this feature published in the fall of 2022 on the distorting role of AIPAC<\/a> and a related super PAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, in shaping and constraining the bounds of allowable discourse in Democratic primaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis week, that fight ratcheted up to unprecedented levels of animosity when nine Democrats voted against a resolution that condemned Hamas and defended Israel\u2019s response, but which said nothing about Palestinian civilian lives lost. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the Squad\u2019s chief antagonist in the House, called them \u201cdespicable\u201d in response. And President Joe Biden shockingly cast doubt on civilian casualty statistics put out by hospitals in Gaza because they run through the Ministry of Health, which is itself run by Hamas. In response, Hamas posted a public list of the names, ages, and ID numbers of 6,746 people who\u2019ve died amid the bombing campaign. The list includes 2,664 children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve seen some people cast doubt on the reliability of the list, but Maram provided us a list of his relatives who\u2019d been killed that was created before Hamas put its own data out, and those names all appear on the Ministry of Health list. (We did find one duplicate on the list, not a relative of Maram\u2019s, a 14-year-old boy who appears twice on it. That\u2019s why I say it\u2019s a list of 6,746 people and not the number you\u2019ve seen in public reporting, 6,747.) I asked Maram what he made of Biden\u2019s dismissal of the accuracy of the numbers, and he said he agreed with Biden, but in the other direction: It\u2019s not possible that the hospitals are capturing the extent of the slaughter, he said, because many of the people he knows who have died in bombings have not been able to get to a hospital or a morgue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Deliberately leaving Palestinian lives out of a congressional resolution, or suggesting that the numbers from Gaza can\u2019t be trusted because Hamas runs the Ministry of Health, riggs those numbers. In fact, it likely makes the situation on the ground considerably worse, giving the IDF a sense of impunity that comes from dismissing the deaths as a Hamas conspiracy or fake news.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
You can find my interview with Maram anywhere you listen to podcasts, just search for \u201cDeconstructed.\u201d And please share with anybody you think does not yet grasp the scale of what\u2019s happening. It can\u2019t stay hidden forever. Below is a brief excerpt of our conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maram Al-Dada:<\/strong> It’s a total of 46. Yesterday, when you texted me about this interview, my uncle’s house was bombed. My aunt’s house was bombed. My cousin’s house was bombed. I mean, yesterday, it was a very tough time. We really thought, like, that’s it. The whole family will go.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nRyan Grim:<\/strong> I saw news of Khan Yunis being bombed over the last couple of days and I thought of you and your family each time.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nMaram Al-Dada:<\/strong> I mean, I was talking to my uncle when I was trying to get him to join this interview. He was telling me like, \u201cWe will die in this war, like all of us will die, but we don\u2019t know when.\u201d \u2026 I mean, I’ll tell you a little story. Yesterday, I was calling him, I was talking to him. He goes like, today, a bomb fell in our street. A guy’s leg was cut off in front of everyone and we were trying to just help him, waiting for an ambulance and there was just no ambulance. There’s no, no 911, ambulance. The healthcare system\u2019s collapsed and he just kept bleeding and people just, at the end, just put him in a car and they just drove him away trying to take him to the hospital. I don’t know what happened after that.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd then another story: He goes, \u201cThere’s no food.\u201d My cousin, my cousin called, my aunt called my uncle, she goes \u2013 that was before their house was bombed \u2013 she goes, \u201cDo you have food? Do you have any bread?\u201d And he said, \u201cLet me try to see who has bread. We don’t have any.\u201d So they tried calling around and they found there’s one little bakery in our town that still has bread, and they called and were like, \u201cCan you please keep a bag of bread for us?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nSo he called my aunt back and he goes like, \u201cOh, ask Ahmed, my cousin, to go and pick it up.\u201d Ahmed calls my uncle back, and I was with him on the phone, and he tells him, \u201cI can’t go, I can’t leave, it’s the street.\u201d Our street, called Gamal Abdel Nasser, you can go check it out, that street is just blocked because the buildings are collapsed. \u201cI can’t just cross to the other side.\u201d So I was like, wow, so it’s just a slow death, just waiting to die. There’s no food, they get water now four hours a day, no electricity. It’s horrifying. What’s happening is literally slow death.<\/em><\/p>\nThe post The Lights Are Off. Here\u2019s What We Know About Life and Death Inside Gaza.<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\nThis post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a chilling interview on this week\u2019s \u201cDeconstructed,\u201d Ryan Grim speaks with Maram Al-Dada, who has been in regular touch with his family in Gaza as they\u2019ve been killed one after the other.<\/p>\n
The post The Lights Are Off. Here\u2019s What We Know About Life and Death Inside Gaza.<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,68890],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299611"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1308379,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299611\/revisions\/1308379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}