial US assessment of her shooting was that that soldier intentionally shot her and that he could tell that she was wearing a blue flak jacket with “Press” across it.

That assessment was essentially overruled by the Biden administration, which came out and said exactly the opposite. That’s a fairly startling revelation, that the Biden administration and the Israeli government essentially were doing everything they could to cover up what happened that day to Shireen Abu Akleh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to a clip from the documentary Who Killed Shireen?, in which Dion Nissenbaum, our guest, speaks with former State Department official Andrew Miller. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs in 2022 when Shireen was killed.

ANDREW MILLER: It’s nearly 100 percent certain that an Israeli soldier, likely a sniper, fired the shot that killed or the shots that killed Shireen Abu Akleh. Based on all the information we have, it is not credible to suggest that there were targets either in front of or behind Shireen Abu Akleh.

The fact that the official Israeli position remains that this was a case of crossfire, the entire episode was a mistake, as opposed to potentially a mistaken identification or the deliberate targeting of this individual, points to, I think, a broader policy of seeking to manage the narrative.

DION NISSENBAUM: And did the Israelis ever make the soldier available to the US to talk about it?

ANDREW MILLER: No. And the Israelis were not willing to present the person for even informal questioning.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was State Department official — former State Department official Andrew Miller, speaking in the Zeteo documentary Who Killed Shireen? He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs in 2022 when Shireen was killed.

I want to go to Shireen’s family, whom we have as guests, Anton Abu Akleh and Lina, who are joining us from New Jersey. You both watched the film for the first time last night when it premiered here in New York City. Lina, if you could begin by responding to the revelations in the film?

LINA ABU AKLEH: Hi, Amy. Hi. Thank you for having us.

Honestly, we always welcome and we appreciate journalists who try to uncover the killing of Shireen, but also who shed light on her legacy. And the documentary that was released by Zeteo and by Dion, it really revealed findings that we didn’t know before, but we’ve always known that it was an Israeli soldier who killed Shireen. And we know how the US administration failed our family, failed a US citizen and failed a journalist, really.

And that should be a scandal in and of itself.

But most importantly, for us as a family, it’s not just about one soldier. It’s about the entire chain of command. It’s not just the person who pulled the trigger, but who ordered the killing, and the military commanders, the elected officials.

So, really, it’s the entire chain of command that needs to be held to account for the killing of a journalist who was in a clear press vest, press gear, marked as a journalist.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anton, if you could respond? Shireen, of course, was your younger sister. What was your response watching the documentary last night?

ANTON ABU AKLEH: It’s very painful to look at all these scenes again, but I really extend my appreciation to Zeteo and all those who supported and worked on this documentary, which was very revealing, many things we didn’t know. The cover-up by the Biden administration, this thing was new to us.

He promised. First statements came out from the White House and from the State Department stressed on the importance of holding those responsible accountable. And apparently, in one of the interviews heard in this documentary, he never raised — President Biden never raised this issue with Bennett, at that time the prime minister.

So, that’s shocking to us to know it was a total cover-up, contradictory to what they promised us. And that’s — like Lina just said, it’s a betrayal, not only to the family, not only to Shireen, but the whole American nation.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, you’ve backed this documentary. It’s the first big documentary Zeteo is putting out. It’s also the first anniversary of the founding of Zeteo. Can you talk about the proof that you feel is here in the documentary that Alon Scagio, this — and explain who he is and the unit he was a part of? Dion, it’s quite something when you go to his grave. But how you can absolutely be sure this is the man?

MEHDI HASAN: So, Amy, Nermeen, thanks for having us here. I’ve been on this show many times. I just want to say, great to be here on set with both of you. Thank you for what you do.

This is actually our second documentary, but it is our biggest so far, because the revelations in this film that Dion and the team put out are huge in many ways — identifying the soldier, as you mentioned, Alon Scagio, identifying the Biden cover-up, which we just heard Tony Abu Akleh point out. People didn’t realise just how big that cover-up was.

Remember, Joe Biden was the man who said, “If you harm an American, we will respond.” And what is very clear in the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, an American citizen who spent a lot of her life in New Jersey, they did not respond.

In terms of the soldier itself, when Dion came to me and said, “We want to make this film. It’ll be almost like a true crime documentary. We’re going to go out and find out who did it” — because we all — everyone followed the story. You guys covered it in 2022. It was a huge story in the world.

But three years later, to not even know the name of the shooter — and I was, “Well, will we be able to find this out? It’s one of Israel’s most closely guarded secrets.” And yet, Dion and his team were able to do the reporting that got inside of Duvdevan, this elite special forces unit in Israel.

It literally means “the cherry on top.” That’s how proud they are of their eliteness. And yet, no matter how elite you are, Israel’s way of fighting wars means you kill innocent people.

And what comes out in the film from interviews, not just with a soldier, an Israeli soldier, who speaks in the film and talks about how, “Hey, if you see a camera, you take the shot,” but also speaking to Chris Van Hollen, United States Senator from Maryland, who’s been one of the few Democratic voices critical of Biden in the Senate, who says there’s been no change in Israel’s rules of engagement over the years.

And therefore, it was so important on multiple levels to do this film, to identify the shooter, because, of course, as you pointed out in your news headlines, Amy, they just killed a hundred Palestinians yesterday.

So this is not some old story from history where this happened in 2022 and we’re going back. Everything that happened since, you could argue, flows from that — the Americans who have been killed, the journalists who have been killed in Gaza, Palestinians, the sense of impunity that Israel has and Israel’s soldiers have.

There are reports that Israeli soldiers are saying to Palestinians, “Hey, Trump has our back. Hey, the US government has our back.” And it wasn’t just Trump. It was Joe Biden, too.

And that was why it was so important to make this film, to identify the shooter, to call out Israel’s practices when it comes to journalists, and to call out the US role.

AMY GOODMAN: I  just want to go to Dion, for people who aren’t familiar with the progression of what the Biden administration said, the serious cover-up not only by Israel, but of its main military weapons supplier and supporter of its war on Gaza, and that is Joe Biden, from the beginning.

First Israel said it was a Palestinian militant. At that point, what did President Biden say?

DION NISSENBAUM: So, at the very beginning, they said that they wanted the shooter to be prosecuted. They used that word at the State Department and said, “This person who killed an American journalist should be prosecuted.” But when it started to become clear that it was probably an Israeli soldier, their tone shifted, and it became talking about vague calls for accountability or changes to the rules of engagement, which never actually happened.

So, you got to a point where the Israeli government admitted it was likely them, the US government called for them to change the rules of engagement, and the Israeli government said no. And we have this interview in the film with Senator Chris Van Hollen, who says that, essentially, Israel was giving the middle finger to the US government on this.

And we have seen, since that time, more Americans being killed in the West Bank, dozens and dozens and dozens of journalists being killed, with no accountability. And we would like to see that change.

This is a trajectory that you’re seeing. You know, the blue vest no longer provides any protection for journalists in Israel. The Israeli military itself has said that wearing a blue vest with “Press” on it does not necessarily mean that you are a journalist.

They are saying that terrorists wear blue vests, too. So, if you are a journalist operating in the West Bank now, you have to assume that the Israeli military could target you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to another clip from the film Who Killed Shireen?, which features Ali Samoudi, Shireen Abu Akleh’s producer, who was with Shireen when she was killed, and was himself shot and injured. In the clip, he speaks to the journalist Fatima AbdulKarim.

FATIMA ABDULKARIM: We are set up here now, even though we were supposed to meet at the location where you got injured and Shireen got killed.

ALI SAMOUDI: [translated] We are five minutes from the location in Maidan al-Awdah. But you could lose your soul in the five minutes it would take us to reach it. You could be hit by army bullets. They could arrest you.

So it is essentially impossible to get there. I believe the big disaster which prevented the occupation from being punished and repeating these crimes is the neglect and indifference by many of the institutions, especially American ones, which continue to defend the occupation.

FATIMA ABDULKARIM: [translated] We’re now approaching the third anniversary of Shireen’s death. How did that affect you?

ALI SAMOUDI: [translated] During that period, the occupation was making preparations for a dangerous scenario in the Jenin refugee camp. And for this reason, they didn’t want witnesses.

They opened fire on us in order to terroriSe us enough that we wouldn’t go back to the camp. And in that sense, they partially succeeded.

Since then, we have been overcome by fear. From the moment Shireen was killed, I said and continue to say and will continue to say that this bullet was meant to prevent the Palestinian media from the documentation and exposure of the occupation’s crimes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Ali Samoudi, Shireen Abu Akleh’s producer, who was with Shireen when she was killed, and was himself shot and injured.

We should note, Ali Samoudi was just detained by Israeli forces in late April. The Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti recently wrote, “Ali Samoudi was beaten so bad by Israeli soldiers he was immediately hospitalised. This man has been one of the few journalists that continues reporting on Israeli military abuses north of the West Bank despite the continued risk on his life,” Mariam Barghouti wrote.

The Committee to Protect Journalists spoke to the journalist’s son, Mohammed Al Samoudi, who told CPJ, quote, “My father suffers from several illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and a stomach ulcer . . .  He needs a diabetes injection every two days and a specific diet. It appears he was subjected to assault and medical neglect at the interrogation center . . .

“Our lawyer told us he was transferred to an Israeli hospital after a major setback in his health. We don’t know where he is being held, interrogated, or even the hospital to which he was taken. My father has been forcibly disappeared,” he said.

So, Dion Nissenbaum, if you could give us the latest? You spoke to Ali Samoudi for the documentary, and now he’s been detained.

DION NISSENBAUM: Yeah. His words were prophetic, right? He talks about this was an attempt to silence journalists. And my colleague Fatima says the same thing, that these are ongoing, progressive efforts to silence Palestinian journalists.

And we don’t know where Ali is. He has not actually been charged with anything yet. He is one of the most respected journalists in the West Bank. And we are just seeing this progression going on.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the latest we know is he was supposed to have a hearing, and that hearing has now been delayed to May 13th, Ali Samoudi?

DION NISSENBAUM: That’s right. And he has yet to be charged, so . . .

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to Lina Abu Akleh, who’s in New Jersey, where Shireen grew up. Lina, you were listed on Time magazine’s 100 emerging leaders for publicly demanding scrutiny of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the horror.

And again, our condolences on the death of your aunt, on the killing of your aunt, and also to Anton, Shireen’s brother. Lina, you’ve also, of course, spoken to Ali Samoudi. This continues now. He’s in detention — his son says, “just disappeared”.

What are you demanding right now? We have a new administration. We’ve moved from the Biden administration to the Trump administration. And are you in touch with them? Are they speaking to you?

LINA ABU AKLEH: Well, our demands haven’t changed. From day one, we’re calling for the US administration to complete its investigation, or for the FBI to continue its investigation, and to finally release — to finally hold someone to account.

And we have enough evidence that could have been — that the administration could have used to expedite this case. But, unfortunately, this new administration, as well, no one has spoken to us. We haven’t been in touch with anyone, and it’s just been radio silence since.

For us, as I said, our demands have never changed. It’s been always to hold the entire system to account, the entire chain of command, the military, for the killing of an American citizen, a journalist, a Palestinian, Palestinian American journalist.

As we’ve been talking, targeting journalists isn’t happening just by shooting at them or killing them. There’s so many different forms of targeting journalists, especially in Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem.

So, for us, it’s really important as a family that we don’t see other families experience what we are going through, for this — for impunity, for Israel’s impunity, to end, because, at the end of the day, accountability is the only way to put an end to this impunity.

AMY GOODMAN: I am horrified to ask this question to Shireen’s family members, to Lina, to Tony, Shireen’s brother, but the revelation in the film — we were all there last night at its premiere in New York — that the Israeli soldiers are using a photograph of Shireen’s face for target practice. Tony Abu Akleh, if you could respond?

ANTON ABU AKLEH: You know, there is no words to describe our sorrow and pain hearing this. But, you know, I would just want to know why. Why would they do this thing? What did Shireen do to them for them to use her as a target practice? You know, this is absolutely barbaric act, unjustified. Unjustified.

And we really hope that this US administration will be able to put an end to all this impunity they are enjoying. If they didn’t enjoy all this impunity, they wouldn’t have been doing this. Practising on a journalist? Why? You know, you can practice on anything, but on a journalist?

This shows that this targeting of more journalists, whether in Gaza, in Palestine, it’s systematic. It’s been planned for. And they’ve been targeting and shutting off those voices, those reports, from reaching anywhere in the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Anton, if you could say — you know, you mentioned last night, as well, Shireen was, in fact, extremely cautious as a journalist. If you could elaborate on that? What precisely —

ANTON ABU AKLEH: Absolutely. Absolutely. Shireen was very careful. Every time she’s in the field, she would take her time to put on the gear, the required helmet, the vest with “press” written on it, before going there. She also tried to identify herself as a journalist, whether to the Israelis or to the Palestinians, so she’s not attacked.

And she always went by the book, followed the rules, how to act, how to be careful, how to speak to those people involved, so she can protect herself. But, unfortunately, he was — this soldier, as stated in the documentary, targeted Shireen just because she’s Shireen and she’s a journalist. That’s it. There is no other explanation.

Sixteen bullets were fired on Shireen. Not even her helmet, nor the vest she was wearing, were able to protect her, unfortunately.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mehdi Hasan, you wanted to respond.

MEHDI HASAN: So, Tony asks, “Why? Why would you do this? Why would you target not just a journalist in the field, but then use her face for target practice?” — as Dion and his team reveal in the film. And there is, unfortunately, a very simple answer to that question, which is that the Israeli military — and not just the Israeli military, but many people in our world today — have dehumanised Palestinians.

There is the removal of humanity from the people you are oppressing, occupying, subjugating and killing. It doesn’t matter if you’re an American citizen. It doesn’t matter if you have a press jacket on. It only matters that you are Palestinian in the sniper’s sights.

And that is how they have managed to pull of the killing of so many journalists, so many children. The first documentary we commissioned last year was called Israel’s Real Extremism, and it was about the Israeli soldiers who go into Gaza and make TikTok videos wearing Palestinian women’s underwear, playing with Palestinian children’s toys. It is the ultimate form of dehumanisation, the idea that these people don’t count, their lives have no value.

And what’s so tragic and shocking — and the film exposes this — is that Joe Biden — forget the Israeli military — Joe Biden also joined in that dehumanisation. Do you remember at the start of this conflict when he comes out and he says, “Well, I’m not sure I believe the Palestinian death toll numbers,” when he puts out a statement at the hundred days after October 7th and doesn’t mention Palestinian casualties.

And that has been the fundamental problem. This was the great comforter-in-chief. Joe Biden was supposed to be the empath. And yet, as Tony points out, what was so shocking in the film is he didn’t even raise Shireen’s case with Naftali Bennett, the prime minister of Israel at the time.

Again, would he have done that if it was an American journalist in Moscow? We know that’s not the case. We know when American journalists, especially white American journalists, are taken elsewhere in the world, the government gives a damn. And yet, in the case of Shireen, the only explanation is because she was a Palestinian American journalist.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, in the United States, the US government is responsible for American citizens, which Biden pointed out at the beginning, when he thought it was a Palestinian militant who had killed her. But, Lina, you yourself are a journalist. And I’m thinking I want to hear your response to using her face, because, of course, that is not just the face of Shireen, but I think it’s the face of journalism.

And it’s not just American journalism, of course. I mean, in fact, she’s known to hundreds of millions of people around world as the face and voice of Al Jazeera Arabic. She spoke in Arabic. She was known as that to the rest of the world. But to see that and that revealed in this documentary?

LINA ABU AKLEH: Yeah, it was horrifying, actually. And it just goes on to show how the Israeli military is built. It’s barbarism. It’s the character of revenge, of hate. And that is part of the entire system. And as Mehdi and as my father just mentioned, this is all about dehumanizing Palestinians, regardless if they’re journalists, if they’re doctors, they’re officials. For them, they simply don’t care about Palestinian lives.

And for us, Shireen will always be the voice of Palestine. And she continues to be remembered for the legacy that she left behind. And she continues to live through so many, so many journalists, who have picked up the microphone, who have picked up the camera, just because of Shireen.

So, regardless of how the Israeli military continues to dehumanise journalists and how the US fails to protect Palestinian American journalists, we will continue to push forward to continue to highlight the life and the legacy that Shireen left behind.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s turn to Shireen Abu Akleh in her own words. This is an excerpt from the Al Jazeera English documentary The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh.

SHIREEN ABU AKLEH: [translated] Sometimes the Israeli army doesn’t want you there, so they target you, even if they later say it was an accident. They might say, “We saw some young men around you.” So they target you on purpose, as a way of scaring you off because they don’t want you there.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Shireen in her own words in an Al Jazeera documentary. So, Lina, I know you have to go soon, but if you could just tell us: What do you want people to know about Shireen, as an aunt, a sister and a journalist?

LINA ABU AKLEH: Yes, so, we know Shireen as the journalist, but behind the camera, she was one of the most empathetic people. She was very sincere. And something not a lot of people know, but she was a very funny person. She had a very unique sense of humor, that she lit up every room she entered. She cared about everyone and anyone. She enjoyed life.

Shireen, at the end of the day, loved life. She had plans. She had dreams that she still wanted to achieve. But her life was cut short by that small bullet, which would change our lives entirely.

But at the end of the day, Shireen was a professional journalist who always advocated for truth, for justice. And at the end of the day, all she wanted to do was humanise Palestinians and talk about the struggles of living under occupation. But at the same time, she wanted to celebrate their achievements.

She shed light on all the happy moments, all the accomplishments of the Palestinian people. And this is something that really touched millions of Palestinians, of Arabs around the world. She was able to enter the hearts of the people through the small camera lens. And until this day, she continues to be remembered for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, we’re going to keep you on, Mehdi, to talk about other issues during the Trump administration, but how can people access Who Killed Shireen?

MEHDI HASAN: So, it’s available online at WhoKilledShireen.com, is where you can go to watch it. We are releasing the film right now only to paid subscribers. We hope to change that in the forthcoming days.

People often say to me, “How can you put it behind a paywall?” Journalism — a free press isn’t free, sadly. We have to fund films like this. Dion came to us because a lot of other people didn’t want to fund a topic like this, didn’t want to fund an investigation like this.

So, we’re proud to be able to fund such documentaries, but we also need support from our contributors, our subscribers and the viewers. But it’s an important film, and I hope as many people will watch it as possible, WhoKilledShireen.com.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank Lina, the niece of Shireen Abu Akleh, and Anton, Tony, the older brother of Shireen Abu Akleh, for joining us from New Jersey. Together, we saw the documentary last night, Who Killed Shireen? And we want to thank Dion Nissenbaum, who is the filmmaker, the correspondent on this film, formerly a correspondent with The Wall Street Journal. The founder of Zeteo, on this first anniversary of Zeteo, is Mehdi Hasan.

The original content of this Democracy Now! programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to a campus gate across from the graduate School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) this week, braving rain and cold to demand the school release information related to the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former SIPA student.

Democracy Now! was at the protest and spoke to Jewish and Palestinian students calling on the school to reveal the extent of its involvement in Khalil’s arrest.

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Transcript:

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

Here in New York City, Jewish students chained themselves to gates at Columbia University on Wednesday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now in an ICE jail in Louisiana.

On March 8, federal agents detained Khalil at his university-owned apartment building, even though he is a legal permanent resident of the United States. They revoked his green card.

I went up to Columbia yesterday and spoke to some of the students at the protest.

PROTESTERS: Release Mahmoud Khalil now! We want justice! You say, “How?” We want justice! You say, “How?” Release Mahmoud Khalil now!

CARLY: Hi. My name is Carly. I’m a Columbia SIPA graduate student, second year. And I’m chained to this gate today as a Jewish student and friend of Mahmoud Khalil’s, demanding answers on how his name got to DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and which trustee specifically handed over that information.

We believe that there is a high chance that our new president, Claire Shipman, handed over that information. And we, as Jewish students, demand transparency in that process.

Protesting Jewish students chain themselves to Columbia gates.  Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What makes you think that the new president, Shipman, gave over his [Khalil’s] information?

CARLY: There was a Forward article with that leak. And there has not been transparency from the Columbia administration to Jewish students, when they claim that they are doing all of this to protect Jewish students.

We would like to be consulted in that process, instead of being spoken for. You know, as Jewish students and to the Jewish people at large, being political pawns in a game is not a new occurrence, and that’s something that we very much are here to say, “Hey, you cannot weaponise antisemitism to harm our friends and peers.”

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about being chained. Are you willing to risk arrest or suspension or expulsion from Columbia?

CARLY: Yeah, I mean, just for speaking out for Palestine on Columbia’s campus, you know that you’re risking arrest and expulsion. That is the precedent they have set, and that is something that we all know at this point.

We are now in a situation where, for many of us, our good friend is in ICE detention. And as Jewish students, we feel we need to do more.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you know Mahmoud Khalil? You said you’re at SIPA. What are you studying there?

CARLY: Yeah, so, I’m a human rights student, and we were classmates. We were classmates and friends. And it’s been a deeply troubling few weeks. And, you know, everyone at SIPA, the students at SIPA, we really are just hoping for his safe return.

For me as a graduate in May, I truly hope we get to walk together at graduation.

AMY GOODMAN: Did he hear that you were out here? And did he send you a message?

CARLY: Yes. So, it has gotten back to Mahmoud that Jewish students are out here chained to the gate, and he did send a message that I read earlier that expressed his gratitude.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me what he said?

CARLY: Yes, I can pull up the message. I don’t want to misquote him. OK.

“The news of students chaining themselves to the Columbia gates has reached Mahmoud in the detention center in Louisiana, where he’s currently being held. He knows what’s happening. He was very emotional when he heard about it, and he wanted to thank you all and let you know he sees you.”

SARAH BORUS: My name is Sarah Borus. I am a senior at Barnard College.

AMY GOODMAN: Why a Jewish action right now?

SARAH BORUS: So, the government, when they abducted Mahmoud, they literally put — Donald Trump put out a post that said, “Shalom, Mahmoud.”

They are saying that this is in the name of Jewish safety. But there is a reason that it is four white Jews that were on that fence or that were on that gate, and that’s because we are not the ones that are being targeted by the government.

It is Muslim students, Arab students, Palestinian students, immigrant students that are being targeted.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you respond to those who say the protests here are antisemitic?

SARAH BORUS: I have been involved in these protests for my last two years here. The community of Jewish students that I have found is one of the most wonderful in my life. To call these protests antisemitic, honestly, degrades the Jewish religion by making it about a nation-state instead of the actual religion itself.

SHEA: My name is Shea. I’m a junior at Columbia College. I am here for the same reason.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a keffiyeh and a yarmulke.

SHEA: Yes. That’s standard for me.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to be expelled?

SHEA: If the university decides that that is what should happen to me for doing this, then that is on them. I would love to not be expelled, but I think that my peers would also have loved to not be expelled.

I think Mahmoud would love to not be in detention right now. This is — I obviously worked very hard to get here. So did Mahmoud. So did everyone else who has been facing consequences.

And, like, while I obviously would prefer to, you know, not get expelled, this is bigger than me. This is about something much more important. And it ultimately is in the hands of the university. If they want to expel me for standing up for my friend, for other students, then that is their choice.

PROTESTERS: ICE off our campus now! ICE off our campus now! We want justice! You say, “How?” We want justice! You say, “How?” Answer our demands now! Answer our demands now!

MARYAM ALWAN: My name is Maryam Alwan. I’m a senior at Columbia. I’m also Palestinian, and I’m friends with Mahmoud. I’m here in solidarity with my Jewish friends, who are in solidarity with all Palestinian students and Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza.

We are all here today because we miss our friend, and it’s inconceivable to us that the board of trustees are reported to have handed his name over to the federal government, and the fact that these board of trustees have now taken over the university.

Just yesterday, the University Senate at Columbia released an over 300-page report called the Sundial Report, which reveals that the board of trustees has completely endangered both Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish students in the name of quashing dissent and cracking down on protests like never before, eroding shared governance, academic freedom.

And so this has been a long-standing process over 1.5 years to get us to the point where we are today, where people are getting kidnapped from their own campuses. And we can’t just sit by and let the federal government do whatever they want to our own university without standing up against it.

So, whatever we can do.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does it mean to you that it’s Jewish students who have chained themselves to the gates?

MARYAM ALWAN: It means a lot to me, especially because of all of the rhetoric that surrounds these protests saying that we’re violent or threatening, when, from day one, I was part of Students for Justice in Palestine when it was suspended, and we were working alongside Jewish Voice for Peace from day one.

The media just completely twisted the narrative. So, the fact that my Jewish friends are still to this day fighting, no matter what the personal cost is to them — I’ve seen the way that the university has delegitimised their Jewish identity, put them through trials, saying that they’re antisemitic, when they are proud Jews, and they’ve taught me so much about Judaism.

So it just means a lot to see, like, the solidarity between us even almost two years later now.

AHARON DARDIK: My name’s Aharon Dardik. I’m a junior here at Columbia. And we’re here to protest the trustees putting students in danger and not taking accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the chains on your wrists?

AHARON DARDIK: We, as Jewish students, chained ourselves earlier today to a gate on campus, and we said that we weren’t going to leave until the university named who it was among the trustees who collaborated with the fascist Trump administration to detain our classmate, Mahmoud Khalil, and try and deport him.

AMY GOODMAN: Where are you originally from?

AHARON DARDIK: I’m originally from California, but my family moved to Israel-Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: And being from Israel-Palestine, your thoughts on what’s happening there?

AHARON DARDIK: There’s never a justification for killing innocent civilians and for war crimes and genocide that’s being committed now. And I know many, many other people there who are leftist Israeli activists who are doing their best to end the occupation, to end the war and the genocide and to end Israeli apartheid.

But they need more support from the international community, which currently sees supporting Israel as synonymous with supporting the fascist Israeli government that’s perpetrating this genocide, that’s continuing the occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from a protest on Wednesday when Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to university gates in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now detained by ICE in a Louisiana jail.

Students continued their action into the early hours of yesterday morning through the rain, even after Columbia security and New York police arrived on the scene to cut the chains and forcibly remove protesters.

Special thanks to Laura Bustillos.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

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

We turn now to Gaza, where Israel’s assault on the besieged strip continues despite ongoing talks over a possible ceasefire. Palestinian authorities say 5000 people are missing or have been killed in this first 100 days of Israel’s siege of north Gaza.

Since Monday morning, 33 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera Arabic reports, including five people who died in an Israeli attack on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza journalists reports

On Friday, Saed Abu Nabhan, a Palestinian journalist for the Cairo-based Al-Ghad TV, was killed by Israeli forces while reporting in the Nuseirat refugee camp, his funeral was held on Saturday. This is his colleague Mohammed Abu Namous:

MOHAMMED ABU NAMOUS: [translated] It is clear that the Israeli occupation wants to target the journalist body that exposes its crimes, while the occupation had utiliSed its media to say that they only target the resistance and their weapons, until the Palestinian journalists have exposed the truth to the world, saying that this occupation targets children, women and unarmed civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports more than 200 journalists have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023. More than 400 others have been wounded or arrested.

On Thursday, Palestinian journalists held a news conference outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where they decried the hypocrisy and neglect of international media organisations. This is reporter Abubaker Abed:

ABUBAKER ABED: We are just documenting a genocide against us. It’s enough, after almost a year and a half. We want you to stand foot by foot with us, because we are like any other journalists, reporters and media workers all across the globe, no matter the origin, the color or the race.

Journalism is not a crime. We are not a target.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, journalist Abubaker Abed joins us now from Gaza. He used to be a football — a soccer — commentator, but now he calls himself an “accidental” war correspondent. His new piece for Drop Site News is headlined “What It’s Truly Like to Sleep in a Damp, Frigid Tent: A Report From Gaza.”

He’s joining us from Deir al-Balah, where that news conference was held.

Abubaker Abed, thank you for joining us again. You’re 22 years old. You didn’t expect to be a war correspondent, but that’s what you are now. Talk more about what you were demanding on Thursday, surrounded by other Palestinian journalists, demanding of the Western media, of all international journalists.

‘Journalism is not a crime.’  Video: Democracy Now!

ABUBAKER ABED: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

So, what I demanded was very simple: just the basic human rights as any other people across the globe, particularly for journalists here, who have been subjected to sheer violence, brutality and barbarism over the past almost year and a half — particularly if we talk about, if we have a bit of a comparison between us and any other journalist across the globe.

As I said in this press briefing, that we are working in makeshift tented camps and workplaces. I personally talk about myself here.

I just spent long hours just trying to finalise a story, or finalise a report, just to tell people the truth, and sometimes we don’t have the internet connection.

We have been through starvation. We have been through freezing temperatures. We have been taking shelter in dilapidated tents. We haven’t been given any sort of a human right at all.

So, this is what I really demanded, because what I’ve been seeing for the past 14 months from international media outlets is absolutely enraging.

Like, I do have the same rights. What if we were in another spot in the world? The world would absolutely be standing with us and giving us everything we wanted.

But why, when it comes to Palestinians, it’s a completely different story? We understand, and we’ve been taught as a young man, I’ve been always taught, that the world cares about the human rights of every single person in the world.

But I haven’t seen any of those human rights as a Palestinian. What have I got to do with this war so I was subjected to this scale of barbarism and this starvation and this cold and just all of these diseases?

Right now while I’m talking you, Amy, I’ve been diagnosed with bronchitis. I’m still recovering from it. There are no proper medications inside any of the pharmacies here in Deir al-Balah, where more than a million people are taking shelter.

Even if we’re talking about it in detail, the lack of medical supplies and aid inside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital here, which serves more than 1.5 million people in central Gaza, — apart from the everyday casualties — is literally insane.

When we talk about that, when we talk about the Palestinian journalists, we’ve lost around 210. And even after the press briefing, another journalist was killed.

So, you talk to an absolutely dead conscience of the world. You’re talking about — like … the world just keeps turning a blind eye and deaf ear to what is happening, as if we are talking to ourselves.

It’s completely enraging and unacceptable, because, again, we are like any other reporters, media workers and journalists across the globe, and we have the right to be given access to all media equipment, access to the world, and our voices must be amplified, because, again, we are not any party to this war.

And we must be protected by all international laws, because that’s what has been enshrined in international laws and human rights that have always been taught to the entire world.

AMY GOODMAN: We should make clear that all media has access to journalists on the ground in Gaza.

Our Democracy Now! viewers and listeners know we go regularly to Gaza, almost unheard of in the rest of the American corporate media. Yes, they are banned. And that should be raised every time they report on Israel and Gaza, that they are not allowed there.

Abubaker Abed, what would it mean if there was more attention brought to the journalists on the ground in Gaza? According to a number of reports, well over 150 — nearly 250 —  journalists have been killed, most recently this weekend in Nuseirat, is that right, Abubaker?

ABUBAKER ABED: Yes. I mean, like, the reports are always horrific. Even when we go to a particular place to report on a specific event in the continuously deteriorating humanitarian situation, we know that this might be the end.

We know that even everything we’re doing right now to report on or anything we’re trying to tell, any story that we are trying to relate to the outside world, is going to cost our lives.

But we want to tell the world. We want to live in dignity. We want to live in peace, in calm, because that’s what we really deserve, as any other people across the globe. You said it in the beginning, that I shouldn’t have been an accidental war correspondent, but that’s what I’ve evolved into, because this is my homeland, and this is something that I have to defend wholeheartedly.

But, yes, even when I’m trying to do this, I’m not given the basic things. I’m not given the basic human rights.

So, every journalist here, that is working tirelessly, that has been working relentlessly since the outbreak of this genocidal assault on Gaza, has faced unimaginable horrors. We have — I, myself, lost my very dearest friend, lost family members and lost many of my friends and many of my loved ones.

But I still continue to hope. I still continue to endure the harsh, stark realities of living inside Gaza, because Gaza is now a hellscape. Absolutely, it’s the apocalyptic hellscape of the world. It’s not livable at all.

Children particularly, because I’ve been talking to many children and reporting on them, we can see the children are painful, are barefoot. They are traumatised. Their clothes are ripped apart.

And they are desperately needing just a sip of water and a bite of food, but that is not available because Israel continues, continues applying the collective punishment on all people of the Gaza Strip.

And again, I just want to reaffirm that half of the Gaza population is children. So, what have these children got to do with such a genocidal assault on Gaza?

They should have the right to educate because they have been deprived of their education for the past year and a half almost. They have been deprived of every basic right, even their their necessities and their childhood and everything about them.

The same for us as young men. I should have completed my studies. Unfortunately, my university has been reduced to rubble. Everything about Gaza, everything about my dreams, my memories has also been razed to the ground and has also been reduced to ashes.

Amid the growing news of a possible ceasefire on the line, on the horizon, I can tell you that from here, that we are very hopeful. There is a state of optimism in the anticipation for a ceasefire, because people, including me, want to heal, want to lick our wounds or stitch our wounds — heal up.

And we want to really have one moment, only one moment, of not hearing the buzzing sounds of the drones and the hovering of warplanes, particularly during the night hours, because the tones are every single day, we are very much traumatised.

We really need rehabilitation, to really get to our lives, to get to who we were before this war started.

So, it’s a very much-needed thing, because people are really crying for it. People are really hopeful about it.

And I hope that this will not dash their hopes, the continuous attacks on Gaza. And I hope that they will have their dreams coming true very, very soon, in the coming days.

AMY GOODMAN: Abubaker Abed, we want to thank you so much for being with us, a 22-year-old journalist, speaking to us from Deir al-Balah, Gaza. He used to be a soccer commentator, now as he calls himself, an “accidental” war correspondent.

The article was first published by Democracy Now! and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Gaza’s Health Ministry has confirmed that close to 46,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s ongoing assault, but Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah estimates the true number is closer to 300,000.

“This is literally and mathematically a genocidal project,” says Dr Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Gaza for more than a month treating patients at both Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals.

Israel continues to attack what remains of the besieged territory’s medical infrastructure.

• READ MORE: Gaza Kamal Adwan Hospital chief Abu Safia held at Israeli army base: Report
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, and Faris Odeh, a 15-year-old boy from Gaza, are iconic figures of Palestine, both photographed standing unarmed before Israeli tanks with nothing but their resolve.

Dr. Hussam refused to abandon his hospital despite… pic.twitter.com/R0Y9Qwfcpx

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws) December 29, 2024

On Sunday, an Israeli attack on the upper floor of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City killed at least seven people and wounded several others. On Friday, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, northern Gaza’s last major functioning hospital, and set the facility on fire.

Many staff and patients were reportedly forced to go outside and strip in winter weather.

The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, was arrested, and his whereabouts remain unknown. [Editor: He is reportedly being held in the Sde Teiman base in Israel’s Negev desert, a place notorious for the torture and deaths of detainees].

“It’s been obvious from the beginning that Israel has been wiping out a whole generation of health professionals in Gaza as a way of increasing the genocidal death toll but also of permanently making Gaza uninhabitable,” says Abu-Sittah.

“On October 7, the Israelis crossed that genocidal Rubicon that settler-colonial projects cross.”

‘A genocidal project’.          Video: Democracy Now!

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where a sixth baby has died from severe cold as the death toll tops 45,500 and Israel’s assault on medical infrastructure continues in the besieged territory.

On Sunday, an Israeli attack on the upper floor of al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City killed at least seven people and wounded several others.

On Friday, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, northern Gaza’s last major functioning hospital.

The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, was arrested, [and he is reportedly being held in the Sde Teiman base in Israel’s Negev desert, a place notorious for the torture and deaths of detainees].

Many staff and patients were reportedly forced to go outside and strip in winter weather. This is nurse Waleed al-Boudi describing Dr Hussam Abu Safiya’s arrest.

WALEED AL-BOUDI: [translated] Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was arrested from Al-Fakhoura School after he had stayed with us and refused to leave. Even though they told him to and that he was free to go, he told them that he won’t leave his medical staff.

He took all of us and wanted to get us out at night. But they yelled at him and arrested him, a man of great humanity.

We appeal to the entire world, all of the world, all the human rights organiSations to stand by Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the great man, the man who planted, within us and within our hearts, patience so we can persevere in our steadfast north.

I swear we wouldn’t have left, but by force. We cried blood on the doors of Kamal Adwan Hospital when we were forced out by the occupation army.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A person who was with Dr Hussam Abu Safiya shared testimony that, quote, “The Israeli forces whipped Dr Hussam using an electrical wire found in the street after forcing him and others from the medical staff to remove their clothes”.

This is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya in one of his final interviews before being detained, produced by Sotouries.

DR HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA: [translated] I always say the situation requires one to stand by our people’s side and not run away from it.

Gaza is our homeland, our mother, our beloved and everything to us. Gaza deserves all of this steadfastness and deserves all of the sacrifices.

It is not just about Gaza, but we deserve to be a people that deserves freedom just like every other people on Earth.

I think the occupation wants us to get out and for us to ask them to get us out, so they can publicly say that the healthcare system is the one asking to leave and that it wasn’t them who asked us to, but we are aware of that.

But we will not leave, God willing, from this place, as I said, for as long as there are humanitarian services to be provided to our people in the northern Gaza Strip.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Dr Hussam Abu Safiya in one of his last interviews before Israeli forces arrested him on Friday in a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital along with at least 240 others in a raid which left the hospital nonoperational.

Israel’s military alleged that Hamas militants were using Kamal Adwan Hospital [But have never provided evidence for their claims].

The World Health Organisation is calling on Israel to end its attacks on Gaza hospitals. Earlier today, the World Health Organization’s chief, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, said: “People in Gaza need access to health care. Humanitarians need access to provide health aid. Ceasefire!”

Last week, World Health Organisation spokesperson Dr Margaret Harris was asked on Channel 4 News whether there was any evidence of the Israeli claim that the hospital is a Hamas stronghold.

DR MARGARET HARRIS: So, whenever we send a mission, we go and we look at the health situation.

Now, I’ve not had at any point our healthcare teams come back and say that they’ve got any concerns beyond the healthcare, but I should say that what we do is look at what the health situation is and what needs to be done.

But all we’ve ever seen going on in that hospital is healthcare.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, for more, we go to Cairo, Egypt.

AMY GOODMAN: Nermeen, thanks so much. I am here with a man who knew Dr Abu Safiya well and is in constant contact with people on the ground in Gaza, particularly the medical professionals.

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah is with us here, British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon. He worked last year in Gaza for almost — for over a month with Médecins Sans Frontières — that’s Doctors Without Borders (MSF) — in two hospitals. He worked at Al-Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza, as well as Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital.

Welcome to Democracy Now! You’ve been in touch with family of Dr Abu Safiya. If you can talk about where he is right now, believed to have been arrested by the Israeli military, and then the crisis just right now on the ground with the closing of Kamal Adwan and more?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, unfortunately, the family is afraid that he has been moved to the infamous Sde Teiman torture camp, an internment camp where, before him, Dr Adnan al-Bursh was tortured, and tortured to death, Dr Iyad Rantisi was tortured to death, where there is documented evidence of not just Israeli guards taking part in torture, but even Israeli doctors taking part in the torture of Palestinians.

And so, that is the fear that not just the family has, but all of us have.

And what we’ve seen in this process, in this destruction, systematic destruction of the health system, with the total destruction of all of the hospitals in the north, so not just Kamal Adwan, before that, the Indonesian Hospital and Al-Awda Hospital, and, immediately after, the targeting of al-Wafa Hospital and then the targeting again of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, which was the first hospital the Israelis targeted on the October 17.

The targeting of al-Wafa Hospital was intended to kill medical students from Gaza’s Islamic University who were sitting in exam in that hospital. And luckily for them, the Israelis got the wrong floor. And then the targeting of Al-Ahli Hospital, which is now the last hospital functioning in that whole arbitrarily created northern part of Gaza, is a sign that the Israelis will now move towards the Ahli Hospital for destruction.

I just want to highlight there is research that is about to be published that shows that the chances of being killed as a nurse or a doctor in Gaza during this genocidal war is three-and-a-half times that of the general population.

So it’s been obvious from the beginning that Israel has been wiping out a whole generation of health professionals in Gaza as a way of increasing the genocidal death toll but also of permanently making Gaza uninhabitable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, you, of course, as we mentioned, as Amy mentioned in the introduction, you have worked in two Gaza hospitals. You’ve just talked a little bit about what’s recently — the recent Israeli attacks on medical infrastructure in Gaza, but if you could explain, just to give a sense of what’s happened overall since October 7, 2023.

If you could say the scale of the destruction of medical infrastructure, as well as the systematic attacks on medical personnel, as you said, this new research that’s coming out that shows that they’re three to four times more likely to be killed than the general population?

So, if you could just say, begin from October 2023 to now?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, what happened on October 12th is that the Israeli army started to call by phone medical directors of all of the hospitals, telling them that unless they evacuated the hospitals, the blood of the patients would be on their hands.

And I remember that day I was with Dr Ahmed Muhanna from Al-Awda Hospital, who’s still been arrested now for over a year, an anesthetist and a medical director, and he received a phone call from the Israeli army to tell him to evacuate Al-Awda Hospital.

Of course, we realised at that point that the destruction of the health system was going to be a prerequisite for the kind of ethnic cleansing that the Israelis wanted in Gaza.

I was in Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on the day of the October 17, when the Israelis bombed that hospital, killing over 480 patients. And then we had the whole narrative about Shifa Hospital, the siege of Shifa Hospital, the destruction of three pediatric hospitals in the north, and then the first attack on Shifa Hospital.

And then, after that, 36 hospitals in Gaza have now been reduced to the three partially working hospitals in the south and only a remnant of Al-Ahli Hospital in the north. We have had over a thousand health workers — doctors, nurses, health professionals — killed, over 400 imprisoned, and then the destruction of the health infrastructure, the destruction of water and sewage, the use of water as a tool of collective punishment in order to create the public health catastrophe that exists in Gaza in terms of infectious diseases, and the intentional famine.

And so, at the moment, we have in Gaza what the doctors are referring to as the triad of death: hypothermia because of the winter, wounding because of the injuries, and malnutrition.

And with the three, what happens is that people die of at higher temperatures, people die of lesser injuries, because the coexistence of these three conditions means that the body is depleted of any physiological reserve.

And so, that’s why we’re watching over seven kids in the last week die of hypothermia, an adult nurse die of hypothermia, not because the temperatures are subzero — the temperatures are just hovering above zero — but because they’re so malnourished and they’re injured and a lot of them have infectious diseases, and so they’re dying at the same time.

Israel has created a genocidal machine that takes Palestinian lives beyond the injury, beyond the bombs, beyond the shrapnel.

And so people are dying of infectious diseases. People are dying because of the health system has collapsed, and so their chronic diseases become medical emergencies. And people are dying from the famine and the malnutrition.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, in light of that, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, if you could comment on the fact that so many people now, an increasing number of people, are questioning this death toll of 45,500, over that number who have been killed in Gaza since or who have died in Gaza since October 2023?

People are saying that is a vast undercount. From what you’re saying, that seems almost certain. If you could comment as a medical professional? You know, what do you think might be a more accurate figure?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, 45,000 are people whose bodies were taken to a Ministry of Health hospital, and they were taken by people who witnessed or who recognised them, and a death certificate was issued.

This 45,000 excludes the tens of thousands who are still under the rubble, more so in the north, where the emergency services were targeted by the Israelis and so are now completely unable to function.

And so, we see pictures of dogs eating bodies of those killed in the streets. Not only people under the rubble, people who have been killed and not reported, or their bodies have not been retrieved.

When you drop 2000-pound bombs, there’s very little of the human body that is left. And so there are people who literally pulverized by these bombs.

Then you have those whose chronic illnesses, once untreated, became deadly, so the kidney dialysis patients, the heart disease patients, the diabetics, who were no longer able to get treatment.

It doesn’t take into account the women who are dying from maternal care, from obstetric injuries during delivery, because they’re delivering in makeshift hospitals, they’re delivering in the tents, and they’re malnourished when they give birth, and so them and their babies have a higher rate of maternal mortality, of infant mortality.

And then you have those who are dying of infectious diseases, of the thousands who have hepatitis at the moment, of the polio, and those who are dying not immediately from their injuries but from the wounds that do not have access to healthcare to stop the infection setting in, and then, eventually, the infection becoming sepsis and killing them.

The number is closer to 300,000. This is around 10 to 12 percent of Gaza’s population.

France, at the end of the Second World War, 4 percent of its population were killed. This is literally and mathematically a genocidal project.

This is not a political term. This is a literal and mathematical term, where you want to eliminate the population and to ensure that whoever is left is incapable of becoming part of a society, because they’re tending to their wounds or they’ve been so severely debilitated by the injuries and the neglected injuries.

We at @amnesty are extremely concerned over the fate & wellbeing of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital who was detained by Israeli forces along with others during a raid on the hospital on 27 December. He must be released immediately and unconditionally.

For… pic.twitter.com/lB6ymeNlPJ

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) December 30, 2024

AMY GOODMAN: Dr Abu-Sittah, you have asked, “How can a live-streamed genocide continue unhindered?” What is your response to that question right now?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: Right now with the arrest of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, where is the British Medical Association? Where is the American Medical Association? Where are the royal colleges? Where is the French Medical Association?

Western medical institutions, their moral bankruptcy has become so astounding during this genocide. For them to become part of a genocidal enablement apparatus, for their silence and, in a lot of times, their collusion to silence those who speak out against the genocide.

For me, as a health professional, you’re shocked at how completely empty of any moral value these medical associations have become, when they have become complicit in a televised genocide which targets doctors.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I’m speaking to you here in Cairo. In May, Germany did not allow you in to speak. You are a British Palestinian doctor.

Since you were in Gaza last year, you’ve been speaking out about what’s happening. Explain exactly what happened. I mean, Human Rights Watch and other groups were demanding that this ban be lifted. They banned you from where?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: So, I was invited to speak at a conference in Germany. I was stopped at Berlin Airport and was told that I’m banned from going into Germany for a month, and I was deported at the end of that day back to the UK.

A few months later, I had an invitation from the French Senate. When I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I discovered that the Germans, a few days after they deported me, had put in a ban for the whole of the Schengen — and Schengen is the EU plus Norway, plus Sweden, plus Switzerland — using an administrative law so that they wouldn’t have to put it in front of the judge. We then were able to challenge that and have it overturned.

But at the same time, pro-Israel groups, like UK Lawyers for Israel, submitted multiple complaints against me with the General Medical Council to have my medical licence removed, submitted complaints against me with the Charity Commission in the UK to have me banned for life from ever holding office in a UK registered charity.

This is what — this is why this genocide has continued unhindered and unchallenged for over 14 months. There are apparatus of genocide enablement that exists in the West, either through collusion or by actively targeting.

Over 60 doctors in the UK have had complaints against them with the General Medical Council to have their medical licences removed as a result of their support of the Palestinians during the genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr Abu-Sittah, Jimmy Carter died yesterday at the age of 100. He wrote the book in the 2000s, which is quite amazing, but after he was president, Palestine: Peace [Not] Apartheid. I’m going to rejoin Nermeen for the end of the show, an interview I did with him on that issue. But your thoughts on President Carter?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: The logic of the relationship between the Zionist colonialist movement and the Palestinian indigenous population has always been that of elimination.

At a certain point — and that’s unfortunately now behind us since the 7th of October — apartheid separation was the chosen method of elimination of the Palestinians. On the 7th of October, the Israelis crossed that genocidal Rubicon that settler-colonial projects cross.

And once the genocidal Rubicon is crossed, the elimination of the indigenous population by the settler-colonial project then purely becomes genocidal.

Israel, even at the end of this genocidal war in Gaza, will not be able to deal with the Palestinians in a nongenocidal way. Once the settler-colonial project becomes genocidal, it cannot undo itself.

We’ve seen that in North America with the killing of the children in Canada. We’ve seen that in Australia. We’ve seen that everywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: And Carter, again, as we just have 30 seconds, writing the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: Well, Carter had a historic opportunity to change the course of this struggle, had he insisted that part of the Camp David Accords was the creation of a Palestinian state. And no amount of recantation will ever change that missed opportunity.

He could have forced on the Israeli government, and the first right-wing Israeli government at that point, under Begin — he could have forced the creation of a Palestinian state, but he failed to do that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And finally, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, we just have 30 seconds. You just said that a genocidal settler-colonial project cannot undo itself. How do you see this ending, then?

DR GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: You see, the world has a choice, because surplus populations like the Palestinians, like refugees crossing the Mediterranean, like the poor people in the favelas and in the inner-city slums, these will either be dealt with through a genocidal project, as Israel has dealt with the Palestinians in Gaza — and this kind of response or this kind of template will become part of the military doctrine that is taught to armies across the world in dealing with these surplus populations.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, thank you so much for joining us, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Gaza as a volunteer with Doctors without Borders treating patients at both Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital.

Amy will rejoin us for our last segment talking about her interview with former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100.

This article/transcript is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

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

We turn to Israel’s war on Gaza. A special UN committee has reported Israel’s actions in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”. Another report by Human Rights Watch finds Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity through its mass forced displacement of Gaza’s civilians.

This comes as the Biden administration has decided to continue arming Israel, even though aid groups say Israel has failed to meet a US-imposed 30-day deadline to increase the flow of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza.

We go now to Deir al-Balah in Gaza, where we’re joined by Arwa Damon, founder of INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza. She previously spent 18 years at CNN, including time as a senior international correspondent.

Thanks so much for being with us, Arwa. This is your fourth trip back to Gaza since October 7, 2023. Tell us what you see there:

ARWA DAMON: You know, Amy, you think you can’t get worse, and then it does. You think people, quite simply, could never cope with these deteriorating conditions, and yet somehow they do. It’s a situation that they have been forced into.

Arguably, the conditions when it comes to access of humanitarian organisations and our ability to distribute aid, aid actually getting into the strip, we’re talking about the lowest levels yet. And this is exactly during the timeframe that the US had given to Israel to actually improve the situation. We’ve seen it getting significantly worse.

We’re not just talking about a shortage in things like flour, food, water, fresh vegetables, you know, hygiene kits. We’re also talking about shortages in what’s available on the commercial market. So, even if you somehow had money to be able to go buy what you need, it quite simply isn’t here.

These hospitals that we keep talking about as being partially functioning, what does that actually mean? It means that if you show up bleeding, someone inside is going to try to stop the bleed, but do they actually have what they need to save your life? No. I was inside visiting some kids here at Al-Aqsa earlier today and over the weekend.

There’s a little 2-year-old boy here whose brain you can see pulsing through his skin. His skull bone was removed. This little boy was not stabilising properly because the ICU was missing a pediatric-sized tracheostomy tube. Now, luckily, we were able to, you know, source some of them, and he has now stabilised, and he is off the ventilator.

Palestinians feel they are being ‘slowly exterminated’. Video: Democracy Now!

But this really gives you an idea of just how serious the situation here is.

People are gathering to demonstrate for things like flour, for bread, for whatever it is that you can imagine. Winter is coming. The rains are coming. This means flooding is coming.

And on top of just, you know, water flooding, we’re also anticipating that the sewage sites are going to be flooding, as well. Aid organizations need to be able to have the capacity and the ability to, you know, shift those sites to areas where they’re not going to pose even more of a health hazard to the community.

So, I mean, it’s a complete and total nightmare. It’s beyond being a nightmare.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about this latest report? The special UN committee says Israel’s actions in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” coming at the same time as a Human Rights Watch report, and UNRWA talks about famine being imminent in northern Gaza.

ARWA DAMON: So, if we’re talking specifically about the north, the northern province of Gaza, this is an area where Israel launched its military operation there nearly four weeks ago. We have seen people repeatedly being forcibly displaced from their homes. There is very little access to medical assistance there.

There has been absolutely no humanitarian assistance delivered there for about the last month. People are starving. They are dying. And it’s not just bombs that are killing people, it’s also disease.

‘Bombs kill quickly, but disease and starvation, they are slow killers. And that is what a lot of people are facing here.’

— Arwa Damon, founder of INARA,

So, when we look at the nature of what is happening in Gaza, you can’t spend a day here, Amy, and not come away with the notion that you are witnessing a population that is being slowly exterminated. And I say “slowly” because, yes, bombs kill quickly, but disease and starvation, they are slow killers. And that is what a lot of people are facing here.

And talk to anybody in Gaza, and there’s absolutely no doubt in their mind that, one, they are living through their own annihilation, and, two, what Israel is doing in the northern part is going to be repeated elsewhere.

And this is also part of why you see a reluctance among the population to want to evacuate, because Gazans know, Palestinians know that when they leave, they’re not going to be able to go back home. This is what history has taught them.

And there is this very real, ingrained fear among the population here right now that what they’re going through at this moment is not the end. There is actually a real sense that the worst is yet to come.

And they feel completely and totally abandoned by the international community, by global leaders, not to mention the United States. And everyone is convinced that right now Israel is going to have even more free rein to do whatever it is that it wants here.

When you talk to people about what it is that they’re going through, they do feel as if every single aspect of trying to survive here has been carefully orchestrated by Israel so that it is able to sort of meet America’s bare minimum of standards, to allow America sufficient cover to say, “Oh, no, there’s improvement that’s happening.”

And yet, actually, at the core of it is just another way to continue to kill the population.

AMY GOODMAN: And as you talk about the United States, which has given tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, they did recently set a 30-day deadline to increase the flow of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza, but the US has decided to keep arming Israel despite this and despite the number of officials in the State Department and other parts of the US government who have quit over this.

ARWA DAMON: Yeah, and let’s just look at the numbers. Let’s just look at what happened when the US started the clock for that 30-day deadline to improve humanitarian assistance. We saw, very shortly afterwards, the number of trucks accessing Gaza dip significantly, down to 30 a day, keeping in mind that one of the key demands that the US had was that aid be increased to at least 350 trucks.

So we saw this, you know, decrease consistent of roughly 30 trucks a day for most of the month of October. Now, in November, that number did go up to around 60-70, but we’re still talking about, you know, falling extraordinarily short, providing barely 20% of what it is that the population here needs.

We saw less access to these besieged areas in the north, where people are effectively trapped or having to basically risk their lives. We’ve had numerous instances where aid has been delivered to the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north, for example, where, shortly after medical evacuation teams have arrived there, there have been strikes.

You have this very ingrained fear that exists among people right now, especially in the north, where some of them are saying, “Don’t deliver anything, because right after you’re delivering, strikes are happening.”

And just to illustrate how it is that we try to move, so if we’re moving from south to north, for example, or even if we’re moving within the northern areas, those movement requests have to be approved by Israel. And aid organisations are increasingly wary of moving around with what we call soft-skin cars, which is basically your normal vehicle that we use to move around in, because of the increasing frequency of instances at Israeli checkpoints where aid convoys have been shot at by IDF troops after receiving the green light.

The OK to cross through, which means that for a lot of aid organizations, movement is limited to those who have access to armoured vehicles, vehicles that are more secure. And those don’t really exist in Gaza in high numbers at all. And we’re not allowed to bring in more to sort of beef up our capacity to be able to move around safely.

I mean, no matter which way you look at it, Amy, you’re constantly faced by numerous obstacles that don’t need to be there. It feels very deliberate, not to mention the complete and total breakdown of security. Now we have numerous looting instances of aid trucks.

We’ve repeatedly asked the Israeli side to be able to use alternative routes, to be able to use secured routes. Those requests are not being met.

I mean, it’s just — it’s such an impossible situation to operate in. I feel like I keep saying the same thing over and over and over again each time I come in. And the words to demonstrate how much worse it’s getting, quite simply, lack in our vocabulary.

AMY GOODMAN: You also wrote a piece recently, “The Devastation of Lebanon,” for New Lines. And we had this headline, The Washington Post reporting a close aide to Netanyahu told Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner that Israel is rushing to advance a ceasefire deal in Lebanon as a gift to Trump ahead of his January inauguration. Your response to the significance of Trump’s election and what it means to the people of Lebanon and Gaza?

ARWA DAMON: You know, first of all, anyone who lives in the Middle East and anyone who’s kind of been focusing on the Middle East knows very well that it really doesn’t matter who’s in the White House. Whether it’s Republican or Democrat, that really is not going to change significantly US policy towards this region.

But the thing that we’ve been hearing, specifically when it comes to the re-election of Donald Trump, is at least he’s not lying to us. At least whatever America is going to let Israel do, it’s going to be done faster. So, if our end is coming, at least it’s going to come faster.

Whereas when it comes to, you know, specifically the Biden administration, the sense is that the Democrats are far more willing to allow this slower, more painful death. But the end result, no matter who it is, people are fully convinced, is exactly the same.

And all people really want right now is for this to end. People are suffocated. They’re crushed. They cannot keep going like this. And they very much feel as if, you know, no matter what it is, no matter who it is, Arabs are viewed by the United States and by the Western world as somehow being less than . . . their lives are not that valuable.

You constantly hear people in Gaza — and we were hearing the same thing in Lebanon — making comments like, “Well, you know, America, it doesn’t care if we live or die. It doesn’t care how much we suffer. Our lives don’t matter to them.” And that is not really a perspective that changes all that much, no matter who is sitting in Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, Arwa. Why did you give up journalism for humanitarian work? What do you think you can accomplish at INARA that you couldn’t do as a journalist?

ARWA DAMON: There’s a certain sort of privilege of being able to spend extensive periods of time with people and really get to know who they are. And I feel as if, you know, moving around in the humanitarian sphere, I’m getting a different understanding of sort of people’s emotional journeys, what it actually takes to be able to provide them with assistance.

And it’s provided me a different way of being able to continue to sort of share people’s stories and experiences, but also be able to immediately at least try to provide assistance. You know, the challenge that we have when we’re out in the field as journalists is that you don’t always see the impact.

But when you’re in the humanitarian space, there’s a certain kind of magic when you’re able to just bring a smile to a child’s face. And I needed that.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon, we thank you so much for being with us. Stay safe. An award-winning journalist, she was with CNN for 18 years but now has founded INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza, speaking to us from Deir al-Balah in Gaza outside Al-Aqsa Hospital.

This article is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Israel’s deadly siege on northern Gaza has entered a 30th day. Early week, the World Health Organisation managed to deliver some medical supplies to the Kamal Adwan Hospital, but on Thursday, Israeli fighter jets bombed the hospital’s third floor, where the supplies were being stored.

Al Jazeera reports Israeli forces are continuing to shell Beit Lahia, the scene of multiple massacres last week. On Wednesday, an Israeli attack on a market in Beit Lahia killed at least 10 Palestinians. Earlier in the week, Israel struck a five-story residential building, killing at least 93 people, including 25 children.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, has released a major report accusing Israel of committing genocide.

Albanese concludes that Israel’s war on Gaza is part of a campaign of, “long-term intentional, systematic, state-organised forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians” . The report is titled Genocide as Colonial Erasure.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca Albanese is now facing intensifying personal attacks from Israeli and US officials. She was set to brief Congress earlier last week, but the briefing was cancelled. On Tuesday, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, wrote on social media, “As UN Special Rapporteur Albanese visits New York, I want to reiterate the US belief she is unfit for her role. The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.”

On Wednesday, Francesca Albanese spoke at the United Nations and responded to the US attacks.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: I have the same shock that you have, looking at how the United States is behaving in this context, in the context of the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. I’m not — I’m not surprised that they attack anyone who speaks to the facts that are, frankly, on our watch in Gaza. And they do that so brutally because they feel called out, because it’s not that it’s that the United States is simply an observer. The United States is being an enabler in what Israel has been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: That was UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese speaking at the United Nations on Wednesday. She joins us here in our studio.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! Thanks so much for joining us.

Well, before we get you to further respond to what the US and Israel is saying, can you lay out the findings of your report?

Colonial Erasure’: UN expert Francesca Albanese on Israel’s “intent to destroy” Gaza    Video: Democracy Now!

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me.

I have to say that this report is the second I write on — and I present to the United Nations on the topic of genocide. And it has been very reluctantly that I’ve taken on the responsibility to be the chronicler of — the chronicler of an unfolding genocide in Gaza.

In March this year, I concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israel had committed at least three acts of genocide in Gaza, like killing members of the protected group, Palestinians; inflicting severe bodily and mental harm; and creating conditions of life that would lead to the destruction of the group. And the reason why I identified these were not just war crimes and crimes against humanity is because I identified an intent to destroy.

And I understand that even in this country, people are quite confused about what is genocidal intent, because it’s not a motive. One can have many motives to commit a crime. And I understand genocide is a very insidious one, and it’s difficult to identify what’s a motive. But this is not about the motives. The intent to commit genocide is the determination to destroy, which is fully evident in — especially in the Gaza Strip, as I identified in — as argued in March already.

The reason why I continue to write about genocide — and, in fact, this report walks on the heels of the previous one — is in order to better explain the intent, especially state intent, because there is another misunderstanding that there should be a trial of the alleged perpetrators in order to have — to attribute responsibility to a state.

No, because not only you have had acts committed that should have been prevented by the — in a rule of law, in a proclaimed rule of law system like Israel, where there is the government, the Parliament, the judiciary, working as checks and balances, genocide has not only been not prevented, [it] has been enabled through the various organs of the state.

And I explain what has happened as of October 7, which has provided the opportunity to escalate violence, to build on the rage and on the fury of many Israelis, turning the soldiers into willful executioners, is that there was already a plan, hatred.

I mean, the Palestinians, like Ilan Pappé says, are victims not of war, but of a political ideology that has been unleashed. Palestinians have always been an unwanted encumbrance in the Israeli mindset, because they are an obstacle both as an identity and as legal status to the realisation of Greater Israel as a state for Jewish Israelis only.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, we’ll go back to — because I do want to ask about the Israeli state institutions that you name and the branches of the Israeli state that have been involved in forming this state’s intent. But if you could elaborate on the point that you make, the difference between intent and motive, and in particular what you say in the report about how it’s critical to determine genocidal intent, “by way of inference”?

You know, that’s a different phrasing than one has heard in all of this conversation about genocide so far. If you explain what you mean by that and what such a determination makes possible? So, rather than just looking at genocidal intent in other forms, what it means to infer genocidal intent?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: So, first of all, what constitutes genocide is established by Article II of the Genocide Convention, which creates a twofold obligation for member states, to prevent genocide so genocide doesn’t have to complete itself. When there is a manifestation of intent, even genocidal intent, there is already an obligation to intervene, because a crime is unfolding.

And then there is an obligation to punish. How the jurisprudence, especially after Rwanda and after former Yugoslavia, there have been cases both for criminal proceedings, where individual perpetrators have been investigated and tried, and [the] responsibility of the state, litigated before the International Court of Justice. This is how the jurisprudence on genocide has developed.

And the intent has been further elaborated upon what the Genocide Convention says. And while it might be difficult to have direct intent, meaning to have — it’s difficult but not impossible, in fact, to have a state official say, “Yes, let’s go and destroy everyone” — although I do believe that there is direct intent in this genocide in Gaza.

But the court also established that genocide can be inferred from the scale of the attack on the people, the nature of the attack, the general conduct. And what it says is that normally there should be a holistic approach in order to identify intent, which is exactly what I’ve done.

And indeed, this is why I proposed in this report what I called the triple lens approach. We need to look at the conduct, like the totality of the conduct, instead of studying with a microscope each and every crime. We need to look at the whole, against the totality of the people, the Palestinians as such, in the totality of the land, that Israel has slated as its own by divine design.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, absolutely. And then, if you could — the other precedent you’ve just spoken about — of course, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia — another case that you cite in the International Court of Justice is The Gambia v. Myanmar. So, how is that comparable to what we see happening in Gaza? Why is that a relevant example and different from both Rwanda and former Yugoslavia?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Let me tell you what I see as the major differences in the case of Israel, because it’s a very complex discussion. But in all four cases, there is a toxic combination of hatred, ideological hatred, which has informed political doctrines. And this is true in all the various contexts we are mentioning. The other common element is that there is [a] combination of crimes. Like, forced displacement is not an act of genocide per se, but the jurisprudence says that it can contribute to corroborate the intent.

But, again, mass killing or mass destruction of property, torture and other crimes against a person, which translate into an infliction of physical and mental harm to the group, not individuals as such, but individuals as part of the group, these are common elements to all genocides.

What I find characteristic in this one is, first of all, this is not — I mean, the state of Israel is not Myanmar and is not Rwanda 30 years ago. This is not war-torn former Yugoslavia. This is a state which has a separation of powers, different organs, as I said, checks and balances. And let me give you a specific example, because you asked me to comment on the state functions.

In January this year, the International Court of Justice issued a set of preliminary measures in the context of its identification, before even looking at the merits of the case initiated by South Africa for Israel’s breach, alleged breach, of the Genocide Convention, which identified the plausibility of risk for the rights protected — of the rights of the Palestinians protected under the Genocide Convention, which means plausibility — it’s semantics, but it’s plausibility that genocide might be committed against the Palestinians in Gaza.

And the provisional measures included an obligation to investigate and prosecute the various cases of incitement, genocidal incitement, that the court had already identified. And it mentions leaders, senior leaders, of the Israeli state. Has there been any investigation? Has there been any prosecution?

But I’m telling you more. The genocidal statements didn’t resonate as shocking in the Israeli public, not only because there was rage, an enormous rage and animosity, of course. I mean, this is understandable, that the facts of October 7 were brutal and traumatized the people.

But at the same time, hatred against the Palestinians and hate speech, it’s not something that started on October 7. I do remember, and I do remember the shock I felt because no one was reacting, and years ago, there were Israeli ministers talking of — freely, of killing, justifying the killing of Palestinians’ mothers and children because they would turn into terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca Albanese, talk about the title of your report, Genocide as Colonial Erasure.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: This is another element which I think — and, in fact, it’s the most important, where we see the difference between this genocide and others, because there is a settler-colonial component. And again, if you look at what the International Court of Justice in July this year concluded, when it decided that the — when it found that Israel’s 57 years of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is unlawful and needs to be withdrawn totally and unconditionally, as rapidly as possibly, which the General Assembly says by September 2025.

The court said that it amounts to — that the colonies amount to — have led to a process of annexation and racial segregation and apartheid. And these are the features of settler colonialism, the taking of the land, the taking of the resources, displacing the local population and replacing it. This has been a feature.

Now, it is in this context that we need to analyse what is happening today. And by the way, don’t believe, don’t listen only to Francesca Albanese. Listen to what these Israeli leaders and ministers are saying — reoccupying Gaza, retaking Gaza, recolonising Gaza, reconquesting Gaza. This is what they are saying.

And there are settlers on expeditions, not only to Gaza but also to Lebanon. So, this is why I say that the main difference, the main feature of this genocide, apart all the horrible aspects of it, is that this is the first settler-colonial genocide to be ever litigated before a court, an international court.

And this is why coming to this country, which is a country birthed from a genocide, when I meet the Native Americans, for example, I feel the pain of these people. And I say if we manage to build on the intersectionality of Indigenous struggle, the cry for justice behind this case for Palestine will resonate even louder, because it will somewhat be an act of atonement from the settler-colonial endeavor, which has sprouted out of Europe, toward Indigenous peoples. So there is a lot of symbolism behind it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, you know, the analogy — first of all, you talked about the case brought by South Africa, so what they share, apart from South Africa and Israel-Palestine, is both the fact that they were colonial-settler states, as well as the fact that apartheid has been established as having occurred in both places.

Now, in the case of South Africa, it was a decision that was taken by the United Nations at the time of apartheid, was unseating South Africa from the General Assembly. There have been calls now to do the same with Israel. So, if you could — if you could comment on that?

And then, I just want to quote another short sentence from your report, in which you say, “As the world watches the first live-streamed settler-colonial genocide, only justice can heal the wounds that political expedience has allowed to fester.” So, if you could talk about the International Court of Justice’s case in that context, what role you think they can play, South Africa’s case, in resolving or addressing — seeing and addressing this wound?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: First of all, let me unpack the question of the unseating Israel, because this is one of the recommendations I made in my report. Under Article 6 of the UN Charter, a member state can be suspended of its credentials or its membership by the General Assembly upon recommendation of the UN Security Council. And the first criticism I got is that we cannot do that, because every states commit international law violations. Absolutely. Absolutely.

But there are two striking features here. First, Israel is quite unique in maintaining an unlawful occupation, which has deemed such by — in at least one full occasion, but again, there was already a case brought before the ICJ in 2004, so there have been two ICJ advisory opinions.

There is a pending case for genocide. There has been the violations of hundreds of resolutions by the — on Israel — over occupied Palestinian territory, by the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, and steady violation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, the Apartheid Convention, the Genocide Convention. So this is quite unique.

But all the more, this year alone, Israel has conducted an attack, an unprecedented attack, against the United Nations. It has attacked physically, through artillery, weapons, bombs, UN premises. Seventy percent of UNRWA offices and UNRWA buildings, clinics, distribution centers have been hit and shelled by the Israeli army.

Two hundred and thirty UN staff members have been killed by Israel in Gaza alone. UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have been attacked. And this doesn’t even take into account the smear, the defamation against senior UN officials, the declaration of the secretary-general as persona non grata, the referring to the General Assembly as a “cloak of antisemites”.

Again, this has mounted to a level — the hubris against the United Nations and international law has been unchecked and unbounded forever, but now, especially after the Knesset passed a law outlawing UNRWA, declaring UNRWA a terrorist organisation, and therefore disabling it from its capacity to deliver aid and assistance especially in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is the nail in the coffin of the UN Charter.

And it can also contribute to that sense of colonial erasure, because here it’s not just at stake the function of a UN body — and UNRWA is a subsidiary body of the General Assembly, so it’s even more serious. But there is the capacity of UNRWA to deliver humanitarian aid in a desperate situation, and also the fact that UNRWA is seen by Israel as the symbol of Palestinian identity, especially the Palestinian refugees. So there is an attempt to erase Palestinianness, including by hitting UNRWA.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about your trip here, as we begin to wrap up. The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, quoted on — tweeted on Tuesday, “As UN Special Rapporteur Albanese visits New York, I want to reiterate the US belief she is unfit for her role. The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.” If you can further address their charge of antisemitism against you?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what happened. You were supposed to come to Congress and speak and brief them, but that was cancelled this week.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, it was canceled. But let me — first of all, I’m very embarrassed to read this, because a senior US official who writes this, I mean, it shows a little bit of desperation. I’m sorry, but, you know, I’m very candid.

And let me unpack my antisemitism for the audience. So, what I’ve been accused of — the reason why I’ve been accused of antisemitism — is because I’ve allegedly compared the Jews to the Nazis. Never done. Never done.

What I’ve said, what I’ve done is saying, and I keep on saying, that history is repeating itself. I’ve never done such a comparison where I draw the parallel. It’s on the behaviour of member states who have the legal and moral obligation to prevent atrocities, including an unfolding genocide.

In the past, they have done nothing — nothing — until the end of the Second World War, to prevent the genocide of the Jews and the Roma and Sinti. And they’ve done nothing to prevent the genocide of the Bosnians.

And they’ve done nothing to prevent the genocide of the Rwandans. And they are doing the same today. This is where I insist that now, compared to when there was the Holocaust, now we have a human rights framework that should prevent this. The Genocide Convention to prevent this. So, this is one of the points.

The second point, — which leads to portray me as an antisemite, which is really offensive — is that I’ve said that October 7 was not — I’ve contested, I’ve challenged the argument that October 7 was an antisemitic attack. October 7 was a crime, was heinous. And again, I’ve condemned the acts that were directed against the Israeli civilians, and expressed solidarity with the victims, with the families. I’ve been in contact with the families of the hostages.

But I’ve also said the hatred that led that attack, that prompted that attack, to the extent it hit civilians, not the military, but it was prompted not by the fact that the Israelis are Jews, but the fact that the Israelis — I mean, the Israelis are part of that endeavor that has kept the Palestinians in a cage for 17 years and, before, under martial law for 37 years. And Palestinians have tried — it’s true they have used violence, but before violence, they have tried dialogue. They have tried collaboration. They have tried a number of means to access justice, and they have gone nowhere.

I can — I mean, let me relate just this case, because last year I worked with children. And someone who was 17 years old before October 7 last year had never set foot out of Gaza. This is the reality. And I spoke with children while I was writing my report on “unchilding”, the experience of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. And one of them — I mean, there were these two girls fighting, because one of them had been able to go to Israel and the West Bank because she had cancer and could be treated, and the other was jealous, because, she said, “At least she was sick, and she could go, she could travel. I’ve never seen the mountains.”

And again, this doesn’t justify violence, but, please, please, put things in context. And even Israeli scholars have said claiming that October 7 was prompted by antisemitism is a way to decontextualize history and to deresponsibilise Israel.

I condemn Israel not because it’s a Jewish state. It’s not about that, but because it’s in breach of international law through and through. And were the majority of Israelis Buddhists, Christians, atheists, it would be the same. I would be as vocal as I am now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, just one last question, and we only have a minute. Your recent book, J’Accuse, you take the title, of course, from the letter Émile Zola wrote during the Dreyfus Affair to the French president. You came under severe criticism for the choice of that title. Could you explain why you chose it and what it means in this context?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Absolutely. I have the sense that whatever I say comes under scrutiny and criticism. But J’Accuse is — first of all, it’s the title that was proposed by the editor, the publisher. And I was against it until October 7.

When I saw the narrative, the dehumanization of the Palestinians after October 7, and what it was legitimising, I said, “This is the title. We need to use it,” because I draw the parallel between what is happening to the Palestinians and what has happened to other groups, particularly the Jewish people in Europe.

I say the Holocaust was not just about the concentration camps. The Holocaust was a culmination of centuries of discrimination, and the previous decades had led the Jewish people in Europe to be kicked out of jobs, professions, to be treated like subhumans, as animals. And it’s this dehumanisation that we need to look at in the face today, in the eyes today, and recognise as leading to atrocity crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The text of this programme was first published by Democracy Now! here and is  republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Democracy Now!

This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I am Amy Goodman, with Juan González:

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post newspapers are facing mounting backlash after the papers’ publishers announced no presidential endorsements would be made this year. The LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and The Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

National Public Radio (NPR) is reporting more than 200,000 people have cancelled their Washington Post subscriptions, and counting.

• READ MORE: Two of the US’s biggest newspapers have refused to endorse a presidential candidate. This is how democracy dies
• Other US presidential elections reports

A number of journalists have also resigned, including the editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, who wrote, “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”

Veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein have also resigned from the L.A. Times editorial board.

At The Washington Post, David Hoffman and Molly Roberts both resigned on Monday from the Post editorial board. Michele Norris also resigned as a Washington Post columnist, and Robert Kagan resigned as editor-at-large.

David Hoffman, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for his series “Annals of Autocracy,” wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”

David Hoffman joins us now, along with former Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza.

David Hoffman, let’s begin with you. Explain why you left The Washington Post editorial board. Oh, and at the same time, congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize.

DAVID HOFFMAN: Thank you very much.

I worked for 12 years writing editorials in which I said over and over again, “We cannot be silent in the face of dictatorship, not anywhere.” And I wrote about dissidents who were imprisoned for speaking out.

And I felt that I couldn’t write another editorial decrying silence if we were going to be silent in the face of Trump’s autocracy. And I feel very, very strongly that the campaign has exposed his intention to be an autocrat.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, is there any precedent for the publisher of The Washington Post overruling their own editorial board?

DAVID HOFFMAN: Yeah, there’s lots of precedent. It’s entirely within the right of the publisher and the owner to do this. Previous owners have often told the editorial board what to say, because we are the voice of the institution and its owner. So, there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s wrong here is the timing. If they had made this decision early in the year and announced, as a principle, they don’t want to issue endorsements, nobody would have even blinked. A lot of papers don’t. People have rightly questioned whether they actually have any impact.

What matters here was, we are right on the doorstep of the most consequential election in our lifetimes. To pull the plug on the endorsement, to go silent against Trump days before the election, that to me was just unconscionable.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mariel Garza, could you talk about the situation at the LA Times and your reaction when you heard of the owner’s decision?

MARIEL GARZA: Certainly. It was a long conversation over the course of many weeks. We presented our proposal to endorse Kamala Harris. And, of course, there was — to us, there was no question that we would endorse her. We spent nine years talking about the dangers of Trump, called him unfit in 5 million ways, and Kamala Harris is somebody that we know. She’s a California elected official.

We’ve had a lot of conversations with her. We’ve seen her career evolved. We were going to — we were going to endorse her. And there was no indication that we were going to suddenly shift to a neutral position, certainly not within a few weeks or months of the election.

At first, we didn’t get a clear answer — sounds like it’s the same situation that happened at The Washington Post — until we pressed for one. We presented an outline with — these are the points we’re going to make — and an argument for why not only was it important for us, an editorial board whose mission is to speak truth to power, to stand up to tyranny — our readers expect it.

We’re a very liberal paper. There is no — there is no question what the editorial board believes, that Donald Trump should not be president ever.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to —

MARIEL GARZA: So, it was perplexing. It was mystifying. It was — go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to get your response to the daughter of the LA Times owner. On Saturday, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika Soon-Shiong posted a message online suggesting that her father’s decision was linked to Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Nika wrote, “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process.

“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she wrote.

Her father, Patrick Soon-Shiong, later disputed her claim, saying that she has no role at the Los Angeles Times. Mariel Garza, your response?

MARIEL GARZA: Look, I really don’t know what to say, because I have — that was — if that was the case, it was never communicated to us. I do not know what goes on in the conversation in the Soon-Shiong household. I know that she is not — she does not participate in deliberations of the editorial board, as far as I know. I’ve never spoken to her.

We all know how she feels about Gaza, because she’s a prolific tweeter. So, I really can’t say. And this is part of the bigger problem, is we were never given a reason for why we were being silent.

If there was a reason — say it was Israel — we could have explained that to readers. Instead, we remain silent. And that’s — I mean, this is not a time in American history where anybody can remain silent or neutral.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, this whole issue has been raised by some critics of Jeff Bezos that his company has a lot of business with the US government, and whether that had any impact on Bezos’s decision. I’m wondering your thoughts.

DAVID HOFFMAN: I can’t be inside his mind. His company does have big business, and he’s acknowledged it’s a complicating factor in his ownership. But I can’t really understand why he made this decision, and I don’t think it’s been very well explained. His explanation published today was that he wants sort of more civic quiet, and he thought an endorsement would add to the sense of anxiety and the poisonous atmosphere.

But I disagree with that. I think, like in the LA Times, I think readers have come to expect us to be a voice of reason, and they’ve looked to endorsements at least for some clarity. So, frankly, I also feel that we’re still lacking an explanation.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, you have subtitle, the slogan of The Washington Post, of course, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It’s being mocked all over social media. One person wrote, “Hello Darkness My Old Friend.”

David Hoffman, your response to that? But also, you won the Pulitzer Prize for your series “Annals of Autocracy,” and you talk about digital billionaires, as well, and what this means. How does this fit into your investigations?

DAVID HOFFMAN: You know, I would hope everybody would understand and acknowledge that we’ve done a lot of good for democracy and human rights. You know, I’ve had governments react sharply to a single editorial. When we call them out for imprisoning dissidents, it matters that we are very widely read.

And that’s another reason why I feel this was a big mistake, because we actually were on a path, for decades, of championing democracy and human rights as an institution.

And, you know, I have to tell you, I wrote a book in Russia about oligarchs. I understand how difficult it is when you have a lively and independent group of journalists. And ownership really matters. And, you know, we’re not just another widget company.

This is actually a group of very, very deep-thinking and oftentimes very aggressive people that have a desire to change the world. That’s the kind of journalism that The Washington Post has sponsored and engaged in.

In 2023, we published a series of editorials that took a look deep inside how China, Russia, Burma, you know, other places — how these autocracies function. One of the findings was that many of these dictatorships are using technology to clamp down on dissent, even things as tiny as a single tweet.

Young people, young college students are being thrown in prison in Cuba, in Belarus, in Vietnam. And I documented these to show how this technology actually isn’t becoming a force for freedom, but it’s being turned on its head by dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, David Hoffman, Washington Post reporter, stepped down from the Post editorial board when they refused to endorse a presidential candidate; Mariel Garza, LA Times editorials editor who just resigned.

I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

This programme is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Acclaimed journalist Mehdi Hasan joins Democracy Now! to discuss US media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza and how the war is a genocide being abetted by the United States.

Hasan says US media is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and fails to convey the truth to audiences.

“Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict,” he says.

• READ MORE: Is­rael army plan to in­vade Gaza’s Rafah ap­proved as Qatar talks to re­sume
• ‘Food not bombs’ Gaza protesters picket MFAT offices in Auckland

Hasan has just launched a new media company, Zeteo, which he started after the end of his weekly news programme on MSNBC earlier this year.

Hasan’s interviews routinely led to viral segments, including his tough questioning of Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev, but the cable network announced it was canceling his show in November.

The move drew considerable outrage, with critics slamming MSNBC for effectively silencing one of the most prominent Muslim voices in US media.

Rafah invasion threat
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, which human rights groups warn would be a massacre.

President Biden has said such an escalation is a “red line” for him, but Netanyahu has vowed to push ahead anyway.

“Where is the outcry here in the West?” asks Hasan of reports of Israeli war crimes, including the killing of more than 100 journalists in the past five months in Gaza and the blockade of aid from the region.

“It’s a stain on [Biden’s] record, on America’s conscience.”

Transcript:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza has topped 31,300. At least five people were killed on Wednesday when Israel bombed an UNRWA aid distribution center in Rafah — one of the UN agency’s last remaining aid sites in Gaza. The head of UNRWA called the attack a “blatant disregard [of] international humanitarian law”.

This comes as much of Gaza is on the brink of famine as Israel continues to limit the amount of aid allowed into the besieged territory. At least 27 Palestinians have died of starvation, including 23 children.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera has reported six Palestinians were killed in Gaza City when Israeli forces opened fire again on crowds waiting for food aid. More than 80 people were injured.

In other news from Gaza, Politico reports the Biden administration has privately told Israel that the US would support Israel attacking Rafah as long as it did not carry out a large-scale invasion.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we begin today’s show looking at how the US media is covering Israel’s assault on Gaza with the acclaimed TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. In January, he announced he was leaving MSNBC after his shows were cancelled. Mehdi was one of the most prominent Muslim voices on American television.

In October, the news outlet Semafor reported MSNBC had reduced the roles of Hasan and two other Muslim broadcasters on the network, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

US Media fails on Gaza, fascism.       Video: Democracy Now!

Then, in November, MSNBC announced it was cancelling Hasan’s show shortly after he conducted this interview with Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is an excerpt:

MEHDI HASAN: You say Hamas’s numbers — I should point out, just pull up on the screen, in the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death tolls, so — and the UN, human rights groups all agree that those numbers are credible. But look, your wider point is true.

MARK REGEV: Can I challenge that?

MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —

MARK REGEV: Will you allow me —

MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —

MARK REGEV: — to challenge that, please? Can I just challenge that?

MEHDI HASAN: Briefly, if you can.

MARK REGEV: I’d like to challenge that.

MEHDI HASAN: Briefly.

MARK REGEV: I’ll try to be as brief as you are, sir. Those numbers are provided by Hamas. There’s no independent verification. And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists, combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe that they’re all civilians, that they’re all children.

And here we have to say something that isn’t said enough. Hamas, until now, we’re destroying their military machine, and with that, we’re eroding their control.

But up until now, they’ve been in control of the Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, but I have —

MARK REGEV: Is that by accident, or is that —

MEHDI HASAN: But I have, Mark —

MARK REGEV: — because Hamas can control — Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza?

MEHDI HASAN: Mark, but you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I haven’t. You’re right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So —

MARK REGEV: Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also —

MARK REGEV: They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.

MEHDI HASAN: But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?

MARK REGEV: No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.

MEHDI HASAN: Oh wow.

AMY GOODMAN: “Oh wow,” Mehdi Hasan responded, interviewing Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev on MSNBC. Soon after, MSNBC announced that he was losing his shows. Since leaving the network, Mehdi Hasan has launched a new digital media company named Zeteo.

Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. I want to start with that interview you did with Regev. After, you lost your two shows, soon after. Do you think that’s the reason those shows were cancelled? Interviews like that?

MEHDI HASAN: You would have to ask MSNBC, Amy. And, Amy and Nermeen, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be back here after a few years away. Look, the advantage of not being at MSNBC anymore is I get to come on shows like this and talk to you all. You should get someone from MSNBC on and ask them why they cancelled the shows, because I can’t answer that question. I wish I knew. But there we go.

The shows were cancelled at the end of November. I quit at the beginning of January, because I wanted to have a platform of my own. I couldn’t really spend 2024, one of the most important news years of our lives — genocide in Gaza, fascism at the door here in America with elections — couldn’t really spend that being a guest anchor and a political analyst, which is what I was offered at MSNBC while I was staying there. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get my voice back.

And that’s why I launched my own media company, as you mentioned, called Zeteo, which we’ve done a soft launch on and we’re going to launch properly next month. But I’m excited about all the opportunities ahead, the opportunity to do more interviews like the one I did with Mark Regev.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, could you explain Zeteo? First of all, what does it mean? And what is the gap in the US media landscape that you hope to fill? You’ve been extremely critical of the US media’s coverage of Gaza, saying, quite correctly, that the coverage has not been as consistent or clear as the last time we saw an invasion of this kind, though far less brutal, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, on Zeteo, it’s an ancient Greek word, going back to Socrates and Plato, which means to seek out, to search, to inquire for the truth. And at a time when we live in a, some would say, post-truth society — or people on the right are attempting to turn it into a post-truth society — I thought that was an important endeavor to embark upon as a journalist, to go back to our roots.

In terms of why I launch it and the media space, look, there is a gap in the market, first of all, on the left for a company like this one. Not many progressives have pulled off a for-profit, subscription-based business, media business. We’ve seen it on the right, Nermeen, with, you know, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and even Tucker Carlson has launched his own subscription-based platform since leaving Fox.

And on the progressive space, we haven’t really done it. Now, of course, there are wonderful shows like Democracy Now! which are doing important, invaluable journalism on subjects like Gaza, on subjects like the climate. But across the media industry as a whole, sadly, in the US, the massive gap is there are not enough — I don’t know how to put it — bluntly, truth tellers, people who are willing to say — and when I say “truth tellers,” I don’t just mean, you know, truth in a conventional sense of saying what is true and what is false; I’m saying the language in which we talk about what is happening in the world today.

Too many of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, hide behind lazy euphemisms, a both-sides journalism, the idea that you can’t say Donald Trump is racist because you don’t know what’s in his heart; you can’t say the Republican Party is going full fascist, even as they proclaim that they don’t believe in democracy as we conventionally understand it; we can’t say there’s a genocide in Gaza, even though the International Court of Justice says such a thing is plausible.

You know, we run away from very blunt terms which help us understand world. And I want to treat American consumers of news, global consumers of news — it’s a global news organisation which I’m founding — with some respect. Stop patronising them. Tell them what is happening in the world, in a blunt way.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, talk about this. I mean, in your criticism of the US media’s coverage, in particular, of Israel’s assault on Gaza — I mean, of course, you have condemned what happened, the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. You’ve also situated the attack in a broader historical frame, and you’ve received criticism for doing that.

And in response, you’ve said, “Context is not causation,” and “Context is not justification.” So, could you explain why you think context, history, is so important, and the way in which this question is kind of elided in US media coverage, not just of the Gaza crisis, but especially so now?

MEHDI HASAN: So, I did an interview with Piers Morgan this week. And if you watch Piers Morgan’s shows, he always asks his pro-Palestinian guests or anyone criticising Israel, you know, “Condemn what happened on October 7.” It’s all about October the 7th. And what happened on October 7 was barbarism. It was a tragedy. It was a terror attack. Civilians were killed. War crimes were carried out. Hostages were taken. And we should condemn it. Of course we should, as human beings, if nothing else.

But the world did not begin on October 7. The idea that the entire Middle East conflict, Israel-Palestine, the occupation, apartheid, can be reduced to October 7 is madness. And it’s not just me saying that.

You talk to, you know, leading Israeli peace campaigners, even some leading Israeli generals, people like Shlomo Brom, who talk about having to understand the root causes of a people under occupation fighting for freedom. And it’s absurd to me that in our media industry people should try and run away from context.

My former colleagues Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, who Amy mentioned in the introduction, they were on air on October 7 as news was coming in of the attacks, and they provided context, because they’re two anchors who really understand that part of the world.

Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps the only US anchor who’s ever lived in Gaza. And they came under attack online from certain pro-Israel people for providing context. This idea that we should be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic as journalists for providing context on one of the biggest stories in the world is madness.

You cannot understand what is happening in the world unless we, unless you and I, unless journalists, broadcasters, are explaining to our viewers and our listeners and our readers why things are happening, where forces are coming from, why people are behaving the way they do. And I know America is a country of amnesiacs, but we cannot keep acting as if the world just began yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a piece in The Intercept — you also used to report for The Intercept — the headline, “In internal meeting, Christiane Amanpour confronts CNN brass about ‘double standards’ on Israel coverage”. It’s a really interesting piece. They were confronting the executives, and “One issue that came up,” says The Intercept, “repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau.

As The Interceptreported in January, “the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.”

And then it quotes Christiane Amanpour, identified in a recording of that meeting. She said, “You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” Amanpour said. The significance of this and what we see, Mehdi? You know, I’m not talking Fox right now. On MSNBC . . .

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: . . . and on CNN, you rarely see Palestinians interviewed in extended discussions.

MEHDI HASAN: So, I think there’s a few issues there, Amy. Number one, first of all, we should recognise that Christiane Amanpour has done some very excellent coverage of Gaza for CNN in this conflict. She’s had some very powerful interviews and very important guests on. So, credit to Christiane during this conflict. Number two . . .

AMY GOODMAN: International . . .

MEHDI HASAN: . . .  I think US media organisations . . .

AMY GOODMAN: . . .  I just wanted to say, particularly on CNN International, which is often not seen . . .

MEHDI HASAN: Very good point.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On CNN domestic.

MEHDI HASAN: Very good — very good point, Amy. Touché.

The second point, I would say, is US media organisations, as a whole, are engaging in journalistic malpractice by not informing viewers, listeners, readers that a lot of their coverage out of Israel and the Occupied Territories is coming under the shadow of an Israeli military censor.

How many Americans understand or even know about the Israeli military censor, about how much information is controlled? We barely understand that Western journalists are kept out of Gaza, or if when they go in, they’re embedded with Israeli military forces and limited to what they can say and do.

So I think we should talk about that in a country which kind of prides itself on the First Amendment and free speech and a free press. We should understand the way in which information comes out of the Occupied Territories, in particular from Gaza.

And the third point, I would say, is, yeah, Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict. When we talk about why the media is structurally biased towards one party in this conflict, the more powerful party, the occupier, we have to remember that this is one of the reasons.

Why are Palestinians dehumanised in our media? This is one of the reasons. We don’t let people speak. That’s what leads to dehumanisation. That’s what leads to bias.

We understand it at home when it comes to, for example, Black voices. In recent years, media organisations have tried to take steps to improve diversity on air, when it comes to on-air talent, when it comes to on-air guests, when it comes to balancing panels. We get that we need underrepresented communities to be able to speak. But when it comes to foreign conflicts, we still don’t seem to have made that calculation.

There was a study done a few years ago of op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the subject of Israel-Palestine from 1970 to, I think it was, 2000-and-something, and it was like 2 percent of all op-eds in the Times and 1 percent in the Post were written by Palestinians, which is a shocking statistic.

We deny these people a voice, and then we wonder why people don’t sympathise with their plight or don’t — aren’t, you know, marching in the street — well, they are marching in the streets — but in bigger numbers. Why America is OK and kind of, you know, blind to the fact that we are complicit in a genocide of these people? Because we don’t hear from these people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Mehdi, I mean, explain why that’s especially relevant in this instance, because journalists have not been permitted access to Gaza, so there is no reporting going on on the ground that’s being shown here. I mean, dozens and dozens of journalists have signed a letter asking Israel and Egypt to allow journalists access into Gaza. So, if you could talk about that, why it’s especially important to hear from Palestinian voices here?

MEHDI HASAN: Well, for a start, Nermeen, much of the imagery we see on our screens here or in our newspapers are sanitised images. We don’t see the full level of the destruction. And when we try and understand, well, why are young people — why is there such a generational gap when it comes to the polling on Gaza, on ceasefire, why are young people so much more antiwar than their elder peers, part of the reason is that young people are on TikTok or Instagram and seeing a much less sanitised version of this war, of Israel’s bombardment.

They are seeing babies being pulled from the rubble, limbs missing. They are seeing hospitals being — you know, hospitals carrying out procedures without anesthetic. They are seeing just absolute brutality, the kind of stuff that UN humanitarian chiefs are saying we haven’t seen in this world for 50 years.

And that’s the problem, right? If we’re sanitising the coverage, Americans aren’t being told, really, aren’t being informed, are, again, missing context on what is happening on the ground. And, of course, Israel, by keeping Western journalists out, makes it even easier for those images to be blocked, and therefore you have Palestinian — brave Palestinian journalists on the ground trying to film, trying to document their own genocide, streaming it to our phones.

And we’ve seen over a hundred of them killed over the last five months. That is not an accident. That is not a coincidence. Israel wants to stamp out independent voices, stamp out any kind of coverage of its own genocidal behavior.

And therefore, again, you’re able to have a debate in this country where the political debate is completely disconnected to the public debate, and the public debate is completely misinformed. I’m amazed, Nermeen, when you look at the polling, that there’s a majority in favor of a ceasefire, that half of all Democrats say this is a genocide. Americans are saying that to pollsters despite not even getting the full picture. Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if they actually saw what was happening on the ground?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to what is unfolding right now in Gaza. You said in a recent interview that in the past Israel was, quote, “mowing the lawn,” but now the Netanyahu government’s intention is to erase the population of Gaza. So let’s go to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about the invasion of Rafah, saying it would go ahead and would last weeks, not months. He was speaking to Politico on Sunday.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7th doesn’t happen again, never happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. … We’re very close to victory. It’s close at hand.

We’ve destroyed three-quarters of Hamas fighting terrorist battalions, and we’re close to finishing the last part in Rafah, and we’re not going to give it up. … Once we begin the intense action of eradicating the Hamas terrorist battalions in Rafah, it’s a matter of weeks and not months.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, your response to what Netanyahu said and what the Israelis have proposed as a safe place for Gazans to go — namely, humanitarian islands?

MEHDI HASAN: So, number one, when you hear Netanyahu speak, Nermeen, doesn’t it remind you of George Bush in kind of 2002, 2003? It’s very — you know, invoking 9/11 to justify every atrocity, claiming that you’re trying to protect the country, when you, yourself, your idiocy and your incompetency, is what led to the attacks. You know, George Bush was unable to prevent 9/11, and then used 9/11 to justify every atrocity, even though his incompetence helped allow 9/11 to happen.

And I feel the same way: Netanyahu allowed the worst terror attack, the worst massacre in Israel to happen on his watch. Many of his own, you know, generals, many of his own people blame him for this. And so, it’s rich to hear him saying, “My aim is to stop this from happening again.” Well, you couldn’t stop it from happening the first time, and now you’re killing innocent Palestinians under the pretence that this is national security.

Number two, again George Bush-like, claiming that the war is nearly done, mission is nearly accomplished, that’s nonsense. No serious observer believes that Hamas is finished or that Israel has won some total victory. A member of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet said recently, “Anyone who says you can absolutely defeat Hamas is telling tall tales, is lying.” That was a colleague of Netanyahu’s, in government, who said that.

And number three, the red line on Rafah that Biden suppposedly set down and that Netanyahu is now mocking, saying, “My own red line is to do the opposite,” what on Earth is Joe Biden doing in allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to humiliate him in this way with this invasion of Rafah, even after he said he opposes it? I mean, it’s one thing to leak stuff . . .

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi . . .

MEHDI HASAN: . . . over a few months . . .

AMY GOODMAN: . . . let’s go to Biden speaking on MSNBC. He’s being interviewed by your former colleague Jonathan Capehart, as he was being questioned about Benjamin Netanyahu and saying he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.

He’s hurting — in my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world — it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake. So I want to see a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: And he talked about a, well, kind of a red line. If you can address what Biden is saying and what he proposed in the State of the Union, this pier, to get more aid in, and also the dropping — the airdropping of food, which recently killed five Palestinians because it crushed them to death, and the humanitarian groups, United Nations saying these airdrops, the pier come nowhere near being able to provide the aid that’s needed, at the same time, and the reason they’re doing all of this, is because Israel is using US bombs and artillery to attack the Palestinians and these aid trucks?

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s just so bizarre, the idea that you could drop bombs, on the one hand, and then drop aid, on the other, and you’re paying for both, and then your aid ends up killing people, too. It’s like some kind of dark Onion headline. It’s just beyond parody. It’s beyond belief.

And as for the pier, as you say, it does not come anywhere near to adequately addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, in terms of the sheer scale of the suffering, half a million people on the brink of famine, over a million people displaced. Four out of five of the hungriest people in the world, according to the World Food Programme, are in Gaza right now.

The idea that this pier would, A, address the scale of the suffering, and, B, in time — I mean, it’s going to take time to do this. What happens to the Palestinians who literally starve to death, including children, while this pier is being built?

Finally, I would say, there’s reporting in the Israeli press, Amy, that I’ve seen that suggests that the pier idea comes from Netanyahu, that the Israeli government are totally fine with this pier, because it allows them still to control land and air access into Gaza, which is what they’ve always controlled and which in this war they’ve monopolised.

The idea that the United States of America, the world’s only superpower, cannot tell its ally, “You know what? We’re going to put aid into Gaza because we want to, and you’re not going to stop us, especially since we’re the ones arming you,” is bizarre.

It’s something I think Biden will never be able to get past or live down. It’s a stain on his record, on America’s conscience. The idea that we’re arming a country that’s engaged in a “plausible genocide,” to quote the ICJ, is bad enough. That we can’t even get our own aid in, while they’re bombing with our bombs, is just madness.

And by the way, it’s also illegal. Under US law, you cannot provide weaponry to a country which is blocking US aid. And by the way, it’s not me saying they’re blocking US aid. US government officials have said, “Yes, the Israeli government blocked us from sending flour in,” for example.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, let’s go to the regional response to this assault on Gaza that’s been unfolding with the kind of violence and tens of thousands of deaths of Palestinians, as we’ve reported. Now, what has — how has the Arab and Muslim world responded to what’s going on? Egypt, of course, has repeatedly said that it does not want displaced Palestinians crossing its border. The most powerful Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates, if you can talk about how they’ve responded? And then the Axis — the so-called Axis of Resistance —  Houthis, Hezbollah, etc. — how they have been trying to disrupt this war, or at least make the backers of Israel pay a price for it?

MEHDI HASAN: So, I hear people saying, “Oh, we’re disappointed in the response from the Arab countries.” The problem with the word “disappointment” is it implies you had any expectations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. Arab countries have never had the Palestinians’ backs.

The Arab — quote-unquote, “Arab street” has always been very pro-Palestinian. But the autocratic, the despotic, the dictatorial rulers of much of the Arab world have never really had the interests of the Palestinian people at their heart, going back right to 1948, when, you know, Arab countries attacked Israel to push it into the sea, but, actually, as we know from historians like Avi Shlaim, were not doing that at all, and that some of them, like Jordan, had done deals with Israel behind the scenes.

So, look, Arab countries have never really prioritised the Palestinian people or their needs or their freedom. And so, when you see some of these statements that come out of the Arab world at times like this, you know, you have to take them with a shovel of salt, not just a grain.

Also, I would point out the hypocrisy here on all sides in the region. You have countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were involved in a brutal assault on Yemen for many years, carried out very similar acts to Israel in Gaza in terms of blockades, starvation, malnourishment of the Yemeni children, in terms of bombing of refugee camps and hospitals and kids and school buses. That all happened in Yemen.

Arab countries did that, let’s just be clear about that, things that they criticise Israel for doing now. And, of course, Iran, which sets itself up as a champion of the Palestinan people, when Bashar al-Assad was killing many of his own people, including Palestinian refugees, in places like the al-Yarmouk refugee camp, Iran and Russia, by the way, were both perfectly happy to help arm and support Assad as he did that.

So, you know, spare me some of the grandiose statements from Middle East countries, from Arab nations to Iran, on all of it. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around.

Very few countries in the world, especially in that region, actually have Palestinian interests at heart. If they did, we would have a very different geopolitical scene. There is reporting, Nermeen, that a lot of these governments, like Saudi Arabia, privately are telling Israel, “Finish the job. Get rid of them. We don’t like Hamas, either. Get rid of them,” and that Saudis actually want to do a deal with Israel once this war is over, just as they were on course to do, apparently, according to the Biden administration.

We know that other Arab countries already signed the, quote-unquote, “Abraham Accords” with Israel on Trump’s watch.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the number of dead Palestinian journalists and also the new UN investigation that just accused Israel of breaking international law over the killing of the Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon. On October 13, an Israeli tank opened fire on him and a group of other journalists. He had just set up a live stream on the border in southern Lebanon, so that all his colleagues at Reuters and others saw him blown up.

The report stated, quote, “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable journalists, constitutes a violation of . . .  international law.” And it’s not just Issam in southern Lebanon. Well over 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza have died. We’ve never seen anything like the concentration of numbers of journalists killed in any other conflict or conflicts combined recently. Can you talk about the lack of outrage of other major news organisations and what Israel is doing here? Do you think they’re being directly targeted, one after another, wearing those well-known “press” flak jackets? It looks like we just lost audio to Mehdi Hasan.

MEHDI HASAN: Amy, I can — I can hear you, Amy, very faintly.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, OK. So . . .

MEHDI HASAN: I’m going to answer your question, if you can still hear me.

AMY GOODMAN: Great. We can hear you perfectly.

MEHDI HASAN: So, you’re very faint to me. So, while I speak, if someone wants to fix the volume in my ear. Let me answer your question about journalists.

It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal, what has happened to journalists in Gaza, that we have seen so many deaths in Gaza. And the real scandal, Amy, is that Western media, a lot of my colleagues here in the US media, have not sounded the alarm, have not called out Israel for what it’s done. It’s outrageous that so many of our fellow colleagues can be killed in Gaza while reporting, while at home, losing family members, and yet there’s not a huge global outcry.

When Wael al-Dahdouh, who we just saw on the screen, from Al Jazeera, loses his immediate family members and carries on reporting for Al Jazeera Arabic, why is he not on every front page in the world? Why is he not a hero? Why is he not sitting down with Oprah Winfrey?

I feel like, you know, when Evan Gershkovich from The Wall Street Journal is wrongly imprisoned in Russia, we all campaign for Evan to be released. When Ukrainian journalists are killed, we all speak out and are angry about it. But when Palestinian journalists are killed on a level we’ve never seen before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where is the outcry here in the West over the killing of them?

We claim to care about a free press. We claim to oppose countries that crack down on a free press, on journalism. We say journalism is not a crime. But then I don’t hear the outrage from my colleagues here at this barbarism in Gaza, where journalists are being killed in record numbers.

This is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, DC, on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on US President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.

“From Ankara to Manila to Budapest to right here in the United States, state actors are cracking down on journalists, their sources, and their publishers in a globally coordinated campaign to disrupt the public’s access to information,” co-chair and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman said during her opening remarks at the National Press Club.

“The Belmarsh Tribunal… pursues justice for journalists who are imprisoned or persecuted [and] publishers and whistleblowers who dare to reveal the crimes of our governments,” she said.

• READ MORE: Other Julian Assange articles at Asia Pacific Report

“Assange’s case is the first time in history that a publisher has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” Goodman added.

“Recently, it was revealed that the CIA had been spying illegally on Julian, his lawyers, and some members of this very tribunal. The CIA even plotted his assassination at the Ecuadorean Embassy under [former US President Donald] Trump.”

Assange — who suffers from physical and mental health problems, including heart and respiratory issues — could be imprisoned for 175 years if fully convicted of Espionage Act violations.

Among the classified materials published by WikiLeaks — many provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning — are the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a US Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs, which revealed American and allied war crimes.

Arbitrary detention
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh Prison, for which the tribunal is named.

Human rights, journalism, peace, and other groups have condemned Assange’s impending extradition and the US government’s targeting of an Australian journalist who exposed American war crimes.

“That the extradition proceedings against Assange are an unexpected legal outcome — is a lie. Based on my experience as Ecuador’s foreign minister…the British government wanted to extradite him all along.” — @GuillaumeLong

Attend the Belmarsh Tribunal. https://t.co/1au3neo8FD pic.twitter.com/hwshaiiQzM

— Progressive International (@ProgIntl) January 19, 2023

In a statement ahead of Friday’s tribunal, co-chair and Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat said:

The First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the life of Julian Assange are at stake. That’s why the Belmarsh Tribunal is landing literally just two blocks away from the White House.

As long as the Biden administration continues to deploy tools like the Espionage Act to imprison those who dare to expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe.

Our tribunal is gathering courageous voices of dissent to demand justice for those crimes and to demand President Biden to drop the charges against Assange immediately.

Belmarsh Tribunal participants include Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, US academic Noam Chomsky, British parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, former Assange lawyer Renata Ávila, human rights attorney Steven Donziger, and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.

The Belmarsh Tribunal hearing in Washington DC on January 20, 2023. Video: Democracy Now!

Assange’s father, John Shipton, and the whistleblower’s wife and lawyer Stella Assange, are also members, as are Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola, Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights, Selay Ghaffar of the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and ACLU attorney Ben Wizner.

Former U.K. Labour Party leader @jeremycorbyn is in Washington for the Belmarsh Tribunal to advocate for Julian Assange’s freedom as he fights extradition from Britain to the United States.

“We’re standing up for the right to know. We’re standing up for journalism,” Corbyn says. pic.twitter.com/A4v6QbNSN0

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) January 20, 2023

First Amendment foundation
“One of the foundation stones of our form of government here in the United States . . . is our First Amendment to the Constitution,” Ellsberg — whom the Richard Nixon administration tried to jail for up to 115 years under the Espionage Act, but due to government misconduct was never imprisoned — said in a recorded message played at the tribunal.

“Up until Assange’s indictment, the act had never been used… against a journalist like Assange,” Ellsberg added. “If you’re going to use the act against a journalist in a blatant violation of the First Amendment… the First Amendment is essentially gone.”

Ávila said before Thursday’s event that “the Espionage Act is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation in the world: an existential threat against international investigative journalism.”

“If applied, it will deprive us of one of our must powerful tools towards de-escalation of conflicts, diplomacy, and peace,” she added.

“The Belmarsh Tribunal convened in Washington to present evidence of this chilling threat, and to unite lawmakers next door to dismantle the legal architecture that undermines the basic right of all peoples to know what their governments do in their name.”

The Belmarsh Tribunal, first convened in London in 2021, is inspired by the Russell Tribunal, a 1966 event organised by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the US accountable for its escalating war crimes in Vietnam.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk

Nearly 400 Aucklanders, from a wide variety of backgrounds, joined in an impromptu rally and peaceful march today for a Free Jerusalem – “the heart of Palestine”.

The protest was called by the NZ Palestine Solidarity Network in urgent response to US President Donald Trump’s proclamation that the US considered Jerusalem to be the “capital of Israel” and to move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv.

The rally came as   a “Day of Rage” protests continued for a fourth day across the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

The demonstrations yesterday came as Palestinian leaders were to meet in Ramallah to firm up a response to US President Donald Trump’s controversial move.

In East Jerusalem, Israeli forces fired stun grenades and tear gas as they charged – some on horseback – through a crowd of at least 100 peaceful demonstrators in Salah Eddin, one of the city’s busiest shopping streets, reports Al Jazeera.

At least 13 Palestinians were detained and 12 injured as Israeli troops pushed and beat demonstrators at the scene. Among those held was Jihad Abu Zneid, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Before her arrest, Abu Zneid told Al Jazeera the protesters were determined to “never give up”.

In Cairo, the head of the Arab League called President Trump’s decision on Jerusalem as “dangerous and unacceptable” and a “flagrant attack on a political solution” to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

The statement by Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, the regional bloc’s secretary-general, came at the start of an emergency meeting of foreign ministers from 22 Arab states in Egypt’s capital.

Shut Israeli embassy call
In Auckland, Kia Ora Gaza reports that after short, passionate speeches by justice campaigners, union leaders and spokespersons from the local Palestinian community, the rally unanimously endorsed a resolution to “demand the NZ government strongly oppose the US president’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel”, and as an act of sanction, “shut down the Israeli embassy in Wellington”.

Mike Treen, national director of the Unite Union, told the crowd that his union moved a motion supporting Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) to sever ties with Israel, which was passed by the CTU.

One protester, Ricardo, reflected on today’s march: “There’s something awesome about communities that are often ‘invisibilised’ by mainstream politics coming together and making their voices heard.”

“Members of the Palestinian community in Aotearoa/New Zealand (and supporters) came out to protest against Trump appointing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“The demands were clear: For the government to shut down its Israeli embassy and for the Government to openly and strongly condemn the Trump’s administration for these actions that are already a fanning the flames of conflict.

I have always held a lot of solidarity with Palestinians, having grown up by the US/Mexico border, another example of border imperialism that has displaced and dispossessed many. I hope one day we can fully dismantle these institutions that continue to divide us.”

Democracy Now! has featured women Palestinian writers and campaigners denouncing the US president’s move.

The independent multimedia programme East Jerusalem to spoke with Budour Hassan, a Palestinian writer and project coordinator for the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights in east Jerusalem; Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace; and were  We joined in Ramallah by Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian politician and scholar.

At least 23 million people were displaced by extreme weather as a result of climate change.

“If we act now in terms of climate change action, … it means we support for people to stay in their homes. … Let’s not make migration a last resort, a tragedy,” says Dina Ionesco, the head of migration, environment and climate change at the International Organisation for Migration.

Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: We are broadcasting live from the UN climate summit in Bonn.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This year is known as the first “Islands COP,” with Fiji presiding over this year’s summit. The event itself is being held here in Bonn because of the logistical challenges of hosting thousands of people in Fiji at the start of the South Pacific cyclone season. Researchers here at Bonn are warning that Pacific Islanders may be among the first to be forced to migrate due to climate change, as sea level rise is threatening to make whole islands uninhabitable.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we got a chance to speak with Pacific Islanders who rolled out a red carpet to greet German Chancellor Angela Merkel here at the COP23. The massive banner that went along the floor to the plenary read “Keep it in the ground.” Among those who rolled it out were Pacific warriors Joseph-Zane Sikulu of Tonga and Lusia Feagaiga, a delegate from Samoa. I asked them how climate change is affecting their islands.

LUSIA FEAGAIGA: With the sea levels rising, a lot of our lower-lying atoll countries are being affected. I mean, Marshall Islands is two meters above sea level; Tuvalu, probably three. And once king tides come in, it’s most likely that their villages will be flooded with saltwater because of the rising sea levels. Even in Samoa, places where families, their ancestral homes used to be on the shore, now have to be moved further inland because of the rising sea level. So, it’s affecting way of life. It’s affecting crops and indigenous root crops, because of saltwater intrusion, as well as fresh drinking supplies, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: But island nations are not the only places where climate change is threatening to force people from their homes. Last year, around the world, at least 23 million people were displaced by extreme weather.

For more, we’re joined by Dina Ionesco, the head of migration, environment and climate change at the International Organisation for Migration.

So you just heard people from Tonga and Samoa. What do they face? What is a climate change migrant or climate change refugee?

DINA IONESCO: Well, climate change migration means that the impacts of climate change affect so much the lives of people that they can’t stay in their homes. And very often also, climate change connects to other issues—poverty, for instance, or demographic issues or conflict. And it makes it even more difficult for people to remain. So, climate migration means that people have to move, but also sometimes choose to move, because their environment is degrading. And it can mean, as you said, sudden onset, big storms, floods. There, it’s easier to count who moved because of those causes. But it means also the slow onset, like desertification, sea level rise, land loss. So it’s very complex, many different issues. But the bottom line is that we maybe do not want these people to be forced to move because of climate change. So, this was why we are here.

Climate refugees
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, a few years ago, a man from the island of Kiribati sparked a global debate because he became the first person ever to seek asylum, for him and his family, as climate refugees. So could you tell us about his case and what’s happened with people seeking asylum for climate-related issues?

DINA IONESCO: So, we have to realise that the majority of people who move because of climate change, they move internally. They move within borders. So that means they are under the responsibility of their own states. They are not seeking a climate refugee status, because their own state has to take care of them and respect their human rights. There are some cases—we had the case for these small islands or for Haiti after the earthquake—where people move to across borders, maybe to Brazil or to the US or just across within the same island. And then there’s the question: What right do they have to move, to stay? And there, there are also possibilities to give them a humanitarian visa or a temporary protection that can allow them to stay. You can’t be a refugee for the moment. Maybe it will be, but we don’t know that. It’s very difficult to create a status as a refugee for climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: But what do you think it’s most important for the world to know right now about what the world is doing about climate migrants?

DINA IONESCO: I think one key thing to realize is that if we act now in terms of climate change action, if we take care of the Earth now, it means we support for people to stay in their homes, that they are not forced to migrate. So that’s one key message we have to say. Invest in climate action. It gives people a choice whether to go. They have the right to move if they want to move, but let’s not make migration a last resort, a tragedy, when it’s too late, when there’s nothing else.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dina Ionesco, we thank you so much.

• More COP23 stories

This year’s UN climate summit is known as the first “Islands COP,” with Fiji presiding over the event, but hosting it in Bonn, Germany, because of the logistical challenges of hosting 25,000 people in Fiji at the start of the South Pacific cyclone season.

Today is also Gender Day here at the UN Climate Change Conference. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is joined by the first woman president of the Marshall Islands, Hilda Heine, and her daughter, poet and climate change activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. Her new book is entitled Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.

Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We are broadcasting live from the UN climate summit in Bonn, Germany.

We’re joined now by the first woman president of the Marshall Islands, Hilda Heine, and her daughter, poet and climate change activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.

This is Kathy reading one of her poems at a UN climate change gathering in New York City in 2014, only days after the massive People’s Climate March, the largest climate march in history. Kathy’s poem is written as a letter to her child.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER:

dear matafele peinam,

don’t cry

mommy promises you

no one will come and devour you

no greedy whale of a company sharking through political seas
no backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals no blindfolded
bureaucracies gonna push
this mother ocean over
the edge

no one’s drowning, baby
no one’s moving
no one’s losing their homeland
no one’s becoming a climate change refugee

or should i say
no one else

to the carteret islanders of papua new guinea
and to the taro islanders of fiji
i take this moment
to apologize to you
we are drawing the line here

because we baby are going to fight
your mommy daddy
bubu jimma your country and your president too
we will all fight

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, back in 2014. Well, less than two years later, her own mother, Hilda Heine, was elected president of the Marshall Islands, becoming the first female president of an independent Pacific nation.

And they’re all still fighting. Climate change and sea level rise poses a particularly devastating threat to low-lying island nations like the Marshall Islands, a chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the Philippines.

According to a report by the US Geological Survey, “many atoll islands will be flooded annually, salinising the limited freshwater resources and thus likely forcing inhabitants to abandon their islands in decades, not centuries, as previously thought” .

But climate change is not the first existential threat the Marshall Islands has faced. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted more than 60 large-scale nuclear tests there. The largest, known as the Bravo shot, was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and vaporized three small islands. The nuclear testing forced people from their homes and caused long-lasting health impacts, including women giving birth to “jellyfish babies”—tiny infants born with no bones.

In 2014, the Marshall Islands launched an unprecedented lawsuit against the United States and eight other countries at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, accusing them of failing to meet international commitments for nuclear disarmament. The lawsuit was rejected in 2016 after the court said it did not have jurisdiction over the case.

Well, for more on climate change and the long legacy of nuclear testing, we’re joined now by the president of the Marshall Islands herself, Hilda Heine, and her poet daughter, climate change activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Madam President, your thoughts today at this first Islands COP, this first COP summit, the UN climate summit, that is sponsored by another South Pacific island, Fiji? The significance of this?

Important for survival
PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Well, it’s very significant for Pacific Island countries, you know, being our first one. So, it’s important for us to be here to let the world know that everyone has to do their part. We are wanting to be here to make sure that countries increase their ambition, so that the 1.5 degrees can be maintained. That’s the importance for our island country in order for us to survive. So it’s very important. This COP is very important for us.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is the first UN climate summit since President Trump announced that he’s pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord. What does that mean to you?

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Yeah, that’s why it’s all that more important for us to be here and to gather the support from other countries around the world. We were very disappointed when—of course, when President Trump pulled out the United States from the Paris Agreement. We see them as important leaders in the world and should be taking the leadership role in the climate fight. So when he decided to pull the US from the Paris Agreement, it was a very disappointing act for countries like the Marshall Islands.

AMY GOODMAN: What message do you have for President Trump today? We just played their first—and, it looks like, only—event that they’re holding here at the climate summit, where they were pushing coal, nuclear and gas.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Well, I think we’re all for coal to be kept underground. And we want to make sure that President Trump understands the importance of emission and what’s going on in terms of coal being promoted by his administration. We want to make sure that—oh, we want President Trump to acknowledge the science. There’s no longer debate about the issue of climate change. We need to make sure that, you know, we’re doing all we can to ensure the survivability of all the island countries, especially, and the rest of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this idea, which, sadly, isn’t an idea, but a reality, of what they call jellyfish babies. Can you talk about the legacy of nuclear testing in the South Pacific, in the Marshall Islands? Talk about—first of all, how many islands make up the Marshall Islands? I don’t think people realise the breadth and scope.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: OK. Yeah, well, we have 33 islands in the Marshall Islands—atolls, actually, with many other smaller islands, about a thousand-some. But the communities, there are 33. We have 24 islands that are inhabited with actual communities in the Marshall Islands.

The legacy of the nuclear testing program brings back the whole issue of colonialism and how the U.S. has colonized the Marshall Islands. To this day, we’re still struggling with the legacy of the—you know, what we call jellyfish babies. We have people who—

‘Babies without bones’
AMY GOODMAN: This is babies without bones.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Babies without bones that were born by women who were—who lived in the islands that were contaminated. And we still have people who have not returned to their homelands after 50 years of being displaced from their homelands. We have islands that were vaporized by the nuclear testing programme. Of course, these islands belonged to people. And those can never be recovered. So we’re still seeking nuclear justice for the people of the Marshall Islands. This is one of the—the legacy of the U.S. presence in our country. And it seems like we’re repeating with the climate change issue coming on, also same force from outside being brought to influence or to impact the livelihood of Marshallese.

AMY GOODMAN: Your grandniece—Kathy, your niece, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner—died at the age of eight of leukemia?

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Oh, talking about Bianca.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Bianca, yes.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Bianca.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Yes, she died at age eight as a result of leukemia.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Yeah.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: And many children like that also. It’s not a—this is one of the common—what do you call?

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Sicknesses.

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Sickness.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: We have some of the highest rates of cancers—

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Yeah.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: —in the world. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You suffer the highest rates of cancer in the world?

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Yes.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Yeah, we have some of the highest in the world.

Nuclear health impact
PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: So, this is one of the impacts. The health impact on the people of the Marshall Islands is, you know, beyond our budget to ensure that the people are healthy. Again, a legacy of the nuclear testing programme.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, The Hague—The Hague, the International Court of Justice, said it’s not within its jurisdiction to rule on this suit that you have against the Marshall Islands [sic], and they threw the case out. Are you still asking the United States for reparations? And what does it mean to you that at this COP, COP23, at this summit, the US is pushing nuclear power?

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Well, it’s the same thing as pushing the use of coal, you know, in a world that has acknowledged that climate change is here. And yet, on the face of that, U.S. is here pushing for use of clean coal, if there is such a thing. And it’s the same thing with the nuclear justice. Here we are. We’re still struggling with that. And we don’t see the end of this journey for those people who are impacted by the nuclear testing programme of the United States. So we continue to seek justice. We go to the—we’ll be going to the United Nations. And we’re trying to also get advocates from around the country to help us with the nuclear justice that is required.

AMY GOODMAN: So, on this Gender Day, we’re here with a mother-daughter team. Madam President, you are the first woman president not only of the Marshall Islands, but of the Pacific Islands. And, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, you are her daughter and a longtime climate activist yourself, poet. You wrote a letter to your daughter. We just played a clip of it before, a poem to your daughter. What does it mean to you that your mother has been elected president? And what does it mean for the Marshall Islands?

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Well, to be honest, I didn’t really expect it to happen at all. I mean, I never thought that I would see my mom as—you know, as a leader of a country and as a leader of our country—not because she’s not, you know, perfect for it, not because she’s not worthy, but just because, you know, so much of our society is extremely patriarchal, you know? And I think that’s also a result of colonisation. And I think, you know, seeing her become president tells me that there are actually changes being made and that there is actually hope for a lot of us women to continue to push and continue to take on leadership positions and make changes that we want to see in the world. And I think that’s really—you know, it gave me a lot of hope. And I was extremely proud, of course, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Your final comment? I know you’re heading off to yet another meeting. This is part of being president. Your final comment to women of the world, why you see, in particular, the effects of women and children—the effects of climate change, what you see are those effects?

PRESIDENT HILDA HEINE: Well, there is—in the Marshall Islands, we see the effects on women and their life, because they are the caretakers of the homes. So, if there is drought, they’re the ones that will have to go out and look for water for the family, look for food in order to cook the meals for the family. So their life is really upside down when there is these events from climate change. We see that firsthand with our droughts, with inundation of the waves coming over our islands and washing homes away. It’s the women leading the—leading the solutions, looking for solutions for families, like they always do. Climate change is another addition to the work that women continue to do to make their families survive.

Alternative Nobel Peace Prize
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with the comments of a previous Marshall Islands political leader. I want to thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to turn to longtime Marshall Islands political leader, anti-nuclear activist Tony deBrum, the late leader. DeBrum was one of the world’s most prominent voices confronting climate change, spent decades organising against nuclear weapons, after having witnessed firsthand the US nuclear testing on his homeland. This is deBrum speaking in 2015 as he accepted the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Peace Prize”:

TONY DEBRUM: Decades after the conclusion of devastating nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, I might be branded by some as a radical for my impassioned conviction against the use, testing or possession of nuclear weapons. But this is not radical. It is only logical. … I have seen with my very own eyes such devastation and know, with conviction, that nuclear weapons must never again be visited upon humanity. … Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 large-scale nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. That is the equivalence of 1.6 Hiroshima shots every day for 12 years.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Tony deBrum, longtime Marshall Islands political leader, accepting the Right Livelihood Award a few years ago, the late leader. And I wanted to end with Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner talking about your NoDAPL solidarity. That’s the Dakota Access pipeline.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: Yeah, I was really inspired by the work of the indigenous protesters in NoDAPL, just because they were fighting for their land and for clean water, in the same way that we are fighting for our islands in the Marshall Islands. And as someone who lives in the US at the moment, I wanted to show my support for the people of their land, and that’s why I wrote that poem for them last year. But for me, really, I think I am really inspired by the work of a lot of indigenous activists around the world, who are trying to fight for their home, for their culture and for their people.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much. Again, our guests have been Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, poet and climate activist, and the first woman president of the Marshall Islands, President Hilda Heine.

Republished on a Creative Commons licence.

• Democracy Now! broadcasting live

As the second week of the UN climate conference has got underway in Bonn, Germany, Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman speaks with two activists about the impact of climate change on their countries, and their goals for this year’s talks.

“It was devastating to see thousands of homes damaged, and about 40 people lose their lives in Cyclone Winston [last year],” says George Nacewa, a Fiji islander and a 350.org Pacific Climate Warrior.

“This is something we’ve never experienced before.”

Tetet Lauron, programmne manager for climate justice at IBON international and a former member of the Philippines delegation, says negotiators must increase their sense of urgency “to avoid runaway climate change”.

Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we are talking with Tetet Lauron, who is with IBON International. And we are now joined, as well, by George Nacewa, who is a Fiji islander and a Pacific Climate Warrior. Let’s now pivot into the issue of climate.

We’ll stay with you Tetet. How does climate affect the Philippines? And what are you calling for here at the UN climate summit?

TETET LAURON: Well, the Philippines has always been poster child of the climate change. And as you said, especially during COPs, you know, one big typhoon hits our country, an earthquake strikes, affecting millions. So, at this COP, we’re hoping and calling on governments to be accountable: number one, to make good on the promises that they made two years ago in Paris, and, number two, because what they’ve put in as pledges in the Paris Agreement is not enough, because it’s still going to bring us anywhere between three to seven degrees warming. We’re calling on them, you know, to increase the level of ambition, know the urgency and really just try to do everything that they could to avoid runaway climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined by George Nacewa, who is a Fiji islander. So, George, your country is actually hosting this summit. It’s called the “Island COP”. But it’s being held in Bonn because Fiji couldn’t deal with 25,000 people coming in all at once for this summit.

But talk about how climate affects Fiji. And place it for us geographically.

Devastating Cyclone Winston
GEORGE NACEWA: So, Fiji, impacts of climate change in the Pacific islands is such that we have sea level rise, saltwater intrusion, harsh weather patterns, flooding. But just last year, we had the worst cyclone, Cyclone Winston, a Category 5 cyclone, that hit Fiji. It was devastating to see thousands of homes damaged, and about 40 people lose their lives. And this is something that we’ve never experienced before.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of this being an Island COP? It’s your island nation that’s hosting this, Fiji?

GEORGE NACEWA: Yeah. I mean, this is to show the world what true leadership is all about, you know? And we have our leaders from the islands that are pushing that affirmative action is taken and that the Paris Agreement is put into play, you know? And that—yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to be a Pacific Climate Warrior?

GEORGE NACEWA: It means we bring our faith, our culture, our tradition into the mix of things, you know? And to show people who we are as human beings from the islands and that we are connected to the land and to the ocean and that this is important to us.

AMY GOODMAN: And the fact that President Trump is pulling the US out of the UN Paris climate accord, what does it mean to you?

GEORGE NACEWA: It’s frustrating to say. I’m angry, but, at the same time, I’m hopeful to see that our island leaders are taking the true leadership role that is needed.

US ‘pull out’ consequences
AMY GOODMAN: And, Tetet Lauron, the fact that Trump, yes, is in your country right now, in the Philippines; you’re here in Bonn for the island summit, this Island COP. What does it mean to you that the US is pulling out? Following Syria and, just before that, Nicaragua signing on to the Paris climate accord, that means the US is alone, if it in fact is pulled out of the accord.

Even with Trump’s efforts to pull it out, he actually can’t pull it out until 2020. I think it’s a day after the next election.

TETET LAURON: Well, the US has not—has never been a climate leader. So, you know, it doesn’t really matter much if they stay in or they stay out of the agreement. It’s because we haven’t seen real climate leadership.

There’s still the role of the US policy. And it’s not just about the environmental policy. It’s also about trade. It’s about finance. It’s about putting in place policies that extract more resources from countries like the Philippines and Fiji, and bringing in their corporations with destructive mining activities, you know, opening up our country and our people to even more damage and vulnerability.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does it mean to you when activists, George, from the United States, actually grassroots activists, governors, senators, mayors, nonprofits from all over, come as a kind of separate delegation from the Trump delegation? We have 15 seconds.

GEORGE NACEWA: I think it’s important because we don’t stand alone in this fight, you know? Even though we face the impacts of climate change back home, we know that we are in this fight with others around the world. And that’s very important, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, and, of course, we’re going to continue to discuss this. Tetet Lauron, IBON International; George Nacewa, from Fiji, is a 350.org Pacific Climate Warrior.

Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

• More #COP23 stories

Thousands of people have taken to the streets in the German capital Bonn for a rally and march to demand an end to fossil fuel extraction. These are some of their voices:

CARLOTTA GROHMANN: Hi. My name is Carlotta Grohmann. I am from the Bonn Youth Movement. And we are here today because we think that climate change, that environmental pollution, is not just one cause. It’s not just the carbon emissions. It’s not just coal. It’s everything. It’s nuclear power. It’s the way that we are putting war all over the planet and destroying it. It’s the way that our economic system is working for the profit of few.

KATIA AVILÉS-VÁZQUEZ: My name is Katia Avilés-Vázquez. I came from Puerto Rico to be here in Bonn. Part of the reason I’m here is we, the Caribbean, just got hit with two major-force hurricanes, and we had unusually high activity of hurricanes, particularly part of the effects of increased temperature due to climate change. And while we’re living and struggling through the effects of climate change, the decisions that are causing it are being made here.

VIEW MORE: Watch the full Democracy Now! show hosted by Amy Goodman broadcasting live from Bonn

And I’m hoping, by being here, we can kind of highlight the struggles that we’re going through, what climate change is doing in the now. This is not something to prepare for in the future. We’re living it, we’re suffering, we’re dying at this moment. We have lost power. We lost communications. We lost potable drinking water. And our economy is collapsing due to that.

So we need just—we need climate reparations. One of the things that we’re demanding, ending the Jones Act, ending the colonial rule and PROMESA. We want to be able to work, trade and heal with our Caribbean sister islands, like they have offered to help, but the US has told them no. And we want to make sure that we transition into renewables, not just rebuilding the Puerto Rico of old that replicates the oppression that led us to being in such vulnerable positions.

AMY GOODMAN: Just as we flew here from the United States, we saw whatever power was restored to San Juan. When we were in San Juan, there was some pockets of electricity, that, once again, San Juan has been plunged into darkness. That’s just in San Juan, which is the most—

KATIA AVILÉS-VÁZQUEZ: Electrifying.

AMY GOODMAN: —successful in returning electricity.

Correcting past oppression
KATIA AVILÉS-VÁZQUEZ: Correct. That’s actually been one of the most painful things about being here, is seeing that whatever little progress was made, we set up, a couple steps back. And it’s important to highlight that that was the one line that Whitefish fixed and that Whitefish got that contract because their owner or someone has stocks, that’s a Trump donor. So, again, it highlights the need to—for whatever transition we demand needs to be just, and it needs to correct past oppressions, and it needs to be towards renewable, not just fixing an old and decaying infrastructure.

The other thing that happened while we were here—just today it came out—that FEMA is going to relocate at least 3000 Puerto Ricans out of Puerto Rico, when we have so much housing that’s available and that’s apt to have humans. They’re moving our people out systematically. And now it’s—the gentrification that was already happening due to Law 2022 is now being officialised by the US government, and that’s just completely unacceptable.

MONICA ATKINS: My name is Monica Atkins, and I am here representing Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, as well as the Climate Justice Alliance. And I’m here to stand in solidarity with the communities of color, indigenous people, whose land are being polluted, whose waters are being polluted and whose land is being taken over. So we’re just here standing in solidarity and showing support.

CHIEF NINAWA HUNI KUI: [translated] My name is Chief Ninawa. I am from Acre, Brazil, with the Huni Kui people. I came to bring a message from the forest to this climate conference. This message is of life, love, peace and hope. We believe that nature should not be commercialized for big capital. We came here to demand respect for human beings, for the water, for the forest and everything that depends on the forest.

MIRIAN CISNEROS: [translated] My name is Mirian Cisneros. I’m the president of Sarayaku and Kichwa people in the Ecuadorean Amazon. I’m here because the indigenous people around the world are affected by climate change. And we came with a proposal, the Living Forest proposal, to advance this call for the living forest, but also to join forces and gain solidarity from other people, other movements, so that we can unite and be in this fight together.

DARIO KOPPENBERGER: I’m Dario Koppenberger, and I’m from Wiesbaden in Germany. [translated] It’s become evident, from what we’ve seen at the world climate conference that is in progress here, that the climate targets that they had established are not sufficient. At the same time, it is clear that they are not truly willing to carry them out anyway. I believe that there is enough wealth in the world to be able to accommodate both our concerns for the environment as well as job security for workers. In other words, there need not be starvation or unemployment, because there is enough work in the world, and it is more a question of how to spread it around among all. We need the environment. We cannot exist without it. Therefore, the question is simple for me. It is that capitalism lies at the basis of our problems and that we critically need groundbreaking alternatives to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from the streets of Bonn, Germany, here on Saturday.

Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

• Other #COP23 stories

With just weeks to go, polls show Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is edging ahead of front-runner Hillary Clinton in the primary season’s first two contests in the United States.

Numbers released this week give Sanders a five-point lead over Clinton in Iowa and a four-point lead in New Hampshire.

Sanders has also narrowed Clinton’s once commanding lead nationwide, pulling within seven points.

As the Democratic race tightens, The Nation magazine—the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States—has issued a rare endorsement.

On Thursday, the magazine ran the editorial “Bernie Sanders for President,” saying: “[Sanders] has summoned the people to a “political revolution”, arguing that the changes our country so desperately needs can only happen when we wrest our democracy from the corrupt grip of Wall Street bankers and billionaires.

“We believe such a revolution is not only necessary but possible—and that’s why we’re endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.”

This marks only the third time in the magazine’s 150-year history that it has endorsed a candidate in the Democratic primary.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, joins Democracy Now! to discuss.

Democracy Now! is an independent global television news hour that airs weekdays on the Public Broadcasting System in the US.

http://democracynow.org