The process of Jewish expansion over Palestinian land has involved maintaining a “system of domination,” says author Nathan Thrall on this week’s Intercepted. In order to constrict “Palestinians into tighter and tighter space” over the decades, Israel has deployed a strict permit system, movement restrictions, walls, fences, segregated roads, and punitive actions such as arrests and detentions, even of children.
In “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” Thrall’s book, published just before the start of the current war, tells the story of one Palestinian man’s struggle to navigate Israel’s painful system of legal and security controls after his son’s school bus is involved in a fatal accident. Thrall joins host Murtaza Hussain in a discussion about the system of control that Israel maintains over Palestinians, violence in the West Bank, the future outlook for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Gaza, and possible escalation amid fighting at Israel’s northern border.
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is a 2024 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winner. Thrall is also the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.”
Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the official death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. These figures are likely a stark undercount of the true devastation. A recent report from the British aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. A new documentary by Fault Lines called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” tells the story of the war’s impact on the lives of three Palestinian families in Gaza.
This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill speaks to the film’s correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and executive producer Laila Al-Arian, the Emmy award-winning executive producer of Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine.
The escalating military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel now threatens to expand the conflict in Gaza into a full-blown regional war. For the past eight months, Israel and Hezbollah have traded missile attacks, leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians from northern Israel and southern Lebanon. The two sides have fought devastating wars in the past, but a cold peace has reigned for nearly 17 years. That peace is now in jeopardy, as Hezbollah has mobilized in sympathy with Hamas following Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. To discuss the situation this week on Intercepted is Sam Heller, a fellow with the Century Foundation and expert on Lebanon and Hezbollah. Heller spoke with host Murtaza Hussain on the prospects of the conflict escalating, as well as the potential impact on the Lebanese, Israelis, and the broader Middle East.
An Israeli military operation in Gaza this week aimed at rescuing four hostages from Hamas killed over 270 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. The Nuseirat refugee camp, where the attacks occurred, became a scene of horror as the injured sought care from Gaza’s few remaining hospitals. Karin Huster, a Doctors Without Borders medical coordinator, witnessed the aftermath. She joins host Murtaza Hussain on Intercepted to discuss what she saw following the Israel Defense Forces attack alleged to involve grave war crimes, and the ongoing impact of the war on Gaza’s civilian population.
After eight months of brutal fighting with no end in sight, the war in Gaza is at risk of metastasizing into a regional conflict. Recent tensions between Egypt and Israel — normally security partners who have cooperated in the blockade of Gaza — have thrown into stark relief the growing risks of a spillover from the war.
This week on Intercepted, security expert H. A. Hellyer discusses with co-host Murtaza Hussain the growing hostilities between the two countries, which have resulted in Egypt joining the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel, threats to annul the Camp David peace accords, and even a fatal shooting incident between Egyptian and Israel troops.
The war in Gaza is at risk of exploding into a far greater war that could cause the destruction of the tenuous security architecture that has held the region together for decades.
The past week in Gaza has seen a major escalation in Israeli attacks against the besieged and starving Palestinians trapped in a killing cage. The Biden administration has aggressively sought to portray itself as being increasingly at odds with Israel’s tactics, mostly focusing on U.S. threats to withhold some weapons shipments if Benjamin Netanyahu conducts an invasion of Rafah. But the cold reality is that Israel has already bombed and occupied large swaths of Rafah.
The regime has ordered the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, not only from Rafah, but also from areas of northern Gaza, once again thrusting masses of civilians — many of whom are wounded, starving, dehydrated, and traumatized — on a desperate hunt for a place to pitch a makeshift tent as they await either death or a ceasefire.
Despite the White House leaking stories to insider media outlets about how Biden is fed up with his great friend Netanyahu, the U.S. has made clear it continues to arm and support the Israeli regime.
This week on Intercepted, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the feminist antiwar organization Code Pink, speaks with Jeremy Scahill. Since the launch of the so-called war on terror in 2001, the 71-year-old activist has spent more than two decades disrupting congressional hearings, chasing members of Congress through the halls of the Capitol for answers, and traveling to countries the U.S. has labeled as enemies. Benjamin discusses her personal path to activism and the siege on Gaza, and offers a guide on how ordinary people can disrupt business as usual in the chambers of power in Washington, D.C.
Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, reached a deal with students to work toward divesting from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.” It is one of the few schools to reach deals with students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza as demonstrations spread to more than 154 campuses nationwide.
This week on Intercepted, we bring you a special episode from inside the student movement for Gaza. Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, breaks down the campus protests and students’ demands for schools to cut off financial ties with Israel and weapons makers. Thakker is joined by Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism graduate student at Columbia University. Gillian takes us inside the protest encampment at Columbia, which inspired similar demonstrations nationwide before it was violently dismantled by police.
Last month, the famed American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler was thrust into the center of a controversy after remarks Butler made about the October 7 attacks in Israel. A longtime critic of Zionism and Israel’s war against the Palestinians, Butler had condemned the attacks in the immediate aftermath. But at a March roundtable in France, Butler offered a historical context for the Hamas-led operations and stated that the attacks constituted armed resistance. The blowback was swift, and Butler was criticized in media outlets across Europe and in Israel. This week on Intercepted, Butler discusses the controversy and their position on Hamas, Israel, and crackdowns on student protests.
Butler is currently a Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School. They are the author of several books, including “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind,” “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” and most recently, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”
Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.
Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.
JS: Well, Maz, there’s a lot to talk about this week. In a few minutes, we’re going to be talking with the great Judith Butler. But before we get to that interview, I want to ask you your sense of where things are right now with the Netanyahu government appearing to be ready for a full-scale invasion of Rafah.
Of course, Rafah has been attacked repeatedly, but this presumably would be a much more intense, full-scale ground operation, even as there’s reports that the Biden administration is trying to push for some form of a deal where Hamas would release 33 of the Israelis that they’re holding in return for some, as of now, undefined pause in the Israeli attacks.
But your thoughts on this moment, the political situation, and the threats coming out of Tel Aviv.
MH: Well, it’s been a very eventful few days. We had the reports suggesting that a peace deal could be imminent, in fact, that would end the conflict for a predetermined period of time. But on Tuesday, Netanyahu indicated that whether there is a deal for hostages or not, the war will continue and the attack on Rafah will continue.
And he said explicitly that we’re going to enter Rafah “with or without a deal.” So what it indicates to me, and most observers, I would say too, is that this war was not really about the hostages. It’s not currently about the hostages either, because Netanyahu’s had many opportunities to free the hostages in a peace agreement for a ceasefire or a permanent peace agreement.
And reportedly, even from the first days of the war, it came out recently that Hamas apparently had offered full release of hostages in exchange for the IDF not coming into Gaza on the ground. So it seems that Netanyahu is very, very committed to continuing the war as long as possible; the hostages are not a priority.
It seems like his statement on Tuesday was specifically geared to sabotage the current ongoing negotiations, which by all accounts, we’re almost reaching success. So it seems very, very obvious that Netanyahu is invested in continuing the war. And it could not just be for political reasons, in terms of Israel’s position, but his own political future inside Israel, because the second the war ends, he’s going to be in serious political and legal trouble with Israelis and continuing [the war] longer prevents that.
JS: There’s also this strange micro-mystery that’s been playing out. Some days ago, there were reports that started emerging in the Israeli press, indicating that Netanyahu and some of his senior officials in his government were very concerned that the International Criminal Court was going to be handing down indictments, including indictments of Netanyahu himself and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister.
And the initial reporting in the Israeli media was citing sources in The Hague, but it seems pretty clear from other reporting that has now taken place in Israel and elsewhere, that this was kind of rumor intelligence and that it was being floated to the Israeli press. For what reason would Netanyahu and his government want to float the notion that the International Criminal Court was potentially going to be issuing indictments?
It could be that that is true — that there is a contemplation at play at the Hague where the prosecutor, Karim Khan, is actually considering or has sealed indictments of Netanyahu or others. Though it would be a really swift course of action, if you look at the history of how the ICC proceeds, but it does seem as though there’s a political agenda at play that isn’t exactly clear right now.
Netanyahu reportedly also spoke directly to Joe Biden saying that he wants the United States to block any effort by the International Criminal Court to issue indictments against Netanyahu or other officials. But it’s something to sort of keep an eye on and flag. And just one thing I want to mention for people — we’ve talked about this on the show before, whether it’s true or not, the reports about potential International Criminal Court indictments of the Israelis — it’s important to remember this, that there is a law on the books in the United States that’s been in place since 2002, and it was a bipartisan bill that was signed into law by George Bush. And it’s known in the human rights community as the Hague Invasion Act.
And basically what it says is that if any American personnel — military elected officials, appointed officials — are ever indicted or brought to The Hague on war crimes charges or as part of a war crimes investigation, that the president of the United States can use military force to liberate them from the Netherlands.
But also buried within the language that the framers of that law employed was that it’s not just American officials that could be liberated, but also those working for governments of a NATO member country or major non-NATO allies — and among them is the state of Israel.
So, I just want to put that out there for people. Imagine if China or Russia had a law on the books that said if any of their personnel were ever taken to The Hague, that China or Russia could invade the Netherlands. But the final thing I want to say on this is that just the mere rumors that there may be an attempt by the International Criminal Court to indict the Israelis has caused a panic in Washington, particularly among Republican lawmakers and Speaker Mike Johnson, where they are now drafting legislation to directly retaliate against the International Criminal Court if they indict any Israeli officials on war crimes charges. The White House, Maz, is saying for now, we don’t support an investigation. The position is the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel. And then Speaker Mike Johnson saying that if the Biden administration doesn’t stop this, if it is in fact even true, that it would create a precedent that would allow American diplomats, political leaders, and American military personnel to be indicted on war crimes charges at The Hague as well.
MH: Well, the whole thing is making such a spectacle out of the supposed rules-based liberal order, because these are institutions that the United States has patronized or supported in various ways in the past and used, specifically, endorsed their use against their own enemies. Vladimir Putin is indicted by the ICC. He has a warrant for him.
No one claimed they didn’t have jurisdiction over that. So, to so brazenly view it as valid in one circumstance and ignore it and even attack the institution in others, I think this is not going to be sustainable in the long term, because the whole world sees this hypocrisy, sees the lack of substance behind these very lofty words and institutions.
So I think that if they attack the ICC in various ways, attack its personnel, threaten even to attack it physically, if it puts warrants for Israelis, I think it only further along the process of a decay and dissolution of these very, very flawed ideas, institutions that the U.S. built at the end of the Cold War.
JS: Yeah. And just a final note on this: I still think that there are political reasons why Netanyahu’s government wanted to push this story, whether it’s true or not. And let’s also remember that there have been credible reports that Israel has spied on lawyers working for the state of Palestine in proceedings at the International Criminal Court. These have been going on for many years, so it’s possible that the Israelis heard something and they wanted to front-run it and make a big racket about it. It’s also possible that it’s part of a broader distraction operation or an attempt to get the United States to come out on record and attack the International Criminal Court — knowing that Israel is committing war crime after war crime.
Well, we’re going to speak to somebody who also has been really outspoken about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, as well as the events of October 7, and also the events taking place on American college campuses and universities, [and] around the world increasingly. I’m referring to Judith Butler, the U.S. philosopher, currently a distinguished professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School.
Judith Butler is the author of several books, including “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind,” “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” and most recently, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”
Professor Judith Butler joins us now from Paris. Thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.
Judith Butler: I’m glad to be here.
JS: Judith, I want to start by asking you about the protests, the encampments that we’re seeing pop up, not just across the United States at universities and colleges, but now increasingly we’re seeing this happening at universities internationally.
And at some of the campuses, particularly in the United States, there’s been a violent crackdown — not only targeting students, but also targeting professors at universities like Emory and others. And I’m curious to get your analysis of the situation as we understand it right now on these campuses, the way that the university administrations have responded, and the role of law enforcement agencies in coming onto the campuses to arrest students and faculty.
JB: Well, certainly I have been following the student encampments and protests, and the way that some university presidents have called in police to break apart the encampments, but also physically to confront and hurt students and faculty protesting and to suppress, in general, their rights of assembly and their rights of free speech. I would say as well their academic freedom — although those three are not the same.
I think we all saw the footage from Emory University, and the calm and principled head of the philosophy department [Noëlle McAfee] who had the perspicacity to persist and to communicate about her situation. I have to say that I have seen police incursions on campuses for many years.
It is important to see that some university presidents are not calling in the police. So we need to remember that some of them do still hold to principles of freedom of expression and are not enacting violence against students. That said, it is a quite phenomenal movement.
I’m in France right now, where the students at Sciences Po have been erecting an encampment. I saw an astonishing number of police surrounding the Sorbonne the other morning. Paddy wagons waiting for student protesters and other protesters are seen every weekend in the streets of Paris. Whenever there is a demonstration, there are huge numbers of police who bear their automatics in public as ways of intimidating people and keeping them from expressing their solidarity with Palestine, and of course, their principled opposition to a continuing genocidal attack on Gaza, now focusing, as we know, on and near the Rafah gate.
I think that there are spurious and completely objectionable grounds that universities have given for unleashing police on students. One of them has to do with security. One has to ask security for whom or for what — certainly not security for protesters. They’re not interested in protesters being secure, secure enough, to exercise their rights of expression, their rights of protest. It seems like that would be good if we wanted to guarantee rights of protest on campus, since that would be a defense of freedom of expression and what we call “extramural speech” in the academy.
But also it becomes clear that the security at issue is twofold. One: security for the campus, its own property — security of the entrance, allowing students to come and leave as they wish, imagining that those protests, those encampments, are somehow keeping people from moving on and off campus.
But also, as we know, there is a security concern raised by some Jewish students — and here, it’s really important to say some Jewish students, because not all Jewish students agree — those Jewish students who claim that they are unsafe on campus or feel that they need security, telling us that certain utterances make them feel unsafe.
Now, utterances that truly jeopardize another person’s safety are those that threaten them with harm. And what we’re seeing in some of the justifications that are used by college and university presidents to bring police onto campus is an equivocation between utterances that may be objectionable and hurtful or disturbing, and utterances that are threats, literally threats to the physical safety of a student.
So I think that the blurring of that distinction has quite frankly become nefarious because any student who says “I feel unsafe by what I hear another student say” is saying that “My security and safety is more important than that person’s freedom of expression.” And if we countenance that, if we give too much leeway to that claim that a student feels unsafe because, say, an anti-Zionist — or a statement in support of Palestine, or a statement opposing genocide makes that Jewish student feel unsafe, we are saying that that student is perceiving a personal threat or is threatened by the discourse itself — even when the discourse is expressive rather than portending physical harm.
Now, if somebody does say, listen, if somebody uses a deeply antisemitic slur, any kind of antisemitic slur, or addresses a Jewish student in an antisemitic way, and then says, “And because you’re Jewish,” or “Because I feel the following way about Jews, I’m also going to do physical damage to you. I’m going to harm you.” — that is not acceptable speech. That is not protected speech. There’s nothing about that speech that is protected.
But if calling for an end of genocide against Palestine is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then we see that the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student. It’s as if they are being threatened with harm when, in fact, the opposition to the genocide in Gaza is quite explicitly an opposition to doing harm and killing numerous people who are huddled in Rafah looking for safety.
So I call it nefarious because it’s so clear that Palestinians — who are under bombardment and will now, or have undergone, unfathomable loss, who are living through a spree of killing and genocide that stretches the human imagination and appalls anybody whose heart is open to the reality before them — that they are the ones in need of safety. And the international community has failed to provide that safety. They are in need of safety from harm, like real physical harm. They need to be safe from killing, from being killed. They need to be protected against being killed. They need to protect their families, what’s left of their families.
So for an utterance that opposes the genocide in Gaza to suddenly make a Jewish student feel unsafe — because that Jewish student identifies with Zionism or with the state of Israel — is a grotesque claim in the sense that that student is safe.
That student is having to hear something that might be deeply disturbing and sometimes antisemitic — and I think we must all agree that antisemitic speech, narrowly, clearly, lucidly defined, is radically unobjectionable under all circumstances. But we can talk about that as well, since what counts as antisemitic has so expanded beyond the limits of its established definitions that, unfortunately, the call for justice in Palestine is registered by some as nothing more than antisemitism.
“If calling for an end of genocide against Palestine is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then we see that the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student.”
MH: Judith, I wanted to get your perspective also on what these protests are indicative of — in the sense that, obviously, you’ve seen previous generations of protests by students and others about Palestine before, but it seems the scale and scope today is quite unlike what we’ve seen in the past. What do you think that this reflects in terms of public opinion and particularly generational change of how younger people view this subject, as opposed to how it appears to older generations?
JB: I think that it’s obviously not everyone in the younger generation. So we have to be careful in our generational generalizations. And, you know, we see people like Ros Petchesky in New York, a Jewish Voice for Peace advocate, getting arrested, I think, several times now. She’s older than I am, I believe. So there’s a cross-generational solidarity, as well as a specific form of mobilization that is now focusing on college campuses.
But let’s remember that the mobilization on college campuses was preceded by a number of very public actions jointly waged by Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, disrupting bridges in New York or the federal building in Oakland, the ports of Oakland, the Statue of Liberty, we could go on and on. Some very high-profile protests. And of course, Biden himself has discovered that there are — that there’s no event he can go to right now without major protest outside. Now, a lot of times that is young people. I guess I want to point out that a lot depends on whether you’re able-bodied, like able-bodied young people are able to encamp and protest in ways that other folks maybe can’t.
But the current mobilization on college campuses is being watched nationwide and globally. So a number of Palestinians have commented to me from different parts of the world that it is enormously heartening, that it lifts them to see this great solidarity and this great clarity. Very often when it comes to Israel–Palestine, we hear people say, “Well, it’s so complex.” I think for many of the young people, it’s not that complex. This is a genocidal violence being enacted against the Palestinian people in Gaza. And it is obvious and it is clear, and they have the footage and they circulate the footage and they know it.
They’re also reading: They’re getting the history of Zionism. They’re getting the history of occupation. They’re getting the history of Gaza. They’re learning online and in seminars and in their own colleges. And the mobilization is born of an unequivocal conviction — not just that the bombardments and killings, the loss now of over 34,000 Palestinian lives is horrific. Not just that, but the history of Zionism, the history of occupation, the structure of apartheid within the state of Israel, the fact that Palestinians remain stateless or living within administrative authorities that do not have full state powers and do not represent full political self-determination. And that even now, Palestinians who live within the state of Israel, within its current boundaries, they also are suffering harassment, violence, and second-class citizenship in many different ways.
I think that there is a broad educational effort happening here. And I like the fact that education is being mixed with activism because activism should be informed. And sometimes we see ill-informed instances, like somebody yelling, “Jews go back to Poland.” No, that’s not acceptable.
What does the liberation of Palestine mean? What does it look like? Well, in my view, it means that Palestinians and Jews and other inhabitants of that land will find a way to live together. Either next to each other or with one another, under conditions of radical equality, where occupation is dismantled and all the colonial structures associated with occupation is dismantled.
It doesn’t mean pushing Jews off the land. It does mean, in my mind and in many people’s minds, the taking down of settlements and the redistribution of that land to Palestinians who lived there. And it does mean, in my mind and in the mind of many others, a just way of thinking about the right of return for Palestinians who have suffered forcible exile and who wish to return to the lands or at least to the region, or to have compensation or acknowledgment for what they have suffered.
I wish I saw more on campus. Like, what’s behind the slogan? Like, yes, I want to free Palestine from colonization, from bombardment violence, from settlements, from military and police detention. I want to see freedom from all of those things. But then we also have to ask: Freedom to do what? What will freedom look like? How will it be organized? How will people live together in a free Palestine, or in a free Palestine–Israel, whatever it may be called, or in two states who will have to have a negotiated agreement or a federated model?
A lot of people have been thinking about this for a long time, so I think I would like to see more seminars in the street, seminars on college campuses that try to take apart the slogans — distinguish the hateful slogans, the ignorant ones, the antisemitic ones from those that are actually helping to realize justice and freedom and equality in that land.
So if we were to have another public seminar on these campuses where everybody is assembled, it should surely be on academic freedom as well. Academic freedom means that educators have a right to teach what they want, to build their own curriculum, to express their ideas without the interference of state and without the interference of donors.
But I think that’s also collapsing right now as donors, we see at Columbia University, are making threats to withdraw funds, that also happened at Harvard and elsewhere. Also state powers, governments pressuring universities to suppress the rights of speech and assembly that their students have. These are forms of interference in university and college environments that ought properly to be protected from that interference. That is what academic freedom is.
JS: Judith, I wanted to ask you about the events of the last few months and how they’ve impacted you and your public profile. On March 3, you made remarks at a gathering in France. And for people that have really followed the history of Hamas as an organization, of the armed struggle of the Palestinian people, of the actions of the Israeli state over the decades — the remarks that you made were, in my assessment, a quite factual rendering of the events, and embedded within them was historical context. You used a phrase, though, that was then cherry-picked, and much ado was made about it in the international press, and certainly in the Israeli press, but also in Le Monde, in American newspapers, and other papers in Europe, et cetera.
You described the attacks of October 7 as “an act of armed resistance.” And again, I emphasize, if people listen to the full context of your remarks, it was quite clear, I think, to intellectually honest people, what you were saying. But then you had just this avalanche of attacks against you publicly. And, from what I understand, also privately, you received hostile communications or hateful communications from people.
But I wanted you to walk us through how you experienced that. What was the point that you were making that then became the subject of controversy? Because I think it’s important to hear it in your own words.
JB: Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. I should preface my answer with this comment. Because the violence is so acute and people are taking up sides in very emotionally invested ways, they’re not hearing very well. They don’t always have the time or patience to read or listen to a complex point. And I am somebody who does speak in complex sentences, and I make a claim, and then I qualify it, and then I contextualize it. There’s several steps. And as a teacher, I have the time to do that. As a public figure, I’m learning, one doesn’t always have the time to do that.
The question that was posed to me in Pantin was, first of all, whether Hamas was a terrorist organization, and then whether I thought as well that it was possible to distinguish the actions of Hamas from an antisemitic attack.
I made clear in that context that I, as a Jewish person, quite frankly, was anguished on October 7, and I wrote about that, and a lot of my friends on the left were very angry with me for writing about that. I was supposed to keep that to myself. We can see that the grief over Jewish lives lost is very often humanized and memorialized in ways that Palestinian deaths are not.
And we have only to look at the U.S. press and Le Monde as well to see that enormous inequality.
“We can see that the grief over Jewish lives lost is very often humanized and memorialized in ways that Palestinian deaths are not.”
But I did feel that way. And I wrote against Hamas, in fact, hoping that it would disappear as a movement on October 7. And then as I thought about it, and I saw the genocidal actions of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people of Gaza, and I think we have to say Palestinian people, because it’s not just those who voted for Hamas, or those who are actively part of Hamas. They [Israel] weren’t like asking people, “How did you vote?” or “How do you feel about Hamas?” before they killed them. They did not do that. And indeed, children, older people, as we know, aid workers — I mean, the killing has been monstrous and largely indiscriminate.
And I did think that it was then more important to come out against genocide and to call it that. I did some work, some reading, as I think we probably all did, to figure out, well, how is genocide defined, and who are the jurists who agree. And now, as we know, there are several hundred, if not thousands, who do agree that what is happening is genocide, and the International Court of Justice has also said, plausibly, yes, it is. Wish they would say something stronger.
By the time I got to Pantin, and people asked me about Hamas — I still don’t like Hamas. I don’t endorse Hamas. I have never applauded or rejoiced in the military tactics of Hamas. I have written extensively on nonviolence, and I often presume people know that I am actually committed to nonviolent means of overthrowing unjust regimes. This is what I teach, and it’s what I believe, and it is what I also have written about at length.
So I wasn’t romanticizing Hamas, but I was saying they come from somewhere. Hamas emerged as a significant political organization in the wake of the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords turned out to be an enormous betrayal of the Palestinian people. The transfer of political authority that was going to take place, that was promised, never took place. And in fact, it was undercut: More land was taken, fewer rights were given, and it was considered by most Palestinians to be a massive betrayal.
Hamas emerged then, as we know, within Palestinian politics. There are several political parties. There’s Fatah, there’s the Palestinian Liberation Organization, there’s the Palestinian Administration and its complex relationship to that, and also the Palestinian National Unity Party, which is extremely interesting to me. I’m probably following that more closely than anything else.
In short, I thought it was important not to just see the atrocities committed by Hamas — and they were atrocities — on October 7 as random acts of violence. They were horrific. I’ve condemned them many times, and I continue to condemn them. But they come from somewhere.
“Can we take the time to understand what drives people to that? Where does that come from? What conditions are they living under?”
Can we take the time to understand what drives people to that? Where does that come from? What conditions are they living under? What conditions are they objecting to? Can we discuss those who object to those conditions through military means and those who object to those conditions through other means available to them? Just as a matter of understanding.
But in certain contexts, to try to understand something like this means that you endorse it. Or if you fail immediately to call it “terrorist,” that means you think it is acceptable. Well, no, there are various unacceptable crimes against humanity, many of which are inflicted by states. We don’t call all crimes against humanity “terrorist” crimes.
I was trying to contextualize. I was trying to understand why people would be moved to take up arms and be part of a combat struggle. Now, the problem in France is, if you say “resistance movement,” you’re saying résistance. And if you say résistance, you are recalling the liberation from the Nazis, you are recalling the triumphant win of the resistance movement against fascism in France.
So résistance is always an idealization. Résistance is always what you want. You want to be part of it. You want to be in the wake of it. You want to tell that story. You want to applaud it. So to say something is résistance is to applaud it. And I was foolish because I know enough French and French culture to know that you can’t use the word résistance without invoking that particular legacy.
So, people immediately thought that meant, if I call this violent resistance — and then even say, “And I object to its tactics,” which I did say — by using the word résistance, I am applauding, I am endorsing.
I never was. I never will. I never have. But I am interested in why people pick up arms, and I’m interested in when they lay them down. So why can’t we be thinking about the Irish Republican Army, or why can’t we be thinking about other places where there’s been violent conflict — where different groups have agreed to lay their arms down when a legitimate political negotiation seems plausible? I’m interested in that, because I am interested in nonviolent modes of resolution. But we have to understand why people take up arms.
“I am interested in why people pick up arms, and I’m interested in when they lay them down … because I am interested in nonviolent modes of resolution.”
And I suppose also, I want to distinguish between being against occupation or against the Israeli siege of Gaza, and antisemitism. Now, yes, some Hamas members said hideous antisemitic remarks. And, of course, we must object to every and all antisemitic remarks. And those were hideous, clear, and explicit. There’s no equivocation.
But to say that their struggle for justice, freedom, or equality is, at core, just antisemitism, or mainly antisemitism, is to assume that they would be happier if they were colonized by some other group of people. They’re only objecting to be colonized by the Jews because they’re the Jews.Well, no, that’s not right.
They’re objecting to colonization. And if and when antisemitism gets confused with an anti-colonial rhetoric or an anti-occupation rhetoric, then we need to disentangle it. We need to do that on college campuses, we need to do it with our Palestinian allies if that ever happens — in my experience, it happens very, very rarely.
In any case, I guess I was taken to endorse Hamas, which I do not do, that I refused to call it “terrorist,” but I feel like once you call it “terrorist” and you just put it in that box, then it’s random violence that justifies any and all efforts to wipe it out.
If Hamas is only terrorist and not a military group that is trying to achieve some kind of political aim that other people are also trying to achieve through nonmilitary means, if it’s only terrorist, then the alibi for genocide is right there. Because if all of these people are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers who are living in Gaza, then the entire population is painted as terrorist, at which point, there’s only one thing that the Israelis and many of its U.S. supporters think is possible: which is the obliteration of those people.
So I think we have to think critically about how and when we call people terrorists. There’s a jurist here who’s defending people’s free speech on Palestine, and she’s called a terrorist sympathizer, and she’s now under scrutiny by a legal investigation. So before we bandy about this term “terrorist” — and I’m sure there are legitimate uses of it, and we can even describe some actions of Hamas as terroristic, terrorizing, terroristic — we can certainly also talk about whether Israel is an example of state terrorism. When do we talk about that?
I think it’s not the case that terrorism only belongs to nonstate actors. We also have states that act through terrorization and terroristic tactics and who would comply with such a definition. But yes, for many people, at least in the media, it seemed that I had either contradicted myself, that I had criticized Hamas and now I was elevating it and even identifying with it — but that’s not the case. I continue to deplore their tactics.
I am interested in why they took up arms after Oslo. I wonder what it would take to get them to put down arms. What am I for? I’m for significant, substantial political negotiations that would produce a nonviolent future for Palestine. But, I don’t know if anybody can really hear that, because at this point, the smallest word reduces the person.
Like, “Oh, you said that word,” or “You failed to say that word, so this is who you are, and this is where you belong, and you’re on that side.” “You’re pro-Hamas.” Or even in my early one, “You’re pro-Israel.” It’s like, no. No. People are jumping, and they see words and they grab them, and they try to capture people and reduce them without listening, reading, contextualizing. I hope, really, that we get slower, more careful educational efforts happening on campuses and elsewhere, so that our reporting and our speaking can be as precise and thoughtful as possible.
MH: Judith, one thing you alluded to — and we’ve discussed on the show in the past as well too — is the difficulty of discussing the subject not just among peers, but also due to state pressure. In the United States certainly we’re seeing now with the campus protests, but also in Europe, perhaps even more strenuously.
You’re based in Paris, and you’ve had some incidents in the last few months where events you’re speaking at or taking part in came under some sort of pressure or participation had to be withdrawn. And things like this are happening across Europe and quite extensively. Can you talk a bit about the climate there for discussing Israel–Palestine and the challenge in raising these perspectives that you’re discussing with us today?
JB: I mean, I think what’s going on in Germany is quite distinct, and people here in France I know keep asking themselves, “Are we becoming Germany?” And I don’t know whether France is becoming Germany. I think there is in fact an internal debate about that. The police were brought in to confront the students at Sciences Po, and many people who may have very different views on Palestine and Israel objected to the suppression of the freedom of protest and the freedom of speech at Sciences Po. But it’s true that, I mean, obviously in places like Germany, anybody who’s invited there will first be investigated by their hosts to see whether they support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which I have since 2009. I wouldn’t go to Germany because I know what the attacks would be like against me.
I’m glad [Yanis] Varoufakis did. I think that was brave and important and drew attention to it. I’m glad Masha Gessen survived that trial. I’m glad that Nancy Fraser is speaking out strongly against her cancellation. It was, and remains, a complete scandal that someone as smart and important as she is, is denied the freedom to speak because she signed a perfectly legitimate philosophers’ letter objecting to the genocidal attacks on Gaza.
So I’ve been rescheduled. One of that was canceled in a convoluted way, but then I’ve been twice rescheduled. So we will see whether that rescheduling is fulfilled. I think it probably will be, but it is not comfortable to speak freely in public about matters such as these
JS: Just to follow up on that: I’ve been in touch with lawyers in Germany who are representing ordinary citizens, not prominent academics, not famous people, but ordinary residents of Germany.
Some of them are Arabs, Palestinians, others are Jewish residents of Germany, who have been charged under antisemitic speech laws because they’ve used terms at demonstrations to describe what the Israeli state is currently doing to Gaza that were historically applied to the actions of the Third Reich.
And there was a rather senior woman who is an Israeli living in Germany who was twice arrested within I believe a week period, a one-week period, for simply holding a sign. But many of the most vicious attacks against people on these grounds in Germany are aimed at Arab residents, unfamous Arab residents of Germany, some of whom are even being threatened with deportation.
And what I wanted to zero in on is, I’m constantly having arguments with people in Germany and elsewhere in Europe about these kinds of laws. As you see the rise of the AfD in Germany, the far right-wing party, the re-rise of the the far right, — and we’re seeing this in other European countries as well, and you’re certainly experiencing that in France. If right now Germans, ordinary Germans, don’t recognize that the weaponization of these laws against residents or citizens of Germany — because the German state has this “reason of state” that “we must defend Israel at all costs,” that’s the mentality here, and it in and of itself conflates Israel as a state with Judaism as a whole.
But if you justify criminalizing this speech, right now, that is aimed at protesting against Israel’s actions in Gaza. And then if you have a far-right party take over, it’s so easy for that party to say, “Well, hey, that’s the standard. You’ve set the standard. We’re allowed to criminalize speech that we don’t like.” I think that’s extremely dangerous. You know, I can levy a million criticisms toward the United States, but at least we have a fundamental basis to argue about these issues from, and it’s the First Amendment. In Germany, and it’s leading the way, and in other European countries, they also have speech laws heading in this direction, or they’re contemplating them —these are extraordinarily dangerous laws. Extraordinarily dangerous.
JB: I am following that, and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that people who are famous should not be canceled or criminalized, but maybe other people can be. No, no, no. I’m quite aware — in fact, when I used to go to Germany, I visited many Israelis in exile who live in Berlin and who were working closely with Palestinians and were anti-Zionists, quite frankly, who thought that they would be able to live in Germany more easily than they could in Israel because of the cultural activities.
But those people, including, as you say, Jewish people of conscience, the Jüdische Stimme people, the Jewish voices people — they are being arrested, and we’re seeing German police arresting Jewish people in the name of defending against antisemitism. And of course, we’re also seeing German politicians and their apologists deciding whether or not a Jewish person’s critique of Zionism or critique of the Israeli state or the Israeli policy in Gaza amounts to antisemitism.
So Germans are brokering whether or not Jews are antisemitic or not, which I find appalling. And there’s no shame in that. You’re right about the raison d’état the reason of state in Germany, the unconditional support for the Jewish state of Israel. But, you know, they claim that the Jewish state of Israel is a democracy, and yet, if it were, which I don’t think it is, it would also accommodate free speech or robust criticism of the state’s actions. But it does not do that.
We’ve seeing that now in the sporadic persecution of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, professor at Hebrew University, who was arrested in her bed just the other morning. Released now, but possibly facing new arrests as we speak. But in Germany as well, the suppression of criticism, of public criticism, is also an attack on democracy. So as they cancel and annul and criminalize all kinds of young people, including, as you say, Palestinians, people from Turkey, North Africa, Syria, you don’t have full citizenship or full residency or complete papers or are particularly vulnerable — we see a crackdown on the stateless or the precarious that suggests that police powers are legitimately being used to suppress open public criticism. What we associate with flourishing democracies. So you’re right. The AFD, which according to the latest reports is gaining greater and greater support among German people, including German youth, is able to flourish in an environment in which state powers and police powers are being unleashed against people who are trying to express basic democratic rights: the rights to speak, to criticize, to assemble, to protest, to give names to what we see, to give the true name for what we see, to say the word “genocide.”
We could have a longer conversation about the spurious argument that is sometimes used against protesters, namely that the Jews are those who suffered genocide, therefore they cannot be enacting a genocide, and it is obscene to say that they are, and they use that word “obscene.” There is nothing that keeps a people who have suffered massively in life from afflicting massive suffering on others, even though the sufferings are different. There is nothing in the history of the world that precludes that.
There are no pure angels in the situation, but there is obviously an effort to control language and to suppress analogies and to keep the exceptional character of the Nazi genocide in place so that we cannot use the word “genocide” to name what very clearly complies with the legal definition of genocide. So I just think it is going to be a massive struggle in Germany to open up the critique of Israel, to accept the nonconsensus on Israel.
“What if we imagined a transformation of that state, so that it was a state that represented all the inhabitants there, regardless of religion, regardless of race, national origin?”
I want to say one last thing about it, and here’s a kind of bad argument: If you say you’re an anti-Zionist in Israel, in Germany, and sometimes here in France as well, people think it means that you believe that Israel has no right to exist. They actually think that’s all it means. When you say you’re an anti-Zionist, they hear you saying, “I want the destruction of the state of Israel.” Now, you could be an anti-Zionist like I am, clearly, and wish for a state formation in which Palestinians and Jews live together and inhabit that earth together equally and without violence, supported by constitutional protections, by economic equality, the end to colonial structures, the end to occupation.
That’s not the death of the state of Israel, but it might involve a transformation of that state. And it’s that last point, like, what if we imagined a transformation of that state, so that it was a state that represented all the inhabitants there, regardless of religion, regardless of race, national origin?
We would just sound like old-style liberals, right? We would be like boring old-style liberals. Constitutional democracy. If you called for that, for a one-state solution, would you be calling for the end of the Jewish people or the death of the Jewish people or the destruction of the state? You would be calling for a transformation of the state that would be in the service of all the inhabitants, because living on conditions of equality, living equally free, living under justice is the end to a violent struggle for freedom, because freedom is there.
It’s the end of the violent struggle against the Palestinians because they are your neighbors and your equal citizens. I mean, it’s a vision of cohabitation. It’s not a violent act. So, you know, the state of Israel was founded one way; it could have been founded another way. There were bi-nationalists who wanted the state of Israel not to be founded on the basis of Jewish sovereignty. They lost that. And there have always been Jewish Israeli critics of the Jewish sovereignty principle who wanted Israel to be a democracy worthy of the name. Those are positive values, and at least they should be debated. And they could be debated in Germany because a lot of the people who held to this view were German Jews or German-speaking Czech Jews like Hans Kohn.
I mean, it’s just nonsense. Anyway, this is the nonsense that we’re left with in this world right now.
JS: Well, Judith Butler, you leave us with a lot to contemplate, and I know you have to go right now, but we’re so grateful for you, for taking the time to be with us here on Intercepted. Thank you so much.
JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.
Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Fireman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.
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JS: Thank you so much for joining us, I’m Jeremy Scahill.
In the face of growing international pressure, the Biden administration has continued to double down on a policy of blanket support for Israel, even as it presses ahead with a possible military offensive against the town of Rafah that many observers have warned could trigger the largest humanitarian crisis of the war so far. This week on Intercepted, co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict with Thanassis Cambanis, director of the foreign policy think tank Century International. Cambanis explains how Biden’s policy toward Israel is pushing the entire Middle East to the brink of a regional war that could inflict far greater suffering than we have seen to date, in an area which U.S. policymakers claim to be trying to exit.
The war in Gaza has been among the deadliest for civilians, including children, of any war in the 21st century. After spending five weeks volunteering and administering at a field hospital in Rafah, Mohammad Subeh, an American doctor, describes what he saw to Intercepted co-hosts Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. Subeh spent weeks treating wounded Palestinian children, many of them orphaned by Israeli attacks. He also described treating those who survived the aftermath of “mass casualty incidents” in which dozens of civilians were killed or wounded; many of these attacks appeared deliberately targeted at civilians, Subeh says, rather than “indiscriminate.” As the Strip reels from the consequences of a breakdown of public health infrastructure following the destruction of most Gazan hospitals, Subeh says that ordinary civilians are paying a gruesome price for Israel’s military assault.
The conflict in Gaza has galvanized a new generation of young anti-war activists, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa did in decades past. A backlash is now building in the United States, led by right-wing activist and pro-Israel groups aimed at eliminating any public dissent over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
As the death toll of Palestinians rises, a new authoritarian climate is sweeping across the U.S. — particularly on college campuses, which have transformed into laboratories for censorship and surveillance. Intercepted host Murtaza Hussain discusses this new political reality with Sahar Aziz, distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and author of a new report on free speech and discrimination in the context of the Gaza conflict.
The Israeli military assault on Gaza has continued for nearly six months, with word of an impending attack on the densely populated town of Rafah. Against this backdrop, a shadow war has continued to play out between Iran and a network of militant groups on one side, and the U.S. and Israel on the other. Iran today supports and arms not just Hamas, but also groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Syrian and Iraqi militia groups. Aside from the U.S. itself, Iran today is likely the most important outside power in the Gaza war, though its role is often ignored. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain discusses the role of Iran in the region with historian Arash Azizi. The author of “What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom,” Azizi also discusses political developments in the country in the aftermath of recent elections.
Throughout the past five and a half months, Israel has waged a full-spectrum war against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United States and other Western nations have supplied not only the weapons for this war of annihilation against the Palestinians, but also key political and diplomatic support.
The results of the actions of this coalition of the killing have been devastating. Conservative estimates hold that more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children. More than 8,000 people remain missing, many of them believed to have died in the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks. Famine conditions are now present in large swaths of the Gaza Strip. The fact that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza has not deterred the U.S. and its allies from continuing to facilitate Israel’s war.
The massive scale of human destruction caused by the attacks would pose grave challenges to well-equipped hospitals. In Gaza, however, many health care facilities have been decimated by Israeli attacks or evacuated, while a few remain open but severely limited in the care and services they offer. Israeli forces have repeatedly laid siege to hospital facilities, killing hundreds of medical workers and taking captive scores of others, despite thousands of internally displaced Palestinians sheltering in the health care complexes. This week, Israel again launched raids on Al-Shifa Hospital, reportedly killing more than 140 people.
For months, doctors across Gaza have performed amputations and other high-risk procedures without anesthetics or proper operating rooms. Antibiotics are in short supply and often unavailable. Communicable diseases are spreading, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in makeshift shelters with little access to toilets or basic sanitary supplies. Many new mothers are unable to breastfeed and infant formula shortages are common. Israel has repeatedly blocked or delayed aid shipments of vital medical supplies to Gaza. Basic preventative medical care is nearly nonexistent, and medical experts predict that malnutrition will condemn a new generation of young Palestinians to a life of developmental struggles.
The result of the onslaught against medical facilities is that there is only one fully functional hospital remaining in the territory, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon, just left Gaza where he spent 10 days at the hospital performing eye surgeries on victims of Israeli attacks. It was his second medical mission to Gaza since the war began last October.
Canadian surgeon Dr. Yasser Khan with a Palestinian boy who sought shelter in the European Hospital near Khan Younis. Khan recently returned from a 10-day medical mission in Gaza.Photo: Provided by Yasser Khan
What follows is a transcript of a lightly edited interview with Khan.
Jeremy Scahill: Before we talk about your latest medical mission to Khan Younis in Gaza, I wanted to ask you a bit about your background and your medical practice.
Yasser Khan: Well, I’m from the greater Toronto area here in Canada, and I’ve been in practice for about 20 years. I’m an ophthalmologist, but I specialize in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery.
So that’s my sub-specialty and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 20 years. And I’m a professor. I’ve been to over 45 different countries on a humanitarian basis where I’ve taught surgery, I’ve done surgery, I’ve established programs. And so I’ve been to many types of areas and zones in Africa, Asia, and South America.
JS: And Dr. Khan, tell us about how you ended up going to Gaza for the first time. I think you went on your first mission over the winter period, but talk about how you ended up even getting on an airplane to go into a war zone where the Israelis were raining scorched earth down on the Palestinians of Gaza.
YK: Well, you know, all these things, you never plan for them. You never plan to go to an area like Gaza. And I was on the first North American mission. It was about eight of us that went, seven or eight of us that went, surgeons from both the U.S. and Canada, and you can never plan for these and it was just a random conversation with one of my surgical colleagues, who’s a thoracic surgeon, by a scrub sink. And, you know, we’ve been watching this mass killing or slaughter for the last — at that point in time for about three months — livestreamed for the first time ever, I think. And so I think a lot of us were suffering, and he caught me in my down moments. He goes, “Listen, I’m going to Gaza.” And I said, “What? How? I mean, how are you getting in? Nobody’s going there, right?” He [says] they’ve been trying for six weeks, and finally the WHO [World Health Organization] gave them the green light and so everything’s fine. “You may not be approved. I know it’s probably too late, but let me send your information in. I mean, who knows? I need your passport, your medical degree, and your blood type.” And to be honest, I didn’t even know what my blood type was. I just guessed AB, and at the time I just sent it to him right away. And two days later, miraculously, I was approved. To get into Gaza, first of all, nobody but a health care worker or a physician or a team can get in, and to get in you have to be approved by the WHO, by the Israeli authorities, and the Egyptian authorities. So that’s how I got in first.
JS: Describe that journey of how you then go from Canada to Gaza. What is it like? How do you end up getting into Gaza?
YK: Well, I had one day to book my flight. I booked my flight. I got as many supplies as I could together, and I flew into Cairo. And from Cairo, you meet a U.N. convoy that leaves every Monday and Wednesday, nowadays, at about 5 a.m., and it’s about an eight, nine-hour journey through the Sinai Desert. It’s long because you go through multiple checkpoints. It’s a demilitarized zone and so there’s Egyptian army checkpoints all the way through. And then we get to the Rafah border, which is right now controlled by Egypt and has been forever. And then you go through your immigration and then you get to the Gaza side and that’s controlled by the Palestinians.
JS: What was your first impression on that first trip once you crossed over from Egypt into Palestinian territory, into Gaza?
YK: I got there at about 6:30 p.m. at night and nobody travels at night. In fact, the U.N.’s time limit is 5:00 p.m. because anything moving at night, the Israeli forces attack through drones or other missile attacks. But, you know, the two guys that came to pick me up from the hospital said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Trust God.” And so I still went.
So just to describe to you, my first 20 minutes were when I was driving through at night. We were the only car on the road. And it was dark because there’s no fuel, there’s no electricity, so it’s dark, and the road was empty. And I mean, that was quite scary. I basically made my peace with God, and was ready to go at any point in time. But, I’ve never been more happy to see the emergency sign at a hospital, and that’s [when] I knew I’d arrived. The first thing I noticed at the time — this was in Khan Younis — Nasser Hospital and European Gaza Hospital were the only hospitals left in the Gaza Strip, fully functioning hospitals at that point in time.
Khan Younis was still a city, an intact city, but there’s battles going on. So when I exited the car, I could hear the 24-hour buzzing of drones, and it was quite loud, 24 hours, it never went away. I never saw the drones myself because they’re high up, but it’s Israeli drones: There’s either spy drones or there’s a quadcopter, which is the weaponized drone that can fire missiles and gunfire. And so they’re humming around. The other thing that I heard was bombs. And like a “boom” of bombs, basically every hour, every two or three hours; there was like bombs that would shake everything up. So that’s the first images I had.
But the other images I had was like a mass refugee camp. So basically at that point in time, two months ago, about 20,000 people had sought refuge both in the hospital and outside the hospital. And these weren’t tents. They’re still not tents. They’re makeshift shelters with bed sheets or plastic bag sheets. The ones outside sleep on the floor. They’re lucky [if] they get a carpet or a mat. There was one bathroom at the time for about 200 people that they have to share. And inside, the hallways of the hospital were also made into shelters. There was hardly any room to walk, and there’s children running around everywhere. It’s important to remember all these people were not homeless. They all had homes that were destroyed. They’re all displaced people that took shelter in the hospital.
Khan estimates that some 30,000 Palestinians are now living in and around the European Hospital in Gaza in the hope that Israel will not attack it. “These people were not homeless,” he said. “They all had homes that were destroyed. They’re all displaced people that took shelter in the hospital.”Photo: Yasser Khan
“What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine.”
So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come. That was the other thing that at the time shocked me: What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine. I saw scenes that were horrific that I’d never witnessed before and I never want to see again. You have a mother walking in holding her 8, 9-year-old, skinny — because they’re all starving — boy who’s dead, he’s cold and dead and [the mother is] screaming, asking for someone to check his pulse and everybody’s busy in the mass chaos. So that was kind of my initial welcoming scene when I entered Khan Younis the first time.
JS: You’ve just come out now from your second medical mission. You were in Gaza for 10 days. Describe the scenes that you witnessed this time in Gaza, but also specifically in the hospital.
YK: Well, I must admit the first time I went there it was partially getting used to what’s going on, seeing the mass casualties, seeing the hospital, meeting the doctors and the nurses and health care workers, getting familiarized with the surroundings, and also doing the operations. This time, I was over all that introduction.
It was quite demoralizing. You’ve gotta be on the ground to see how bad it is. In two months, things were not only the same in a bad way, but they’re much, much worse because now, two months later, Khan Younis has literally been destroyed as a city. It was an active, hustling, bustling city. The Nasser Hospital, as you know, it’s destroyed now. It’s basically a death zone. And there’s decomposing bodies in the hospital now. It’s been evacuated. And I will add one thing: As a health care worker, I know fully well that to build a major, fully functioning hospital takes years to perfect and build and process, right? So it’s a sheer tragedy that it’s destroyed in mere hours, so it’s really unfortunate.
The European Hospital, which officially has 240 beds, is at more than 300 percent capacity, and many internally displaced people have set up temporary shelter in the hallways of the hospital. “There’s no place to move now in the hallways,” he said. “The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased.”Photo: Yasser Khan
So now [at European Gaza Hospital] instead of 20,000 people, there’s about 35,000 people seeking shelter in a hospital that’s already beyond capacity. And so now, both outside and inside, there’s a mass of people. There’s no place to move now in the hallways. The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased. The European Gaza Hospital, all you have to do is go online and look at their pictures before. It was a beautiful, gorgeous hospital. Well-built, well-run, good quality control — and now it’s reduced to a place that is a mess. It’s a mess. There’s people cooking inside the hospital hallways, there’s the bathrooms, there’s people mixed in with the people who are sick, with major orthopedic injuries, post op. There’s no beds. So sometimes people go and just sleep in their little makeshift shelters. And so infection is, if you can imagine, infection is rampant. So if you don’t die the first time or if your leg or arm is not amputated the first time, it is for sure with infection. So then they have to amputate it to save your life. So it’s much, much worse.
“They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.”
The other thing I noticed was now, more so than even before, the health care workers and nurses and the doctors, they’re just burnt out. I mean, they’re just spent. They’ve witnessed so much in almost six months now. They’ve seen so much on a regular, hourly, daily basis. When I operate [at a hospital in Canada], typically speaking, I’ve got a few mostly elective lists, elective kind of not urgent problems that you gotta fix. And then there’s some trauma, or something that comes in that’s a bit more urgent once in a while, right? That’s my usual list. But [Palestinian medical workers], they are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen. They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.
The thing I try to emphasize to people is that it’s not only the actual medical trauma, it’s the other trauma associated with it in that these patients come in, if you’ve been involved in an explosive injury, and you come in injured, guaranteed you’ve lost loved ones. Guaranteed. So you’ve either lost a father, a mother, a child, all your children, all your family, your uncle, aunt, grandparents, your house, whatever. You’ve lost something. So every patient that comes in, not only is severely injured, is dealing with this trauma.
I had one girl who basically lost all her siblings, 8-year-old beautiful girl, lost her siblings. She came in for a leg fracture, was under the rubble for 12 hours. And her mother died, all her siblings gone. And all her family [were] gone, her aunts and uncles. As you know, it’s a generational killing, like slaughter. Generations. There’s about 2,000 families that have been erased now completely, are gone. Nonexistent. So it’s generational trauma or death or slaughter, and so her father was out burying his wife and his killed children while she was by herself getting her leg fracture repaired. And while she was under there for 12 hours, this 8-year-old girl, next to her was her grandmother and her aunt, dead, lying next to her for 12 hours.
Khan said this 8-year-old Palestinian girl was trapped for 12 hours under rubble alongside two of her dead relatives after an Israeli attack. Her mother and other siblings were killed in the strike. “Her father was out burying his wife and his killed children while she was by herself getting her leg fracture repaired,” Khan recalled.Photo: Yasser Khan
I saw this one guy who had his face split open, and he was under the bubble for eight days. I don’t know how he survived, and they were able to get him out. He lost both his eyes, but they were able to put his face back together again, and he survived. So, they’re dealing with this, all this.
So two months ago it was bad, and two months later, it’s even worse. I could see, actually feel the burnout [among Palestinian medical workers], but they’re superhuman. They keep on going when the rest of us will lose our crap, the rest of us lose it. But they keep on going because it’s their steadfastness and it’s their faith. And they still consider their mere survival as their resistance. You know, they will survive the Israeli bombing no matter what because that’s their form of resistance. No matter what they tried, no matter how much they try to kill them, basically is their attitude.
JS: Dr. Khan, as I’m listening to you, I’m also recalling over these past five-plus months all of the episodes where Israeli forces have attacked or laid siege to hospitals and other medical facilities in Gaza. And I’m specifically thinking of the medical staff at Nasser Hospital, which was raided on February 15 by Israeli forces, and scores of medical personnel were snatched, taken prisoner by the Israelis. And the BBC recently did an exposé documenting what I think can clearly be called the torture of these medical workers, including holding them for prolonged periods in stress positions, dousing them with cold water, using muzzled dogs to menace them, blindfolding them, and leaving them in isolation.
And I’m thinking of the testimony you’re offering about the steadfastness of the doctors and then imagining after months and months of just amputating limbs from children, sometimes without any anesthesia, then having this occupation force come in; snatch doctors, nurses, other medical workers; and then subject them to torture under interrogation aimed at getting them to confess that somehow Hamas is using their hospital as a Pentagon, basically, to plot attacks against the Israeli occupation forces. What kinds of stories did you hear from Palestinian colleagues about these types of raids and actions by the Israelis against medical facilities, doctors, nurses, et cetera?
YK: This has been a systematic, intentional attack on the health care system. The bizarre thing of all of this is that the Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics. There’s been tons of open statements about what they intend to do. So you can’t even make this stuff up. It’s bizarre how they have openly said this, right? But having said that, I think over 450 health care workers have been killed — doctors, nurses, paramedics, over 450 — when they’re not supposed to be a target, right? They’re protected by international law. Doctors have been kidnapped, specific doctors who are of unique specialties have been targeted and killed.
Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon. That’s it, just a medical professional. The assistant director of the hospital was basically declothed and beat up in front of all the other hospital workers just to kind of insult and degrade him because he’s their boss. And they’re beating him up and kicking him and swearing at him, and everybody witnessed this, and they did it purposely in front of his workers. So, it’s a further dehumanization of a human being. These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore. For me, as a surgeon, it’s really heartbreaking for me to see that. As a surgeon, we have people’s lives in our hands and we heal. And then to see them mentally reduced to nothing is hard to take. Yeah. It’s hard to stomach.
JS: I wanted to ask you about an op-ed that a colleague of yours wrote. It was an American doctor, Irfan Galaria, who penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on February 16 after returning from Gaza, and I believe that doctor was at the European Gaza Hospital and described a scene and I’ll just read from their experience at the hospital:
“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”
This should be shocking to the soul of everyone who hears those words from an American doctor describing children between the ages of 5 to 8, arriving in that emergency room with, according to the doctor, single sniper shots to the head. Talk about the kinds of injuries or fatalities that you witnessed during your time there.
YK: Yeah. I know Irfan, and he’s a really good guy and he saw a lot there and I spoke to him when he got back. I myself did not see, when I was there, what he described. But definitely the doctor spoke about it for sure, and it was well known that that indeed was happening on the ground. We hear reports from the West Bank as well, where 12-year-olds or 13-year-olds are shot for nothing really, for no reason at all, just for the sake of being shot. So, it’s not something which is far-fetched, and it is going on.
During his 10-day medical mission in Gaza, Khan performed surgery to remove the eyes of multiple children and adults wounded in Israeli assaults. He described the appearance of these pervasive injuries as the “Gaza shrapnel face.”Photo: Yasser Khan
What I saw — I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual.
Dr. Khan performed surgeries to remove eyes of multiple children wounded in Israeli strikes, calling the injuries “the Gaza shrapnel face.”
Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out. So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes. And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.
And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. And the thing is that the emergency does not have room, so they’re all over the floor. So you have these massive trauma, and [the patients] are on the floor. And sometimes they get forgotten in the mass chaos.
There was a 2-year-old baby who came in from a fresh bombing. He lost his aunt and his sibling, and his mother was in the OR being amputated. And she was actually a U.N. worker, by the way, a Palestinian U.N. worker. So he was just forgotten on the floor somewhere with major, major head trauma. Fortunately, after about two hours, they found him. And, because he had no — I mean, his mother wasn’t there, his father wasn’t there, there’s no family there — and fortunately, they found him. And they took him up to neurosurgery, but I don’t know what happened to him because that was on my last day that I was leaving. So I remember that very well. So it was just injuries that you have never seen before and the degree to it was amazing.
UNICEF said in December — and this was a low number — that there was over 1,000 children that had either double amputation or single amputation. This is only in December. It’s a very conservative estimate. Some people have said about 5,000 children. This is in January. So if you look at two months later, it must be 7,000, 8,000 now, either double amputees or single amputee, like arm, leg, both legs, both arms, mostly children. The thing is that in any normal amputation, in a normal circumstance, a child who gets amputated goes through about eight or nine operations until they’re adults, to revise the stump and fix the stump. Who is going to do that now? Not only have they lost their supports, their entire family structure, they don’t have the family structure or the infrastructure to do that because it’s all been destroyed.
JS: Were you just in one hospital, or did you go to multiple hospitals?
YK: No, so I stayed in European. The first time I was going to go to Nasser, but it got too dangerous and I think the fear was that the Israelis would just close off the road and then I’d be stuck in Nasser Hospital, so I didn’t go, but I went to European. And now there’s only one hospital, really, left, which is the European Hospital. One fully functional hospital exactly. They have these clinics across the city — I mean, they call them hospitals sometimes, like the Indonesian field hospital, things like that, but they really aren’t fully functioning hospitals. They’re clinics that have one or two services that kind of are more than just a clinic, but they’re mostly just clinics. So there’s really only one fully functioning hospital now, which is the European hospital, and therefore the impending invasion of Rafah is quite worrisome for me.
JS: At the European Hospital, are there sufficient supplies to manage the influx of patients? You’re describing an apocalyptic scene, particularly with these amputations among children. Are there adequate supplies to handle the demand in that hospital where you were?
YK: Definitely two months ago there weren’t. On my last day when I was leaving, they ran out of morphine, and morphine is needed in a lot of orthopedic and major trauma. You need morphine for pain control. So they ran out of morphine, and they ran out of a lot of the antibiotics as well, about two months ago. Now, two months later, supplies have come in. So they do have supplies that are running out pretty fast and they do run out. So, they’re coming in, but their equipment is rusted, new equipment is harder to come in, because anything that’s dual purpose, for example, the Israelis stop from coming.
So a lot of medical equipment is not coming in, unfortunately, and as a result a lot of equipment is rusted and it’s old, and it needs to be replaced, but these Palestinian doctors are very innovative and they’re geniuses, all of them are. What they’re going through, what they’ve done is amazing. I mean, hats off to them for sure. But yeah, it’s a mess. I mean, even the ORs are a mess. They’re a disorganized mess. People are frustrated. There’s a lot of frustrations, and I don’t blame them.
Khan operates on a patient in the European Hospital in Gaza in early March. Palestinian doctors in Gaza, he said, “are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen.”Photo: Provided by Yasser Khan
JS: Talk about the conversations you were having with Palestinian colleagues. You described a bit of this, but you are coming from Canada. You had colleagues that also came from the United States, and you’re going for these 10-day periods or so. I know there are some doctors that have stayed longer, but relatively short periods of time. And we all have to remember the Palestinian doctors and nurses and medical workers that are there, they’re simultaneously doing their job and many of them have lost their families, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren. This is their reality. They don’t leave. And I’m wondering as a medical professional from Canada, what that’s like to talk then to your Palestinian colleagues and what impression it has left on your heart?
YK: It’s left a huge impression, Jeremy, especially this time. This time I felt the emotional burden more than I did the last time. But, you know, I’ll tell you one thing. I know we talk about the death and the disease and all that, but one thing that we also need to more talk about — and this relates to how they’re doing is the death of their culture and their civilization, which is a genocide or plausible — that’s part of the definition of a genocide, is it not? Every single playground, hangout place, café, restaurant, 500-year-old ancient mosque, 500-year-old ancient church, destroyed. There’s schools destroyed, there’s stadiums, sports facilities destroyed, their hospitals destroyed, their cinemas destroyed, museums destroyed, archives, where they kept their archives, erased, destroyed, burnt, their homes, 80 percent of homes, are all gone now. And even though the homes are empty, they do not need to be destroyed. They’ve been TikToked on for the whole world to see. The Israeli forces have TikToked this and have shown destruction of these homes, of these beautiful people, and then dedicated destruction to their spouses or their children or whatever.
We’ve seen all this. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all out there that we’ve seen. So they’ve witnessed all this. What the Israeli forces have also done is that once they’ve come in, they’ve depaved the roads. Even in Khan Younis, many of the roads have been depaved. So there’s no roads left. So they’ve seen a complete destruction of their culture and their civilization and their lives, a complete erasure of their culture. And so that by itself is a tremendous tragedy. If we all look at ourselves and see if that happens to us, how would we feel?
So in the backdrop, despite that, they remain hopeful. They really do. There are some that have lost hope and want to get out. There’s a lot of patients that come in, and they may have like a dry eye, and they want a referral to be referred out, like a medical referral, because that’s one way to get out. But first of all, even people with serious medical conditions are not getting out so easily, but they’re all trying to leave just to save their lives, but they all say that they want to leave and come back. They all want to come back, right? Because there’s something magical about the land. Palestinians have been there for thousands and thousands of years, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians. They have a very strong connection to their land, and they don’t want to leave. They’d rather die than leave, but at this point in time, they want to leave, be safe. So that’s their philosophy. In the end, I think what holds them together is their faith. They have faith in God. They have faith in justice. God’s justice. They have no faith in humanity’s justice at all. And I don’t blame them. We have really abandoned them. Not us, as in the average person who’s been protesting and advocating for them. But at an elitist or governmental level. They’re encouraged and touched by everybody in the world who has fought for them and advocated for them. They know this, and they are touched by this. But at the other hand, they don’t know what to do. There’s no certainty. So they don’t know how to plan for the future because they don’t know whether there’ll be a Rafah invasion.
“Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence.”
I was on the ground, I toured the refugee camps, I went around Rafah, I saw, and if there’s an Israeli invasion, I can’t emphasize enough how catastrophic it’s going to be. It’ll be mass killing, mass destruction, because all these figures come in, 50 dead, 100 wounded. But what people don’t realize is, being wounded is a death sentence. Being wounded in this environment with no health care system, completely collapsed, is a death sentence. And the wounded often will lose everybody, like all family members, so they have no supports, especially children, have nobody left to take care of them, not even aunts and uncles. It will be catastrophic. I don’t know what to say to the world to stop an impending invasion. You’ve got to rein this prime minister of Israel in. You got to do something to stop this stupid invasion that he still wants to do, because it’ll be catastrophic.
JS: I was just thinking back to your description of having to remove eyes from children or adults who’ve been hit with shrapnel. I think any of us who’ve ever had an operation or surgery, or we’ve helped a loved one that went into surgery, knows that the path to recovery is often a long one where you have to have physical therapy, you have to come to terms with a body part that you’ve lost and are going to have to live your life without. What’s your understanding of what happens to the patients you operated on who now are entering a reality where they no longer can see? They don’t have eyes, or children that no longer have a leg. What happens to those people after the acute situation is dealt with, that the surgery happens, the amputation happens, the eyes are removed?
YK: Well, Jeremy, that’s what keeps me up at night, and that’s what bears on me a lot. The overall simple answer is, I don’t know. The reason I don’t know is because they’re living in tents and structures. Many of them have lost their family and support, especially children have lost their family and support. Even adults.
I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.
There’s tons of children like this as well. So what happens to them? I don’t know. What’s going to happen to the double amputee child who has no home, no parents and no uncles and aunts or grandparents left, no siblings left either? What’s going to happen to them? Then there’s some kids who have an older sibling that’s 11 years old and they’re like 5 years old. I saw one girl who lost an arm and the only living relative she has is an 11- or 12-year old sibling who’s taking care of her. So I don’t know what’s going to happen because in the current infrastructure, there is no infrastructure, there is no care for these stumps. Many of them are getting infected, these stumps are, after they’ve been amputated — and where are they discharged to? Usually when they’re discharged, because the hospital is trying to discharge them to make room for more people to come in, they’re discharged out to the shelters or tents. That’s where they’re discharged. It’s not like they’re discharged home where there’s proper care.
I will emphasize this, Jeremy, that Palestinians were in an open-air concentration camp for decades. This is not new. It was a struggle, but they were still able to make their life. And because they couldn’t go anywhere, because they’re restricted by Israel and by Egypt on the other side, they couldn’t go anywhere, they put everything into their homes. So their homes were their castles, were their life, were their center of their life and their universe, and they really took a lot of care and attention to their homes. And so now all these people who are homeless, their homes are gone. So, it’s a tremendous effect, and they’re living in tents, and I can only imagine what they must go through. Only a year ago, life was normal so to speak, even though you’re in a concentration camp, but life was still normal. It was their normal, right? And they’re living and they make the best of things. They’re very grateful and gracious people, and steadfast people, and they make the best of every scenario, and they did make the best of even being in a concentration camp. They made the best of it. But now it’s heartbreaking.
JS: I’m thinking of this too, and like anyone who’s a parent, imagine that terror when you lose your kid, you’re at a theme park or you’re out somewhere. And all of a sudden, you can’t see your child and all the thoughts that go through your head and then imagine your child alone in the world, completely alone. And, by the way, they’ve lost their sight. Or they’re a double amputee. I haven’t been to Gaza and seen what you’ve seen, but I have these thoughts all the time, and I think everyone who really has internalized this as a human catastrophe that was preventable, that didn’t need to happen, you think about those children and what does it mean to be alone in this world as a child? But then on top of it, to be alone in this world and it’s hell on earth. It’s bombs. It’s everyone trying to survive. It’s starvation. It’s famine. It’s people fighting over the morsels of food that get dropped from the sky along with the bombs. And as I listen to you, it just punctuates how unconscionable this is to the core of humanity, how unconscionable it is. What is your message to the world right now?
A makeshift graveyard near the European Hospital outside Khan Younis, Gaza. “This is just one graveyard I discovered just outside the hospital,” says Khan. “There’s so many dead.”Photo: Yasser Khan
YK: Well, Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth right now, is what it is, and I think that it’s never too late. If the Israeli invasion of Rafah occurs, it’ll be catastrophic. We have to do all that we can to stop that from happening, put all the pressure we can on our politicians, on the powers that be, to stop this from happening because the health care and the human toll will be unimaginable. The fact is that it’s been 75 years of occupation. In the end, out of all of this death and destruction that’s happened, they need to have their independence, and they need to have their independent state so that they can live their lives with dignity and freedom.
And I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been to 45 different countries, and Palestinians are among the best people that I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’re the most generous, gracious, kind-hearted, intelligent, and wise people that I’ve ever met. And so they’re worth fighting for. I think it’s an issue of humanity. I will side on the side of humanity anytime. And they are worth fighting for. So I want us all to continue the fight and continue advocating for them until this war stops and they are free.
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This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill discusses the dystopian game show that Israel is subjecting Palestinians to in Gaza, kettling them into an ever-shrinking killing cage. While the scope of the war against Gaza is unprecedented, it has been preceded by a decadeslong cycle of regular Israeli ground and air attacks against the Palestinians of both Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Independent journalist Antony Loewenstein discusses his groundbreaking new book, “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.” For two decades, Loewenstein, a co-founder of Declassified Australia, has reported on Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and Israel, having lived in East Jerusalem for several years. Loewenstein breaks down how Israel markets its defense and intelligence technology to nations across the world, boasting of how it has been “battle-tested” against the Palestinians. He also discusses the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism against critics of Israeli policies and wars and the formal efforts in the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere to categorize opposition to Zionism as antisemitism.
This is the last episode of 2023. Thank you for listening this year. We will be back with more episodes in 2024.
Despite a temporary pause in Israel’s massive bombardment and ground operations in Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe continues to worsen. With more than 15,000 dead Palestinians and whole neighborhoods and towns left in ruin, Israel’s defense minister has defiantly vowed to dramatically escalate the attacks inside Gaza the moment the truce ends. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the state of the war as well as the propaganda campaigns being waged by each side. Then Roy Yellin, head of public outreach at Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem, discusses recent developments on the hostage and prisoner exchanges, how the crisis has impacted Israeli society, and describes the conditions faced by Palestinians when they are thrown into Israel’s military justice system. Yellin also explains the state sponsorship of violent Israeli settlers, the mass detentions underway of Palestinians in the West Bank, and the dangerous nature of Israel’s far-right Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The civilian death toll wrought by Israel’s siege of Gaza is staggering. More than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed, nearly half of them children. More than 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. And President Joe Biden has presided over an open spigot of U.S. weapons and support for the war of annihilation being waged by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
This week on Intercepted, the esteemed historian Rashid Khalidi joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain for a wide-ranging conversation about the long arc of the history of Israel’s political, economic, and military campaigns against the Palestinian people. Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of several books, including “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.” Khalidi also discusses how the war on Gaza will impact Biden’s legacy and the role of the United States in facilitating the current war and those of the past 75 years. “Biden has done permanent harm to the standing of the United States in the world, in the Muslim world, and in the Arab world. Permanent harm,” says Khalidi. “He has alienated young generations that will think of the United States in terms of Gaza for a very long time.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said recently on CNN, “It’s not only our war, it’s your war too.” He was right: The Biden administration has armed, funded, and supported Netanyahu every step of the way as Israel wages a campaign of terror bombings against Gaza. In five weeks of sustained Israeli airstrikes and ground operations, one in 200 residents of Gaza has been killed. Of the more than 11,000 deaths, 4,600 of them are children. President Joe Biden remains entrenched in his support for the scorched-earth campaign of his “great, great friend” Netanyahu.
This week on Intercepted, independent journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Jeremy Scahill discuss the horrors facing the people of Gaza and the history of Biden’s support for some of the most extreme actions of Israel. They discuss the unprecedented killing of journalists in Gaza and the violent campaign being waged by Netanyahu-backed Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Kouddous also discusses Israel’s killing of Al Jazeera correspondent and U.S. citizen Shireen Abu Akleh and decries the lack of solidarity from U.S. and other Western journalists. We also hear recent public remarks from author Ta-Nehisi Coates as he describes his trip to Palestine last summer as part of the Palestine Festival of Literature and offers his analysis of the siege of Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to reject international calls for a ceasefire and says Israel will oversee security in Gaza indefinitely. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss Israel’s monthlong scorched-earth campaign in Gaza and the U.S. government’s complicity. Then Mairav Zonszein, an Israeli American journalist and a senior analyst on Israel–Palestine at the International Crisis Group, joins to discuss developments in Israel and Gaza. Zonszein, who is based in Israel, discusses the political developments in the country, the failures of Netanyahu during the crisis, and the tragic implications for Palestinians in Gaza.
More than 3,000 children have been killed in Gaza since Israel began bombarding the enclave three weeks ago. The number of children reportedly killed in the conflict has surpassed the annual number of children killed in conflicts around the world since 2019, according to Save the Children.
This week on Intercepted, Murtaza Hussain is joined by Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute and author of “Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump.” Hussain and Elgindy discuss the latest developments in the war on Gaza, the U.S. government’s role in this crisis, and what the future may look like as the violence continues.
The dystopian images coming out of Gaza, as Israel continues its scorched-earth campaign, show horrific destruction and the killing of civilians. Over the weekend, Israel escalated bombardments in Gaza, raising the death toll to over 5,000 with more than 62 percent of fatalities being women and children, according to the latest U.N. reports. There is a growing concern Israel’s war on Gaza will draw other nations into the conflict, including Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, and Turkey. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain are joined by Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center Washington D.C. They discuss the institutional support for war against Palestine, the shutting down of pro-Palestinian voices, and the broader regional and political implications of an intensification of the war.
The Indian government was locked in a crisis over its alleged assassination of aCanadian citizen when a war between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip broke out that threatens to upend the global order. As the liberal international system begins to fray under these pressures, Indian author and journalist Pankaj Mishra joins host Murtaza Hussain on this week’s Intercepted to discuss how the war in the Middle East is reshaping global politics, the evolution of India’s foreign policy, and its crisis with Canada over an alleged assassination.
