Half a Million Gazans Are Suffering From Acute Hunger. Let That Sink In

Nir Gontarz

January 19, 2024

The scope of the crisis in Gaza is becoming clearer; according to the UN, Israel is creating conditions that are making life in Gaza impossible; but Israeli leaders are unbothered

 

“We’re hearing that food has entered Rafah, but hardly any gets to us. I swear to you by the life of Allah and the life of my children: We are living in hell. For a week and a half we have been in a house that was destroyed, without almost any walls, without windows and without electricity. Our luck is that until a week and a half ago there were Israeli soldiers in this house. We are living off the garbage they left behind.”

– A., a resident of the northern Gaza Strip, who relates that his family cannot move south, because his wife is disabled

Hello to Italian lawyer Francesca Albanese, who since 2022 has been serving as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. What is the situation today in Gaza?

“There is very acute hunger there. The present quantity of food, despite the aid that is entering, is insufficient. There is not enough food and water, and there are no means for cooking. In the northern Strip there have been no functioning bakeries since November 9. In the south, 44 percent of the people who replied to questions in a survey conducted by the World Health Organization said they are suffering from a serious degree of hunger, even though they ostensibly have access to aid and food at a certain level. In the north there is no way to check this, because the area is controlled by the Israel Defense Forces and no one can enter. It’s possible that many more people there are suffering from hunger. It’s beyond belief.”

Still, do you have an estimate regarding the overall picture?

“A UN report that was written last month states that one of every four people in the Gaza Strip – that is, more than half a million people – is suffering from severe hunger. In certain areas, nine of every 10 families might go through an entire day without food. They simply have no food.”

UN policy in the region is determined on the basis of your reports. Can you explain on what you base the data you publish?

“We are talking about reports of the UN’s World Food Program. They have teams on the ground that monitor the food that is being allowed into the Strip; there is data about the amount of food. I know nurses who went to work in hospitals in Gaza and discovered that there is not enough food for the foreigners, either. Of course there is not enough food for the [Israeli] hostages, either. There is simply no food. There are other cases in the world of near-hunger, such as in Afghanistan or Yemen, but the numbers in Gaza are higher. Take into account that only 8 percent of the population receives aid from the UN.”

Why only 8 percent?

“One reason is that there is no access to the north. The second reason is Israel’s heavy bombing, including in areas that the IDF has declared to be safe. This is a region of harsh warfare; it is not a normal situation. There are many difficulties. So, what there is, is not sufficient, and what there is does not reach everyone. You know, it’s difficult to provide assistance to 1.9 million displaced persons. They no longer have a home. They are crowding into places of shelter. There are 1.4 million people who are living in places like schools or hospitals that are no longer active. How can aid be provided to so many people when everything is bombed, when there are not even any bakeries, when nothing is normal? Gaza is destroyed.”

Do you think that the government of Israel and the IDF understand that this is the situation? Because they are saying very different things.

“I think they know exactly what they are doing. Israel knows everything that is happening in Gaza, and now it also has soldiers on the ground. They know exactly what they are doing, Nir.”

Francesca P. Albanese

Do you think that Israel is deliberately depriving civilians of food?

“Israel is creating the conditions that are making life in Gaza impossible. Yes, definitely. We can talk about food, but here is something that haunts me: A thousand children underwent amputations without anesthesia. Why aren’t they [Israeli authorities] allowing anesthetics to enter? It’s a catastrophe. Do they know that this is what is happening? Obviously they know. Israeli politicians have declared that the population in Gaza is responsible for what happened on October 7, and because of that they have abandoned all restraint. Look, there is no way to justify Hamas, and I condemn the killing of the civilians and the cruelty that was adopted, but what is happening today in Gaza is beyond belief. There are 2.3 million Palestinians who are being denied resources essential for their survival.”

Thank you, Francesca, for this interview.

“Just one more thing. I ask myself how what Israel is doing now to the Palestinians will make Israel’s citizens safer. Israel is sowing the seeds for a far more radical region in the years ahead. I am genuinely afraid of what will happen. Even if the battles stop tomorrow, it will be difficult to rehabilitate Gaza, very difficult. I think that Gaza has been destroyed. Look, I am not saying this out of hatred for Israel, in fact the opposite is true. I only want Israel to be safe without obliterating another people.”

“All my produce died – tons of vegetables that could have fed half the children of Gaza. Israeli tanks drove over some of my fields, and it’s too dangerous to enter the ones that weren’t damaged. My family and I, who were well-off compared to most Gazans, managed to get to the tent city in the south and we aren’t leaving. People who know me are asking for handouts, for me to get them food, but I am barely managing to help my family.”

– M., prominent farmer from the central Gaza Strip

Hello to Sheren Falah Saab, a Haaretz journalist who is in direct and continuous contact with residents of Gaza and is covering the situation there. Recently you published monologues from people suffering from hunger there (“Much harder for children’: Severe hunger is spreading in Gaza. Four voices from a human catastrophe,” Jan. 4).

“Right. Before the war I had never heard Gazans begging for help, for food – so mentally broken. It’s hard to grasp the extent of the hunger crisis in Gaza, because it reflects the profound moral nadir to which we on the Israeli side have sunk. If this were a natural disaster, one could understand and come to terms with it, but what is happening now is collective punishment through starvation, and I am talking about children, women, elderly people. How can this be? Whom does it benefit? The Gazans are being stripped of their humanity. What do they have left? Nothing.”

Maha, 26, who moved with her family from Gaza City to Rafah, related in her monologue that the 22 members of her extended family had to make do with two cans of ful (fava beans) a day and that she felt hungry all the time. Noel, 43, who arrived in Rafah from Beit Lahia, said that her family was subsisting on date cookies distributed once a day, and that one night her son woke up and cried that he was hungry. Alham, 38, who was uprooted from Gaza City to Rafah, said her baby nephew had stopped being breast-fed because his mother was too weak to produce milk. Now, in the absence of baby formula, he cries from hunger all the time.

* * *

In routine times and also in wartime, humanitarian operations in Gaza are handled by Maj. Gen. Ghasan Alyan, the Israeli coordinator of government activities in the territories. His organization, COGAT, is also the principal source – one could almost say the exclusive source – of information for political and military leaders about the humanitarian situation in the Strip. If it errs in understanding the reality in Gaza, or is careless in its reports, that will have direct implications for the decisions made in Israel and for the lives of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Strip.

A substantial disparity seems to exist between the dire picture of Gaza described in UN reports, and the situation on the ground as understood by leading political and military figures in Israel. Perhaps they prefer not to know about it, but it’s also possible that the reason for that disparity lies in a gap in the information that comes from COGAT.

Hello to Col. A., a representative of COGAT, which is responsible for supervising the transfer of aid into Gaza. Is there hunger in the Gaza Strip today?

“To the best of my understanding, and according to all the analyses we have conducted, there is no hunger in Gaza, and for sure the population is not being starved.”

Desperate residents scrambling to get food in the Gaza Strip, in November.

What are your tools for determining that there is no hunger in the Strip?

“There are facts. I am present at the border crossings. I see everything that is checked by us and that enters the Strip. There is open-source intelligence, OSINT; there are images in the social media. In addition, I conduct situation appraisals twice a day with representatives of the international community. One is with the UN agencies and the other is four-way: with us, the Americans, the Egyptians and the UN.”

But leading figures in the UN say there is severe hunger in Gaza.

“I haven’t read an in-depth UN report about hunger. I have read reports by other organizations, which conduct phone surveys. There’s no way to know how they do that and whom they call.”

In your situation appraisals, you don’t hear claims about hunger from the international sources?

“No. I hear requests to coordinate the movement of trucks [carrying food and other humanitarian aid] and the transfer of goods to other places in the Strip, which we are doing. Sometimes they explain that if a certain transfer does not take place within a relatively short time frame, distress to the point of hunger could develop. But it doesn’t come to that, because we coordinate the movement of the trucks.”

Israel says that 70 tons of food have entered the Gaza Strip since the war began. Divide that by 90 days of fighting, and then among 2.3 million people, and you get less than 350 grams per day per person.

“Before the war, the Strip was bursting with food. The warehouses and the supermarkets were full. Both in the private sector, among the farmers, and in the UN’s warehouses. The food industry worked vigorously – so that calculation is nonsense. There were stockpiles of food in Gaza. Don’t forget that this is an Arab, Gazan population whose DNA is to hoard, certainly when it comes to food.”

How long does it take for a container from the moment it is unloaded in El Arish port, in Egypt, until it gets to Gaza?

“About a week. El Arish is a small port, there is no efficient unloading and packing company there. The capacity is low. Besides that, there aren’t enough trucks in El Arish [to transport all the food arriving there]. After dealing with bureaucracy at the port, the trucks undergo inspection by Egyptian authorities at Rafah. Trucks belonging to the Red Crescent and the UN are sent to be checked by Israeli authorities.”

How many trucks can you check a day?

“I’m able to inspect more than 350 trucks a day, but the UN can’t absorb more than 190.”

Why?

“They don’t have enough trucks. UNRWA [the UN refugee agency] has taken control of everything and doesn’t allow other agencies to operate. When they took over and excluded these other agencies, they didn’t adjust their logistics systems. They don’t have drivers, there are no forklifts, there is no foreign workforce.”

Where are the UN personnel?

“Only a few have arrived from abroad. Even in Syria hundreds of auxiliary personnel arrived during the war [there].”

And if they were to come in droves, would you allow them to enter?

“Of course, but they don’t need my authorization. They could fly into Cairo and travel to Rafah. I don’t control the border crossings there. It’s easy for everyone to blame Israel for everything.”

Let’s say the world were to double the amount of food being sent to Gaza – would you agree to and succeed in transporting it there?

“Yes.”

You wouldn’t harm anything that’s related to humanitarian aid?

“Correct. The UN warned about a humanitarian crisis long before the war. That’s ridiculous. Never in all the period in which Hamas ruled there was the economic situation better than in the run-up to the war.”

ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/AID-DRONE

* * *

Hello to Chili Tropper, former culture and sports minister and member of the security cabinet, from Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party. As we agreed, I’m calling you to talk about the shortage of food in the Gaza Strip.

“Three months of war will certainly generate a food shortage. I am convinced that there is a shortage, but it wasn’t created in one day. The question is who started the war. Hamas massacred, raped and abducted innocent citizens in civilian communities – not on the battlefield. That starting point is important. Hamas not only launched the war, they are also those who could stop it by laying down their weapons and releasing the hostages. Those who are to blame and are responsible for the serious humanitarian situation in Gaza are the leaders of Hamas. They are the ones who are sacrificing the population.”

In the meantime, we are hearing reports about hungry civilians. There is simply not enough food.

“Israel does not have a starvation policy. On the contrary: This is an unprecedented situation in which a country that is at war is permitting a lot of humanitarian aid to come in while its hostages are still there and haven’t even met yet with the Red Cross. We are trying to prevent a humanitarian disaster.”

Why doesn’t Israel flood Gaza with food? After all, food can’t be used as a weapon against you.

“We are in a state of war with them. Every action is taken judiciously, after checking where the shipment is going. To the best of my knowledge, the amount [of goods] that is entering provides a reasonable response to the situation, but the organizations involved are having difficulty making the aid available to the entire population. There are not enough trucks, there isn’t enough manpower, Hamas interferes and does damage. Hamas has an interest in creating a picture of starvation and of a tremendous humanitarian disaster.”

In the present situation, who is actually responsible for the civilian population in Gaza?

“The Strip is presently in a situation of combat. Our responsibility is to allow third parties to bring in humanitarian equipment for the benefit of the population.”

The Israeli government says it is working to demolish Hamas’ regime, including the local police, of course. Who is supposed to guard the aid trucks on the ground? Who is responsible for paving the roads that were destroyed, which has made it impossible for the trucks to get through?

“Ultimate responsibility rests with Hamas, and despite that, we are operating as best we can from the humanitarian point of view. I don’t feel responsible, but I also don’t feel that I can completely disengage from dealing with this issue. The conditions are very complicated. We are both allowing the entry of food and also ascertaining that it reaches the population as much as possible. The IDF is allowing the UN to move about in all areas. I don’t know if there is a precedent for a country doing everything it can to bring food in to a population, from within which that country is being fought. By the way, Hamas enjoys very broad support from that population. And still, I don’t want to be the mirror image of Hamas and to be cruel like them. I have permitted the entry of thousands of trucks since the start of the war and am allowing the Jordanians to parachute in humanitarian aid.”

The government is forbidding Israeli organizations and private individuals to send goods of any sort that originate in Israel into Gaza. Why? I understand that even Israeli baby formula can’t be brought in.

“The state’s strategic decision is to disconnect from Gaza. Commercial relations with it are over. In the past we thought that the commercial relations were beneficial to both sides. We were wrong. That’s finished.”

* * *

Hello to Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar, from Likud. To the best of your knowledge, is there extensive hunger in the Gaza Strip?

“The answer is no. What exists in the Strip is perhaps a shortage. There is no abundance there, that’s for sure. Let’s put it this way: The shelves in the supermarkets are not full. ‘Hunger’ is a very extreme term – that is not the situation in Gaza. There is food there. Not like before the war, of course, but people there are not in a state of absolute hunger. That is not the situation.”

Senior figures in the UN, and not only the UN, are talking about hunger.

“Maybe they are referring to the northern Strip, where the situation is in fact tougher, because the supplies don’t reach there, and rightly so. Whoever is there needs to go down to the southern part of the Strip. They will not have a shortage of food and water there.”

Who is responsible, in your opinion, for the basic sustenance of the residents of Gaza?

“Until not long ago it was the Hamas terrorist organization. We saw how much they cared about their citizens. The only thing that interested them was to destroy Israel. From the moment Hamas is not present, like in the northern Strip, every person is responsible for himself, and those who will go south will meet up with the international bodies there.”

But who is responsible?

“According to the information I have received, in the southern part of the Strip, Hamas is still dealing with certain matters relating to civilian needs. When we finish annihilating the organization, we will have to hand over the baton of civilian administration to a particular body, whose identity we don’t yet know.”

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-GAZA

* * *

Hello to attorney Oded Feller, head of the legal department at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. The UN is reporting severe hunger in the Gaza Strip. Where are the civil organizations in this story?

“ACRI was among those who approached President Biden, together with other organizations, to address issues relating to human rights [in Gaza]. We realized that here in Israel no one is paying attention to these things. We think that the American involvement in this war is critical. The subject is indeed on the American agenda.”

What about petitioning the High Court of Justice?

“That doesn’t stand a chance; there is no one to talk to. We appealed to them several times on the most basic issues involving human rights, and they threw us out, tarred and feathered. They don’t agree to intervene in anything. This isn’t the first war in which there has been no point in approaching the High Court, for the simple reason that it does not intervene. It’s not willing to discuss the matter. Worse: Not only do you not achieve any positive result, you get a judgment that legitimizes things.”

* * *

Hello to MK Zeev Elkin from the National Unity Party, a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Unlike your coalition colleagues, you think that Israel should assume responsibility for civilian life in the Gaza Strip. Please explain.

“Israel is trying to reduce as much as possible its engagement with civilian issues in Gaza, for fear that in the end it will end up being responsible for them. But with all due respect to fear, that is a shortsighted approach. We must give consideration to all of the most basic issues and think how we prevent humanitarian disasters. We are obliged to be in that picture. It’s impossible to be a player who wants to change the diplomatic-political reality in the Strip, and on the other hand behaves like someone who threw the keys into the sea and has no connection. That doesn’t work. It makes no sense to operate in Gaza and on the other hand not to address the civilian issue, and let Hamas manage it. That is a major mistake. I’ve been saying that since the second day of the war.”

It’s impossible to be a player who wants to change the diplomatic-political reality in the Strip, and on the other hand behaves like someone who has no connection. It makes no sense to operate in Gaza and on the other hand not to address the civilian issue, and let Hamas manage it. That is a major mistake.

    Zeev Elkin

Is there hunger in Gaza?

“There isn’t just one Gaza today. There are many ‘Gazas.’ There is a dramatic difference between the north and the south. There are 200,000 Gazans in the north, and hardly any aid has reached there, and the situation there is a lot tougher. In the south, aid has entered in very large quantities. The problem is who gets the aid and where it goes. Are there people there who aren’t succeeding in obtaining means of sustenance? I believe there are. Especially in the north. Is that the general situation in all of Gaza? No. In any event, the major obstacle is the Rafah crossing. Israel is not limiting the amount of aid.”

The question is whether Israel is responsible now for the condition of the civilians in Gaza.

“The State of Israel is trying to behave as though it’s not. I think that is a serious mistake. Not only in terms of international law, and not only in terms of morality and values, but also in terms of achieving the war’s aims. In the end, the goal is diplomatic-political in nature: for Hamas not to rule in Gaza any longer. People’s basic existence is a critical issue when it comes to achieving that goal. Take, for example, a fisherman in Gaza. Until October 7, he was dependent on Hamas for providing 20 percent of his needs. Now he’s sheltering, and in most of the places of shelter, especially those belonging to UNRWA, the managers are Hamas people. The manager of the shelter decides how much food and water the man will receive, so his dependence on Hamas has risen to 100 percent. From this point of view, Hamas’ control of the population has become stronger since the war started.”

And Israel is not in the game.

“We are not dealing at all with the aspects of civilian life there. We are agreeing to allow aid in under international pressure and we are not involved in the question of who is distributing it, whom it is being distributed to and how it is being distributed. In this way we are strengthening Hamas’ control over the population. I have been arguing for a long time that this approach must be changed radically. We need to create an effective mechanism to manage civilian life already at this stage, not in the distant future, and [to ensure that] this mechanism will not rest on Hamas personnel.”

Do you feel compassion for the noncombatants in Gaza?

“What you’re asking is not easy [to answer]. When I think of that fisherman – maybe his son was one of the Nukhba terrorists who infiltrated our communities? It’s a complex issue. A large part of the [Gazan] population cooperated with Hamas and also rejoiced and celebrated after the massacre. But in the end, in the territories under our control, what happens there is our responsibility. It doesn’t matter how much anger and alienation I feel with respect to the population, in the end we will remain with them, whether we want to or not. It’s impossible to evade the issue of what happens with them. It has to disturb you, also in terms of the responsibility involved. It’s on us.”

Haaretz approached war cabinet ministers Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot with a request to address the issue of hunger in Gaza. Neither of them responded.

 

Civilian Casualties in Gaza are No Accident

Mitchell Zimmerman

An old legal adage states: “Men are presumed to intend the natural consequences of their acts.”

The natural, indeed inescapable, consequence of Israel’s cutting off life-sustaining supplies of food and water to over 2 million people in Gaza is famine and mass death by starvation and dehydration. As 90 percent of the people of Gaza have become refugees, 93 percent of the population is facing crisis levels of hunger.

Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and dysentery are also the natural consequence as sanitation systems collapse and there’s only contaminated water to drink. Deaths from disease and hunger are predicted to be several times that from fighting and bombing.

Who are most likely to die first? Children, the elderly, and pregnant women. Who are least likely to be affected? Hamas’s soldiers, who stockpiled food and water before the war.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombing has killed over 22,000 Palestinians, 40 percent of them children. The pace of killing has been “exceptionally high,” reports the New York Times. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” says a former Pentagon senior intelligence analyst.

Israelis assert casualties are high because Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.” But Hamas fighters are intermixed with civilians because they live crammed together in densely populated Gaza.

Even on its own terms, the excuse fails. If a killer tries to escape capture by forcing an innocent family to stand between himself and the police, the cops can’t mow them all down to get the killer. If Hamas terrorists are surrounded by the people of Gaza, that doesn’t justify eliminating the entire population.

“Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising,” the Times report continued.

But it’s not a surprise if Israel in fact intends the mass deaths it has inflicted. Calls for “erasing” the people of Gaza and claims that “there are no innocents in Gaza” have become widespread among Israeli officials.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has likened the war in Gaza to a biblical call to “totally destroy” the Amalekites, a rival nation to the ancient Israelites. “Do not spare them,” the prophet Samuel tells King Saul: God commands you to “put to death men and women, children and infants.” The idea of treating Palestinians this way is now widespread among Israeli leaders.

Why deliberately target civilians? Many Israelis consider all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to be the God-given “Land of Israel.” Butchering and starving Palestinian noncombatants forces the survivors to flee this land.

“There will be no electricity and no water,” decreed Israeli Major General Ghassan Alain at the outset of the war. “There will only be destruction.” General Giora Eiland added: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Eiland said Palestinians should be told, “They have two choices: to stay and to starve, or to leave.”

Last September at the United Nations, Netanyahu himself displayed a map showing “The New Middle East.” The map had no West Bank and no Gaza — only Israel incorporating both.

Members of Israel’s cabinet openly call for removing 90 percent of Palestinians from Gaza and resettling the land with Israelis. And Netanyahu recently told a meeting of his party that he is “looking for countries that are willing to absorb Gazans … we are working on it.”

Israel’s campaign in Gaza fits the legal definition of genocide: Israel is killing or inflicting conditions intended to bring about the destruction of Gazans as a group.

But whatever you call it, genocide or ethnic cleansing, deliberate mass murder is part of the project. The Biden administration should reconsider its support for Israel.

 

Why Won’t the Media Suggest a Gaza Cease-Fire to Avoid Mid-East War?

Blaise Malley

In the breadth of stories that covered the Biden administration's desire and efforts to avoid a wider escalation of the Israel-Hamas conflict, mainstream media rarely mentioned the clearest non-military pathway to easing regional tensions.

In the weeks leading up to President Joe Biden’s announcement that U.S. forces and a group of allies launched a series of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, major media outlets were acutely aware of the risk that Israel’s war on Gaza could grow into a wider regional conflict.

Yet, in the breadth of stories that covered the Biden administration's desire and efforts to avoid such an escalation, mainstream media rarely mentioned the clearest non-military pathway to easing regional tensions: helping to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

The Houthi leadership in Yemen has said their attacks will not cease until Israel’s “crimes in Gaza stop and food, medicines, and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population” according to Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti in December. Who can tell if that's true, but evidence suggests that the attacks in the Red Sea and in Iraq and Syria all but stopped during an earlier brokered “pause” in Gaza in November.

But this is never discussed. In the first weeks of January, major media outlets maintained that the Biden administration was grappling with how best to manage the conflict and ensure that it did not extend beyond Gaza. Between October 7 and January 14, The New York Times,The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal ran over 60 articles that focused on some aspect of the threat of escalation in the Middle East. At least 14 of them focused on the Biden administration’s decision-making process.

“Attacks Heighten Fears of a Wider War for the Middle East and U.S.,” reported The New York Times.

“Tensions in the Middle East are rising beyond Israel. Here’s where,” said The Washington Post.

“U.S. Steps Up Diplomatic Push to Avert Broader Middle East War,” added The Wall Street Journal.

Even following the January 13 strikes in Yemen, media reports contended that the Biden administration was committed to avoiding escalation. Mr. Biden and his top aides have been loath to take steps that could draw the United States into a wider war in the region, according to the New York Times.

But of those 14 articles, only five mention the demands of U.S. adversaries in the region, namely that Israel allow food and medicine into Gaza and end its bombing campaign. In most cases, the articles only briefly note that the Houthi attacks were being carried out “in solidarity” with suffering Gazans. But nowhere in the series of stories about the potential crisis was the pursuit of a cease-fire mentioned as an option.

Instead, the articles mostly framed the options as maintaining the status quo or pursuing a military solution.

“Senior officials said they must decide whether to strike Houthi missile and drone sites in Yemen, or wait to see whether the Houthis back off after the sinking of three of their fast boats and the deaths of their fighters,” reported The New York Times on December 31, after a U.S. helicopter sunk three Houthi boats in the Red Sea.

“Mr. Biden and his top aides have sought since the Oct. 7 attacks to contain the conflict between Israel and Hamas to the Gaza Strip,” reads The New York Times’ January 3 story on the Biden team’s efforts. “The Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carriers and doubled the number of American warplanes to the Middle East to deter Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq from widening the war.”

If there were critics of the Biden administration, they always preferred a more aggressive path. “Critics of the administration’s approach have called the retaliatory strikes insufficient,” said The Washington Post on November 8, following U.S. strikes in Syria.

Meanwhile, the reports ignored experts who have been pointing to cease-fire as an option for weeks.

In making an argument for Washington to take the lead in pushing for an end to violence in November 2023, three fellows at the Century Foundation offered that a cease-fire would “reduce tensions regionally, lessening the risk—currently increasing daily—of a broader war that draws in the United States.”

A few hours before the strikes in Yemen on January 11, RAND Corporation researcher Alex Stark made the case that pushing for an end to the war in Gaza was the most effective way for Washington to deescalate tensions with the Houthis.

“Like it or not, the Houthis have linked their aggression to Israel’s operations in Gaza and have won domestic and regional support for doing so,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs. “Finding a sustainable, long-term approach to both conflicts will be critical to deescalating tensions across the region and getting the Houthis to call off their attacks on commercial vessels.”

Following the U.S. operations, The New York Times did note that countries like Qatar and Oman “had warned the United States that bombing the Houthis could be a mistake, fearing that it would do little to deter them and would deepen regional tensions. They have argued that focusing on reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’ stated impetus for the attacks.”

Experts have said that the inability to link Houthi aggression with the ongoing war is a strategic miscalculation. “That refusal to see the linkage between Gaza and the Red Sea means we also fail to see the overriding security-strategic imperative here: to avoid a further escalation regionally, and to move towards possibilities that are deescalatory,” wrote the Carnegie Endowment’s H. A. Hellyer on X.

“[I]t's about avoiding a situation that gets out of control quickly and easily, and which could have the potential to drag much of the region into a destructive war. We have a number of clear good pathways in that regard, but we've rejected them.”

To be sure, it is unclear how the Houthis or militias in Iraq and Syria would respond to a pause in hostilities in Gaza. But the short-term humanitarian pauses in Gaza in mid-November led to the only period of relative calm in the region since the outbreak of the war, particularly in terms of attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria.

According to a tracker from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as of January 16, there have been 152 anti-U.S. strikes since October 18 in those two countries. None of them took place between November 23, when the short-term cease-fire was announced, and December 3, two days after the truce expired.

There was also a notable decrease in Houthi attacks in the Red Sea during that timeframe, according to a timeline compiled by the maritime risk intelligence firm Ambrey Analytics.

“During the cease-fire that was in place in November their attacks dramatically decreased, providing a degree of empirical evidence that the cease-fire had a strong likelihood of being an effective option to stop the attacks,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. “The media never had to endorse this option. And they could also rightfully be scrutinizing and be skeptical about it. But by not mentioning it at all, they deprived the American public awareness that the option even existed, leaving Americans with the false impression that the only option was to do nothing or to escalate by bombing Yemen.”

Meanwhile, momentum in the push for a cease-fire in official Washington also appears to have hit a snag after Congress’ return from the holiday recess. In the weeks following the start of Israel’s offensive, perhaps influenced by polls that showed strong public support, the number of members who explicitly called for a cease-fire increased steadily, reaching a total of 62 by December 21.

Since then, however, only one new member has joined the calls.

Several lawmakers from both parties did criticize the White House for not consulting Congress before bombing Yemen.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) took it a step further, drawing the direct link between Washington's unwillingness to call for a cease-fire and the potential for escalation in the region. “This is why I called for a cease-fire early. This is why I voted against war in Iraq,” Lee wrote on X. “Violence only begets more violence. We need a cease-fire now to prevent deadly, costly, catastrophic escalation of violence in the region.”

 

100 Days of War and Resistance: Legendary Palestinian Resistance Will Be Netanyahu’s Downfall

Ramzy Baroud

Law number one in the ‘law of holes’, is that “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Law number two, “if you are not digging, you are still in a hole”.

These adages sum up Israel’s ongoing political, military and strategic crises, 100 days following the start of the war on Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced by the unprecedented challenge of having to react to a major attack launched by Palestinian Resistance in southern Israel on October 7.

This single event is already proving to be a game changer in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Its impact will be felt for many years, if not generations, to come.

Netanyahu was already in a hole long before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation took place, and he has no one else to blame but himself.

To stay in power and to avoid three major corruption cases and subsequent trials, Netanyahu labored to fortify his position at the helm of Israeli politics with the help of the most extreme government ever assembled, in a state whose very existence is an outcome of an extremist ideology.

Even the anti-Netanyahu mass protests throughout Israel, which also took place for months prior to the war, did not alert the Israeli leader that the hole was getting deeper, and that the Palestinians, living under a perpetual military occupation and siege, could possibly find in Israel’s political and military crises an opportunity.

He simply kept on digging.

October 7 should not be perceived as a surprise attack, since the entire Gaza Division, the massive Israeli military build-up in the Gaza envelope, exists for the very purpose of ensuring that Gaza’s subjugation and siege were perfected according to state-of-the-art military technology.

According to the Global Firepower 2024 military strength ranking, Israel is number 17 in the world, mainly because of its military technology.

This advanced military capability meant that no surprise attacks should have been possible, because it is not humans, but sophisticated machines that scan, intercept and report on every perceived suspicious movement. In the Israeli case, the failure was profound and multi-layered.

Subsequently, following October 7, Netanyahu found himself in a much deeper hole. Instead of finding his way out by, for example, taking responsibility, unifying his people or, God forbid, acknowledging that war is never an answer in the face of a resisting, oppressed population, he kept on digging.

The Israeli leader, flanked by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Amichai Eliyahu worsened matters by using the war on Gaza as an opportunity to implement long-dormant plans of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, not only from the Gaza Strip but also the West Bank.

Were it not for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and strong rejection by Egypt and Jordan, the second Nakba would have been a reality.

All mainstream Israeli politicians, despite their ideological and political differences, unanimously outdid one another in their racist, violent, even genocidal language. While Defense Minister Yoav Gallant immediately announced that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed” to the Gaza population, Avi Dichter called for “another Nakba”.

Meanwhile, Eliyahu suggested the ‘option’ of “dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza”.

Instead of saving Israel from itself by reminding the Tel Aviv government that the genocidal war on Gaza would also bode badly for Tel Aviv, the US Biden Administration served the role of cheerleader and outright partner.

Aside from an additional $14 billion of emergency aid package, Washington has reportedly sent, as of December 25, 230 airplanes and 20 ships loaded with armaments and munitions.

According to a New York Times report on January 12, the CIA is also actively involved in collecting information from Gaza and providing that intelligence to Israel.

US support for Israel, in all its forms, has been maintained, despite the shocking reports issued by every respected international charity that operates in Palestine and the Middle East.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said that 1.9 million out of Gaza’s entire population of 2.3 million people have been displaced. Israeli rights group B’tselem said that 2.2 million are starving. Save the Children reported that over 100 Palestinian children are killed daily. Gaza’s government media office has said that about 70 percent of the Strip has been destroyed.

Even the Wall Street Journal concluded that the destruction of Gaza is greater than that of Dresden in WWII.

Yet, none of this concerned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the region five times in less than 100 days, with the same message of support for Israel.

What is so astonishing, however, is that Gaza’s threshold of resilience continues to prove unequaled. This is how determined the Palestinians are to finally achieve their freedom.

Indeed, fathers, or mothers, in a scene repeated numerous times, would be carrying the bodies of their dead children while howling in pain, yet insisting that they would never leave their homeland.

This dignified pain has moved the world. Even though Washington has ensured no meaningful action will be taken at the UN Security Council, countries like South Africa sought the help of the world’s highest court to demand an immediate end to the war and to recognize Israel’s atrocities as an act of genocide.

South Africa’s efforts at the International Court of Justice soon galvanized other countries, mostly in the Global South.

But Netanyahu kept on digging, unmoved, or possibly unaware that the world around him is finally beginning to truly understand the generational suffering of the Palestinians.

The Israeli leader still speaks of ‘voluntary migration’, of wanting to manage Gaza and Palestine, and of reshaping the Middle East in ways consistent with his own illusions of grandeur and power.

100 days of war on Gaza has taught us that superior firepower no longer influences outcomes when a nation takes the collective decision of resisting.

It has also taught us that the US is no longer able to reorder the Middle East to fit Israeli priorities, and that relatively small countries in the Global South, when united, can alter the course of history.

Netanyahu may continue digging, but history has already been written: the spirit of the Palestinian people has won over Israel’s death machine.

 

Joe Sacco, author of ‘Footnotes in Gaza,’ on journalism and Palestine

ChrisHedges

Sacco, whose graphic novels marry illustration with cutting-edge journalism, speaks on his career reporting on Palestine and what it means to bear witness as a journalist committed to justice.

Few journalists can be credited with as innovative and impactful a career as Joe Sacco, whose graphic novel-style reportage from his coverage of Palestine and Bosnia broke down barriers of genre to expand our concepts of what journalism could look like. Sacco appears on The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his work, the intricacies of ethics in journalism, and Israel’s current genocide in Gaza.

Joe Sacco is a cartoonist and journalist and the author of several books, including Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza.

Chris Hedges:  The cartoonist Joe Sacco invented nonfiction and graphic journalism, marrying rigorous and detailed reporting with illustrations that leap off the page and give his stories a texture, depth, and visceral power that is often hard to match for writers. He pioneered this work with nine issues on the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, from 1993-1995. The nine comics, later published as the book, Palestine, educated a generation about the tragedy that has gripped the Palestinians since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Palestine, which gained a cult following, won an American Book Award and is a staple on college syllabuses across the country. Edward Said, in the introduction to Palestine, wrote, “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.” Joe’s book sadly remains even more relevant today than when it was written.

But Joe was not done. He invested over four years in his masterpiece, one of the finest books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Footnotes in Gaza. He explored the little-known massacres of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers when they occupied Rafah and Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip in November 1956. He doggedly tracked down victims and eyewitnesses to combine investigative journalism and oral history from the past to explain the present. Context is key and context in the reporting of the genocide in Gaza is largely absent in US media. This makes Joe’s work not only timely but vital for our understanding of this conflict. Joining me to discuss his two seminal works, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, is Joe Sacco.

I’ve read the books before, of course. I reread them. They are stunningly powerful. I’ve worked with you and I know what high standards you have as a journalist and a reporter. Palestine was where you formulated this marriage between journalism and illustration. At first, no one quite understood what you were doing or knew how to handle it. It’s incredibly effective. But talk about how that evolved, how that came to be.

Joe Sacco:  Okay, Chris. Very good to see you. Well, I wasn’t sure what I was doing, to be quite honest. I was a cartoonist doing comic books. I’d had a degree in journalism, couldn’t get a journalism job, and I wanted to do a series of comics of like a travel log in the Palestinian Territories. I was quite interested in what was going on there.

And it was coming out of the autobiographical tradition of underground comics, or alternative comics. So I went there thinking it would be me, my experiences, talking to some people, and trying to get some Palestinian perspectives on things. But when I was there, the journalistic training I had kicked in and I found myself behaving like a journalist and thinking in those terms, the way I had studied, and it came together organically. So in other words, I didn’t have some big idea about what I was going to do before I went there. The things came together very naturally. It’s in my later work that I was a little more journalistically inclined. But that first work was where I was experimenting with the melding of comics and journalism.

Chris Hedges:  Talk about the illustration. I know because I’ve worked with you, it is highly laborious. It takes you tremendous amounts of time. We did a book together, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and I know from your great work, Footnotes in Gaza the research you do. It’s not that you are meticulous about the reporting but you’re meticulous about the images.

Joe Sacco:  Yeah, that’s super important. I want the reader to viscerally feel like they’re in the places I’ve been. And in those times when I’m taking them back into historical episodes, I want them to feel that too. So I do a lot of visual research. I look at photographs, I look at books, whatever I can get to make what I’m doing feel more real.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about Palestine. The book itself was a series of originally nine comics put together in the book Palestine, but having just reread it it doesn’t feel like nine comics. It holds together and coalesces as a book. Partly because you look at various aspects of the occupation. Can you talk about what you did in those nine comics, which have now been published as a book?

Joe Sacco:  Yeah. Originally, I was going to do six comics and it became nine. A lot of it was episodic. I let it go where it went in my actual travels. In other words, there were a lot of random events and it has that quality to it. But while I was there, it became clear to me that if I wanted to assemble a picture of what the occupation looked like, I would have to piece together some things.

I listened to what people were telling me and I realized what were the important components, and then I began following them up. For example, life in prison or what it was like to be in prison. So many people there had been in prison that I talked to. I realized that was an essential part of it. Torture, because that was going on, the demolition of houses, and the random humiliations. So I put those things together in one section of the book and then in another, a little more self-contained when I went to Gaza and I talked about my experiences there. That was another part of the book where I wanted to see how people got along in that incredibly impoverished strip of land.

Chris Hedges:  Well, it has a sense of discovery. One of the things I like about all of your work is that whatever journey you’re on, you allow us to see exactly what is happening around you, even when it doesn’t reflect particularly well on the Palestinians or yourself. I love your critique of yourself as a journalist. I did that job for many years and there is a darkness, maybe callousness; It’s not that we don’t feel, we do feel. But in that drive to get a story, in Footnotes in Gaza, you’ll talk about those interviews where – And we’re going to talk about that in a minute, the 1956 massacres in Rafah and Khan Yunis by the Israelis – But when you can’t get stories about atrocities or carnage there’s frustration or when somebody starts repeating something you’ve already heard before, that unvarnished view, including all the people who want to get shekels from you for taking you on a tour of a mosque or all the gaggles of kids who surround you – But we know that you’re completely honest because you don’t take anything out – It reminds me very much of… Orwell pushes this. But I want to talk about the importance of that. It gives your work tremendous credibility.

Joe Sacco:  Thank you. Well, it’s important to show those shady parts of journalism or the seams of journalism. Because when I was studying journalism, I didn’t understand how things worked in a way. I was studying it, but to me, journalists seemed like demigods that were floating on the wall and looking down with their all-knowing eye. Then when you’re there and you realize how you are assimilating material and you see how other journalists are assimilating it, you realize it’s not quite like that.

There are a lot of misunderstandings, there’s a lot of guesswork, there’s a lot of realizing you don’t know things and a lot of wondering if you’re being told the truth. All those things are important. They’re important because I want people to understand the process of journalism, the process of getting a story, and also to show that journalism is created by imperfect beings. It’s not a science, exactly. We all go in with our preconceived ideas and our prejudices, and you have to face those things. That’s an important element of the work I do and I’m lucky in that I’m not working through the mainstream, so I can put those things in it.

Chris Hedges:  And also, as you said, the way you will portray the senior side of Palestine and why that’s important to your work.

Joe Sacco:  Oh, yeah. As you suggested, you are often hearing things and you realize this won’t sound so great for the greater cause, but then you have to decide if you’re an activist who’s going to winnow those things out for some greater good or if you’re a journalist who’s trying to, as much as possible, tell the story honestly. And I always went on that side of things because even when Palestinians read the work, they get it. Why should they be ashamed of all the passion and fury and anger that they might feel? It’s completely understandable in the context, which I’m also trying to present.

Chris Hedges:  You’ve spent many, many years… If you count Palestine, and then we did a piece for Harper’s Magazine, A Diary in Khan Yunis, then you went back and did Footnotes in Gaza. What is it about Palestine and did Palestine grip you from that first experience? But you’ve invested tremendous time in Palestine.

Joe Sacco:  Well, you’re a fellow journalist. Particular stories hit you in the gut and mattered to you for whatever reasons and the whole Palestine thing mattered to me on a personal level because I grew up thinking Palestinians were terrorists. And that began to shift around the time of the invasion of Lebanon in ’81, and then the massacres in Sabra and Shatila when I realized that, something else was going on. Later on, after I got my degree in journalism, I began to look at how journalism had shaped that viewpoint of Palestinians and I realized that’s what it was, I was appalled by what I didn’t know and what I wasn’t told by journalists.

There were a lot of reporting effects like an attack on a bus, a hostage situation with some airplanes, or whatever it was, all of those were facts but there was never any context. And I realized the only time I’d ever read or heard the word Palestinian was with the word terrorism. So in a way, I needed to do penance. I almost needed to atone in my own mind for those misunderstandings and that ignorance. And it became a special passion because I began to see how deeply wronged the Palestinian people were historically and how badly misrepresented they were. And it’s those two things, people deeply wronged and so badly misrepresented, that pulled me in that direction.

Chris Hedges:  What is it from your first trip to Palestine… It’s interesting, I was there, we didn’t meet then, but I was covering, I was living in Cairo, covering Gaza for the New York Times. What is it that particularly struck you? Were there certain incidents? What is it that first hit you or gripped you?

Joe Sacco:  When I was there, it was the day-to-day humiliations and degradation. There were always things that were more spectacular. You could always find stories of people who were shot, people who were wounded, and house demolitions. But it was these constant stories of humiliation, men being told to get out of cars, raise their arms, and keep their arms up in the air. They seemed like little things, but they were daily, and they added up. And I realized how dehumanized the Palestinians were from the Israeli perspective. The Israelis were constantly dehumanizing. Over time, that’s the thing that really struck me. It’s not so much the spectacular things.

Chris Hedges:  Although in all of the work, there’s that constant backdrop of violence. In Footnotes in Gaza, you will alternate between what happened in ’56 and what’s happening at the moment. It’s on the eve of the war in Iraq. But there’s that constant drumbeat. Either you hear shots or… And that is pervasive throughout all of your work.

Joe Sacco:  Well, yeah, unfortunately, because it’s been pervasive in Palestinian history. So when I was there – As you were during the first Intifada and then we were both there during the second Intifada – It’s not like the violence was turned on and then turned off and it’s been off since then and now we can all reflect on it in this way. It was constant and it is constant. Obviously, with what’s going on today, you see it’s ramped up to a great level. So violence has always been the backdrop for Palestinians, always, since before 1948. But in particular, since 1948, it hasn’t ceased.

Chris Hedges:  There’s a wonderful moment at the end of Footnotes in Gaza where you meet two Israeli women and they’re saying well, you should see it from our perspective. Or is that in Palestine?

Joe Sacco:  That’s in Palestine.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah. And you go to Tel Aviv. But you have this wonder thing of, in fact, I did see it from the Israeli perspective. I’ll let you explain.

Joe Sacco:  Yeah, I felt my whole life I’d seen things from the Israeli perspective. That was pretty much the only perspective I had and that’s what was filtered down through all the news broadcasts I ever saw and all the newspaper accounts I ever read. So I got the Israeli perspective. And especially at that time in the early 1990s, there wasn’t social media, there weren’t a lot of people reporting on the ground for independent media. So I hadn’t even heard many Palestinian voices. The only ones I ever heard were in human rights reports, let’s say Al-Haq, the well-known Palestinian human rights organization.

There would be these deposition accounts of being stopped or being shot or whatever it was and they all read legalistic. They were very legalistic. And originally, I thought I would try to draw those things. I’d see if I could get permission to draw those and then I realized that was so dry. Palestinians weren’t just victims, with a capital V, there were many other facets of their lives and that’s what I wanted to find out. I wanted to go and talk to Palestinians. You didn’t get that from the media at that time.

Chris Hedges:  Well, we also reflect that I watched the settlers and I watched the IDF. So in some sense, I do know the Israeli perspective; I know it as it’s seen through the Palestinian experience.

Joe Sacco:  That’s right. The whole two months I spent the major trip I took to Gaza, Footnotes in Gaza, I never once saw an Israeli soldier. I only saw Israeli vehicles, armored troop carriers or bulldozers, especially, military vehicles. I never saw someone’s eyes. So that was also the Palestinian perspective.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about Footnotes in Gaza. Its genesis took place in a magazine piece that we did together for Harper’s Magazine. We were working in Khan Yunis, where we focused the piece and we heard about these massacres in 1956 when the Israeli army, under the Suez crisis – They were in Gaza for 100 days if I remember – Carried out wholesale killings in Khan Yunis, and then as you found out later, Rafah. And the magazine cut it out because it was history, it wasn’t deemed important. You and I felt very differently and this sets you on this project. But explain what happened and why you decided to devote so many years to this book.

Joe Sacco:  Well, frankly, it was anger that part was cut from your piece. These seemed like very valuable memories that we were taking down and were very important in understanding the context of what was going on. You remember we met al-Rantisi, the very high Hamas official, later assassinated by the Israelis, and his uncle was killed in 1956 by Israeli forces.

Chris Hedges:  He was nine years old at the time.

Joe Sacco:  Yeah, al-Rantisi was nine years old at the time. And what he told us was at that moment, through all the grief, he remembers his dad wailing and everyone incredibly upset. He said that planted hatred in their hearts. And unfortunately, there have been many instances like that, that have stoked that hatred. So it seemed very important to begin to understand those historical episodes because they’re like the building blocks for what we have today. The building blocks of the context for what’s going on now. And what’s going on now becomes the context for what will happen in the future. So these things are important. It’s important to understand them and it’s important to understand that things don’t come out of the blue. This question, why do they hate us or does the incitement come from textbooks, or something like that, come on. It comes from these episodes in history where people are shot and murdered. That’s where it comes from. And now bombed.

Chris Hedges:  It’s fascinating, throughout the book you’re constantly being questioned as to why you’re focusing on 1956 with some anger and people hauling you off to say, well, you have to look at what they did to my house. This is more important. You were right. But even the Palestinians themselves, often, some of them, not all of them, fail to see the importance of what you were documenting. We should be clear that this has not been documented. There’s very little reference to this. And to go back, when you look at the UN reports and they do that or you quote the report in the book where the Palestinians say this, the Israelis say this and it nullifies the event itself.

Joe Sacco:  Right. And the journalistic comparative is to say, well, this is not a tennis match between two competing sides. What happened? And if you’re not going to get it from documents and people who are alive or remember it, you should make an effort to go and talk to those people. It’s a very simple journalistic enterprise in a way. Okay, I’ll talk to people and try to find out what happened. Yeah, so that’s what launched me in that direction.

Chris Hedges:  And explain what happened, what you found out.

Joe Sacco:  Okay. There had been, what you can say a border of war or a border of conflict with Palestinians, mostly refugees then, in the Gaza Strip. A lot of them were going back into Israel to harvest their crops, to go back to their homes that they had been displaced from or expelled from. And the Israelis were obviously against this. They were killing a lot of these people. And border skirmishes started, and guerilla groups were set up by the Egyptian army, which –

Chris Hedges:  I should be clear, occupied Gaza.

Joe Sacco  – Yeah. Which occupied Gaza at that time. And they attempted to control and were running Palestinian guerillas into Israel. So there were border clashes going on that could get quite heated at times with many casualties.

And in the ’56 war, when for various reasons, Great Britain, France, and Israel wanted to lay low – And Nasser, who was president of Egypt – Another one of the things the Israelis thought they could do like they’re doing now, is end this problem in Gaza once and for all, end the problem of the guerillas once and for all. So when they came into Gaza and they conquered it quite quickly, they went into the town of Khan Yunis and they didn’t do a screening operation of any sort. They started shooting men. They shot them in their homes, they lined them up against walls and in the street, and they shot them. According to the UN, about 275 unarmed men were killed.

Later in Rafah, a few days later, they did do a screening operation where they had all the men gather in a school so they could screen them to see if they were either in the Egyptian military or guerillas. In the process of that screening operation, especially when the men were running toward the school and going through the gate, they shot them or they clubbed them so badly that they died. And more than 100, like 111-112 individuals, died in that. And both those incidents had a great mark on the people. And as you say, though, some of the younger generation didn’t quite understand my focus on it. But as someone told me, events are continuous. They’re going on presently all the time. So it was hard for them to focus on those things. It was easier for me because that was what I was determined to do.

Chris Hedges:  There’s a lot of violence in the book. It’s a painful book to read. Many of the people you interview become emotionally very distraught. What was it like to draw it and write it?

Joe Sacco:  Well, you might feel some of this, Chris. It’s like when you’re in the field talking to people, it’s that coldness that I hint at in the book that you can get. You behave very professionally, almost like a doctor, almost like a surgeon trying to get the story in. You go in, you get the story, you come out. And you have to keep your feelings at bay. You have to collect the information and be as accurate as possible. So that’s one part of the job. The other part is when I’m drawing, even years later, that’s when it hits me because then I can no longer detach myself in the same way. I have to inhabit each person as I’m drawing them. You have to try to feel what they’re going through in order to draw them. So that’s when it becomes more difficult. That’s when you’re getting the full impact of what you did. The drawing table is a harder place to be than the streets of Gaza, on some level.

Chris Hedges:  You said you didn’t want to go through that experience again if I’m quoting you correctly.

Joe Sacco:  Yeah. I don’t know how you feel, but I always feel like journalism has a half-life. There’s only so much of it you can do before you begin to run out of steam. So you have to know when to maybe change focus a bit.

Chris Hedges:  Well, there’s a huge emotional cost.

Joe Sacco:  Right. And that’s what makes it so hard to watch what’s going on now. You feel everything that’s going on now, it’s pretty overpowering. You could imagine what it’s like for them.

Chris Hedges:  Yes. In some ways, it’s the culmination of 75 years of indiscriminate violence, and it seems that each time that wave of Israeli violence hits Gaza, it hits it at a level or has an intensity that it didn’t have before. And what we’re seeing now has an intensity we’ve never seen before, even in 1948. What are your thoughts on what’s happening and how it should be seen from a historical perspective?

Joe Sacco:  Well, as you say, it’s a culmination. It might not even be the low point. That’s what scares me even more. It’s the natural logic of what’s been coming since 1948. It is the logic of 1948. Back in those days, it was the same idea. We need to expel the people. Herzl said that in the 1800s we needed to spirit the pennyless population across the border. It’s nothing new in a way but it was always inching toward this. And it seems to have reached another, what you can say is a catastrophe, and what looks like a genocide to me. So I don’t know where it goes from here. It seems like the Israelis do want to expel the Palestinians. They want to get rid of this population in any way possible. And by making Gaza uninhabitable, there’ll be a lot of pressure from the Palestinians living there themselves to get out, because a lot of them have probably reached a breaking point.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah, it’s clear Israel has offered them a choice. They can die from bullets, bombs, exposure, or disease. 500,000 Palestinians, according to the UN, are literally at starvation level, or they can leave. That seems to be what they’re orchestrating. And it’s on a larger scale. They used the same tactic, which you reported on in 1948. It wasn’t any different.

Joe Sacco:  Right. Yeah, they’re taking it to a greater level. This is their big chance in a way. Perhaps it’ll get foiled, I don’t know. But we’ve seen it now at its most raw, at its most naked. No one who sees it now can deny it.

Chris Hedges:  I was reading that passage in your book, Footnotes in Gaza. You write about Palestinians being expelled to Gaza. And it’s exactly what’s happening today in southern Gaza. There’s no housing, there’s no infrastructure. And in the book, you’re writing about how they dig holes in the ground to sweep in, which is precisely what we’re seeing in Rafah and Khan Yunis at this moment.

Joe Sacco:  Right. It’s a complete reversion to what happened in ’48. People are intense. People are trying to shelter themselves. And in many ways, it is worse because there seems to be a starvation of the population. It’s not hunger, it’s starvation, and like you say, disease and continual military assault. So it’s at another point now, it’s at another level.

Chris Hedges:  And the other continuum, which you also note in particular in Footnotes in Gaza with the cynicism of Nasser and the Egyptians, is the indifference of the international community and even Arab countries who rhetorically will speak on behalf of the Palestinians, but do very little to help them. Can you talk about that continuum?

Joe Sacco:  Yeah. In some ways, the Palestinians are a way that other Arab populations are allowed to vent their frustrations at their dictatorships and their conditions. It’s the release ball for passions and anger. But I do think the average Arab person has a lot of feelings for the Palestinians, it’s the government. Governments make treaties and make agreements with other governments, they don’t make them with the people. So there’s always that disconnect. And yes, the Arab governments are treating this problem mostly, they’re treating it quite cynically.

Chris Hedges:  Have you been in touch with people you worked with? I haven’t been to Gaza for some time, since we did our magazine piece. But have you been trying to reach out to people? And if you had, what have you heard? And talk about that connection, if there is one.

Joe Sacco:  Sure. Well, there are a couple of people who I was in touch with for some time. One of them for not so long, I haven’t heard from him in about six or eight weeks. I’m quite worried. Another friend, I haven’t heard from him in about three weeks and I’m quite worried because a lot of his family members have died: An uncle and his entire family, a cousin and his entire family, and then two daughters of another cousin and their entire family. So it’s hit him quite hard. And I haven’t heard from him either. So I’m waiting.

Chris Hedges:  How do you see it playing out? Or do you have any idea where it’s headed? I don’t know that the Israeli government even knows where it’s headed.

Joe Sacco:  Yeah, it’s hard to say exactly. Netanyahu needs to demonstrate something. He needs to demonstrate something to the Israeli people that will help him claw his way back into their hearts. And it has to be something profound and that’s troubling. So I don’t expect any good things to come out of this. We’re in for perhaps some changes, maybe some surprises. These things, you lift the lid off them and you never know where they’re going to go. You never know how it’s going to play out. And then you have to think, well, what’s it going to look like in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years? And you don’t know. What you do know is that nothing has been resolved. The hatred will continue, and the fear will continue. And if we’ve come to this level, what’s the next step? What’s the next stage?

Chris Hedges:  Well, that’s why Footnotes in Gaza is so important.

Joe Sacco:  Well, thanks. It’s important to provide the context. You do wish these books would run out of steam and wouldn’t have the same meaning and would become obsolete.

Chris Hedges:  It’s absolutely vital and it’s tremendous work. That was the cartoonist, Joe Sacco, author of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team; Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

 

Netanyahu says Israel must Control from the River to the Sea, but it won’t cost him his Job as it does Palestinians

JuanCole

The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports on the press conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He vowed to continue the war on Gaza and vowed to attack Iran. “Who says we won’t attack Iran? We will attack it.”

At one point Netanyahu insisted that in any foreseen arrangement for the future, “Israel must control all the lands west of the Jordan.”

(It is worth noting that such a massive annexation of Palestinian territory would expand Israel from the river to the sea, and would permanently destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state.

When supporters of Palestinian rights use this phrase, Zionists allege that it is murderous toward Israelis. They are wrong — it is a demand for political rights for Palestinians. Marc Lamont Hill was actually fired from CNN for using this phrase in a pro-Palestinian speech at the United Nations. The odious Rep. Elise Stefanik got Claudine Gray fired as president of Harvard because she would not categorize the phrase, used in pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, as Antisemitic.

But when Netanyahu says it, we should in fact understand it to be murderous toward Palestinians, since no one in history has killed as many Palestinian civilians as Netanyahu.)

Netanyahu said, “Complete victory requires the return of our hostages to their homes, the disarming of Gaza, and security oversight over what enters Gaza.” He emphasized that “ending the war before achieving our goals will harm the security of Israel for generations.”

He said that his government had passed an enormous military budget that would help the army realize its war aims and achieve victory. He cautioned, “Victory will take more long months, but we are determined to accomplish it.”

He “completely rejected” the repeated assertions by present and former Israeli political officials in television interviews that victory is impossible. Faced with protests over his failure to bring back Israeli hostages, he insisted that it was military pressure that would free them. He said that ending the war would broadcast a message of weakness and it would then be only a matter of time until there was another bloodbath. He was referring to the sickening Hamas attack of October 7, the bulk of whose victims were innocent civilians.

Regarding reports that he had rejected the American suggestion of establishing a Palestinian state, the embattled prime minister, who is deeply unpopular, attempted to tie his fate to that of the nation, replying, “What the political parties call in Israel ‘the day after’ means for them ‘the day after Netanyahu.’ . . . Whoever speaks of the day after Netanyahu in reality is speaking of the establishment of a Palestinian state via the Palestine Authority. That isn’t the day that follows Netanyahu but is the ‘day after’ for the majority of Israeli citizens.”

He said of US influence in Israel that the Israeli prime minister must be able to say “no” even to the dearest of friends.

Barak Ravid reported this week at Axios that US President Joe Biden is deeply frustrated with Netanyahu’s intransigence and has not spoken with him in nearly a month. Ravid says during that last conversation, Biden was pressing Netanyahu to restore the funding he had cut from the Palestine Authority (the West Bank rival of Hamas). Netanyahu rejected all of Biden’s suggestions for a workaround. Biden allegedly said, “This conversation is over.” And, it has been over ever since.

On Sunday, some 400,000 protesters demonstrated in Washington, DC, against the ongoing war, alleging that Biden is facilitating genocide. Democratic Party leaders such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have expressed anxiety about the impact of Biden losing the Arab and Muslim American votes, which have sometimes been swing votes in Michigan and some other key states.

Netanyahu is on trial for corruption and fears going to jail if he loses his current position. Opinion polling suggests that he and his coalition partners would be crushed at the polls if the government fell and new elections were held now. Some polls show that only 15% of Israelis want Netanyahu to remain at his post once the war on Gaza ends. Many Israelis blame him for the security failures attendant on the October 7 terrorist attack. He in turn has represented himself as the only one who can stand up to pressure for the establishment of a Palestinian state.