April 3, 2025
Adam Johnson
On March 18 Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and recommenced its full scale assault, siege, and bombing of Gaza. Since then, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and the humanitarian situation is as desperate as ever. Watching mainstream media, however, one would hardly notice.
Adam Johnson
On March 18 Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and recommenced its full scale assault, siege, and bombing of Gaza. Since then, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and the humanitarian situation is as desperate as ever. Watching mainstream media, however, one would hardly notice.
While US media outlets continue to report below the fold on the daily airstrikes, they are no longer treated as major stories meriting emphasis and urgency. This is especially true for the New York Times and TV broadcast news, which have all but forgotten there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis ongoing in Gaza–still funded and armed by the US government.
The paper of record, the New York Times, ran a front page story March 19, the day after Israel broke the ceasefire and killed hundreds in one day, but didn’t run a front page story on Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza in the 13 days since. (They ran a front page story on April 3 that centered Israel’s military “tactics” in Gaza but didn’t mention civilian death totals.) The Times did find room on March 27 for a front page image of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza which, of course, are a favorite media topic for the pro-genocide crowd as they see it as evidence their “war on Hamas” is both morally justified and, somehow, endorsed by Palestinians themselves.
Like the New York Times, the nightly news shows–CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight–covered the initial bombing and breaking of the ceasefire the day after (ABC News’s lede after Israel killed 400+ in under 24 hours: “What does this mean for the hostages?”), but have subsequently ignored Gaza entirely, with one notable exception. CBS Evening News did a 4-minute segment on March 26 on “allegations” Israel was using Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular, as human shields and even this was front loaded with bizarre denunciations of Hamas “using human shields”:
Most conspicuous of all was the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda-setting” Sunday news programs that are designed to tell elites in Washington what they should care about. Gaza wasn’t mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows–ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union–for the weeks of March 23 and March 30. Despite Israel breaking the ceasefire on Tuesday March 18 and killing more than 400 Palestinians–including over 200 women and children–in less than 24 hours, none of the Sunday morning news programs that have aired since have covered Gaza at all.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that at least 322 children had been killed and 609 injured since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18.
Whereas the media approach during the Biden years was to spin, obfuscate, blame Hamas, and help distance the White House from the images of carnage emanating from Gaza by propping up fake “ceasefire talks,” the media approach now that Trump is doubling down on Biden’s strategy of unfettered support for genocide appears to be to largely ignore it.
All indications are that Israeli officials were banking on US news outlets normalizing the ongoing genocide of Gaza, assuming–correctly, as it turns out–that the death and despair would become so routine it would take on a “dog bites man” element. Combined with the nonstop “flood the zone” strategy of the Trump White House as it attacks dozens of perceived enemies at once, the US-backed genocide in Gaza is now both cliche and low priority.
By way of comparison, the Sunday shows, nightly news shows, and the front page of the New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Yemen-Signal group chat controversy. Obviously, administration officials using unsecured channels to discuss war plans is a news story (though not nearly as important as the war crimes casually being discussed) but the fact that Israel recommenced its bombing, siege, and starvation strategy on an already decimated population is, objectively, a more urgent story with much higher human stakes.
Indeed, Palestinians reporting from Gaza say the situation is as dire as it’s ever been. Israel cut off all aid on March 2 and the bombings have been as relentless and brutal as any time period pre-ceasefire. Meanwhile, with Trump openly endorsing ethnic cleansing, “debates” around how best to facilitate this ethnic cleansing are presented as sober, practical foreign policy discussions–not the open planning of a crime against humanity. “You mentioned Gaza,” Margaret Brennan casually said to Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the last time Gaza was mentioned on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 16. “I want to ask you what specifics you are looking at when it comes to relocating the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In the past, you’ve mentioned Egypt. You’ve mentioned Jordan. Are you talking to other countries at this point about resettling?”
Witkoff would go on to say Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza would “lead to a better life for Gazans,” to which Brennan politely nodded, thanked him and moved on. Watching this exchange one would hardly know that was being discussed–mass forceable population transfer–is a textbook war crime. Recent revelations by the UN that aid workers had been found in a mass grave have also been ignored by broadcast news. 15 Palestinian rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS). This story has not been covered on-air by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, or CNN.
The ongoing suffering in Gaza, still very much armed and funded by the White House, continues to fade into the background. It’s become routine, banal, and not something that can drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. This dynamic, combined with US media’s general pro-Israel bias, means the daily starvation and death is not going to be making major headlines anytime soon. It’s now, after 18 months of genocide, just another boring “foreign policy” story.
The paper of record, the New York Times, ran a front page story March 19, the day after Israel broke the ceasefire and killed hundreds in one day, but didn’t run a front page story on Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza in the 13 days since. (They ran a front page story on April 3 that centered Israel’s military “tactics” in Gaza but didn’t mention civilian death totals.) The Times did find room on March 27 for a front page image of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza which, of course, are a favorite media topic for the pro-genocide crowd as they see it as evidence their “war on Hamas” is both morally justified and, somehow, endorsed by Palestinians themselves.
Like the New York Times, the nightly news shows–CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight–covered the initial bombing and breaking of the ceasefire the day after (ABC News’s lede after Israel killed 400+ in under 24 hours: “What does this mean for the hostages?”), but have subsequently ignored Gaza entirely, with one notable exception. CBS Evening News did a 4-minute segment on March 26 on “allegations” Israel was using Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular, as human shields and even this was front loaded with bizarre denunciations of Hamas “using human shields”:
Most conspicuous of all was the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda-setting” Sunday news programs that are designed to tell elites in Washington what they should care about. Gaza wasn’t mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows–ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union–for the weeks of March 23 and March 30. Despite Israel breaking the ceasefire on Tuesday March 18 and killing more than 400 Palestinians–including over 200 women and children–in less than 24 hours, none of the Sunday morning news programs that have aired since have covered Gaza at all.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that at least 322 children had been killed and 609 injured since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18.
Whereas the media approach during the Biden years was to spin, obfuscate, blame Hamas, and help distance the White House from the images of carnage emanating from Gaza by propping up fake “ceasefire talks,” the media approach now that Trump is doubling down on Biden’s strategy of unfettered support for genocide appears to be to largely ignore it.
All indications are that Israeli officials were banking on US news outlets normalizing the ongoing genocide of Gaza, assuming–correctly, as it turns out–that the death and despair would become so routine it would take on a “dog bites man” element. Combined with the nonstop “flood the zone” strategy of the Trump White House as it attacks dozens of perceived enemies at once, the US-backed genocide in Gaza is now both cliche and low priority.
By way of comparison, the Sunday shows, nightly news shows, and the front page of the New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Yemen-Signal group chat controversy. Obviously, administration officials using unsecured channels to discuss war plans is a news story (though not nearly as important as the war crimes casually being discussed) but the fact that Israel recommenced its bombing, siege, and starvation strategy on an already decimated population is, objectively, a more urgent story with much higher human stakes.
Indeed, Palestinians reporting from Gaza say the situation is as dire as it’s ever been. Israel cut off all aid on March 2 and the bombings have been as relentless and brutal as any time period pre-ceasefire. Meanwhile, with Trump openly endorsing ethnic cleansing, “debates” around how best to facilitate this ethnic cleansing are presented as sober, practical foreign policy discussions–not the open planning of a crime against humanity. “You mentioned Gaza,” Margaret Brennan casually said to Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the last time Gaza was mentioned on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 16. “I want to ask you what specifics you are looking at when it comes to relocating the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In the past, you’ve mentioned Egypt. You’ve mentioned Jordan. Are you talking to other countries at this point about resettling?”
Witkoff would go on to say Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza would “lead to a better life for Gazans,” to which Brennan politely nodded, thanked him and moved on. Watching this exchange one would hardly know that was being discussed–mass forceable population transfer–is a textbook war crime. Recent revelations by the UN that aid workers had been found in a mass grave have also been ignored by broadcast news. 15 Palestinian rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS). This story has not been covered on-air by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, or CNN.
The ongoing suffering in Gaza, still very much armed and funded by the White House, continues to fade into the background. It’s become routine, banal, and not something that can drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. This dynamic, combined with US media’s general pro-Israel bias, means the daily starvation and death is not going to be making major headlines anytime soon. It’s now, after 18 months of genocide, just another boring “foreign policy” story.
Marc Steiner
The Palestinian American lawyer and activist explains why the fight for our civil liberties and Gaza go hand in hand.
The ceasefire in Gaza has shattered, and Israel’s military has resumed the genocide. Simultaneously, organizations and activists in the US are sounding the alarm over Trump’s persecution of Mahmoud Khalil and other student activists. Palestinian American lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the situation in Gaza, and the urgency of ramping up the solidarity movement with Palestine to combat genocide and the rise of fascism.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. We’re talking today with Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian woman, a lawyer born in Israel, an international renowned human rights lawyer, trilingual and English, Arabic, and Hebrew. A nonviolent activist who co-founded International Solidarity Network fighting for Palestinian rights and nationhood. She ran for Congress in Michigan’s 10th congressional district writes extensively and which her mind, body, literally, and spirit on the line for Palestinian freedom and Hu to welcome. Good to have you with us.
Huwaida Arraf:
It’s good to be with you, Marc. Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
You have been, I mean, doing this for a while.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yeah, I had hoped it wouldn’t be this long, but the fight goes on.
Marc Steiner:
As we had this conversation today, I was looking at the news before I walked into the studio and Israel has resumed their operations in central and South Gaza. They’ve started their airstrikes, 20 Palestinians were killed. Almost all of them health workers for a hundred Palestinians were killed in airstrikes. Since the beginning is conflict. I mean, what’s happening in Gaza is almost unbelievable. I think it’s hard for people to fathom the extent of death and destruction that’s taking place. This is not simply a war.
Huwaida Arraf:
Absolutely. I don’t like to use that term at all because war implies you have two equal sites and that’s absolutely not what you have here. Have a population that has been oppressed and colonized for nearly eight decades and for the past almost two decades in Gaza specifically really has been caged and cut off from essentials. And you take that and over the years also every few years Israel bombs decimate the society, the infrastructure. You have a medieval siege that’s imposed on the entire civilian population that really leaves people not able to control even their daily lives. I mean, forget about just being able to leave the Gaza Strip to go get what you need to go to school, to visit family, to get the medical attention that you need, what you might be able to find food that day is completely determined by what Israel allows in and what doesn’t allow in.
And for the past two and a half weeks before it restarted, this barbaric bombardment of Gaza has been cutting off all food and medical aid and then just cut off also electricity, which means they can’t desalinate water. I mean people have nothing. It is truly a caged, beleaguered star population that Israel has also restarted viciously bombing from the air. So just in the past couple of days, nearly 500 killed so many children. At least the last number, and I don’t even like to say numbers because it changes by the minute, but over 180 children, babies, infants, and no one seems to be able to stop Israel. No one is willing to do it. And the reports are that the United States, the White House has given the green light. They were briefed on it, and the slaughter continues. It really, I am unable to find words these days to describe to the evil that we went missing.
Marc Steiner:
And you mentioned the United States. I mean the kind of lack of political will in the Biden administration to intervene and stop it. And now we’re faced with a government in this country which actively supports Israel in its destruction of Palestinians and the murder of Palestinians. It is really time for, I think those of us in America to step up and really heighten the protests and the confrontations with our own government to say, no, this can’t take place. So I’m curious as an activist here, where you see that going, where you see what our role is here in the United States to stop this kind of genocide taking place in Gaza.
Huwaida Arraf:
Absolutely, and that is the question, right? Because I worked for a long time volunteering in the occupied Palestinian territory and welcoming people from around the world to come see what’s actually happening in Palestine. And Palestinians would be so grateful for the international solidarity and for people leaving the comforts of their own home to travel to stand with them. But what we would hear over and over again from Palestinians is just please go back to your countries, especially the United States, and change the policies there because it is the policies of especially the Western countries led by the United States that’s enabling Israel. And so what we do here in the United States really, really matters. I mean, it’s not adequate to just say it’s not our problem, it’s not happening here. It’s thousands of miles away because we are so actively involved and complicit. It’s our tax dollars.
It is our elected representatives that are making these choices to continuously fund Israel’s genocide. So it comes down to us to create that political will to change policy. Now, how do we do that? It seems to be really overwhelming. A lot of it really comes down to educating people because for decades we have been programmed here in the United States by the mainstream media, by popular culture to dehumanize Palestinians and to think that Israel is the victim here. So there’s a lot of education that goes into it, opening people’s eyes in terms of what has really been happening and then changing that act or moving that education into mobilization and really pushing our elected representatives to make the right choices to stop funding genocide and colonialism and apartheid. And so that requires us making our voices heard, whether in the streets, in protests, to going to town halls, making appointments with our elected representatives, calling them, writing to them every day and letting them know that this is an issue that matters, that we care about, that we will vote on.
Yes, there are other issues that affect our daily lives, but this is also an issue that affects life, that affects life, and it affects our daily lives because it is not just about being what happens in Palestine. Yes, that’s horrible, but I have other concerns. What happens in Palestine and the extent in which the United States is funding and enabling what Israel is doing comes back here to affect us. If we look at the billions and billions of dollars that this government and the previous government and for decades, the United States has been giving of our tax dollars to Israel, that money can be spent in our own communities. I mean, $3.8 billion, that’s just yearly without all of the extra packages that Israel has gotten, which is now in the last 16, 17 months, has topped I think 30 billion. Billion. So yearly is 3.8 billion of our tax dollars.
And on top of that, the United States has authorized more and more money and weapon shipments to Israel that can be used in our own communities. Then when we talk about our own civil liberties here, the extent to which there is a crackdown on freedom of speech and on education, and that people are being doxed and fired from their jobs and silenced if they dare to criticize Israel. That affects our own civil liberties here. And I am involved in cases to defend students’ rights who have been persecuted, who have been kicked out of school. Their organizations suspended because they advocate for Palestinian rights. So if it’s not our tax dollars in our own communities and life in Palestine, it is our own ability to speak out and to exercise our freedom of speech that is being curtailed and actually really threatened all to protect a country that is committing a genocide.
It is really shameful. And I think that when we look back at this time, and I firmly believe there will come a time where we will look back and truly feel ashamed that we allowed this to happen. Those who were silent or those who advocated for this policy of supporting this genocide, it will be seen as a stain on US history. And I think what I keep saying is to everyone around me, this is happening in our lifetime on our watch. What are we going to say we did to stop it? And if we think about that every day, we will find our place what we can do. It could be joining a protest. I’m heading to a protest today, but it could be talking to your neighbor. It could be picking up the phone to talk to your member of Congress. Each one of us have a role to play.
And I think that if we understand that we can’t always be the top, we can’t always be at the front of those demonstrations, but if you do what you can from where you are and we each do that, it will build up. It will create that critical mass that we need to change policy. And I do believe that things have, in all of the years that you mentioned, I have been doing this, but we need to keep pushing. We need to keep pushing until we reach that tipping point. And I just seeing all the carnage, you just have to wonder how many more lives destroyed until we get to that tipping point where policy has changed. I mean, that motivates me every single day, and I hope we can all find it in ourselves to realize that there is something we can do about it.
Marc Steiner:
I hope so too. And I think that from your work, from helping to found a free gaze in 2006 with your co-founding international solidarity, the non-violent movement to fight for Palestinian rights, that we seem to be an precipice of the moment though, given what’s happening in Gaza, given the crackdown in this country on Palestinians who are standing up and given the crackdowns taking place inside Israel at this moment, people I’ve talked to who are both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis are talking about the intense pressure that they’re under every day. Some even being arrested because they’re standing up to the government saying, no, I don’t think people just really get and understand the depth of the repression that’s taking place on the West Bank in Gaza and in Israel itself.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yep, absolutely. I have family. So my family is partially from the West Bank and the other part is from inside 48, what is now Israel. And so,
Marc Steiner:
And you’re an Israeli citizen as well, or was were right,
Huwaida Arraf:
An Israeli citizen. Yes, of course. I mean, I always say I’m not the kind of citizen that Israel wants. Unfortunately, I’m considered a demographic threat because of, again, Israel’s project of really colonization. And when we call it apartheid, it’s not just throwing out words. It really is a government and a regime that wants to create a society and the state with specific rights for certain people based on your religion. So even though my village and my family was there before the state of Israel was created, we are not equal citizens. And the last time I talked to my family, I mean, they’re terrified. They can’t say anything in their place of work. If they like a Facebook post, they could be arrested, right? And they have Israeli citizens that are walking around armed, coming into their place of business, whether it is their clinics or their shops.
And you don’t know if what you’re going to say is going to get you injured, killed, arrested. And those are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who Israel likes to say are equal or have more rights than they would have anywhere else, which is just not true at all. And then when you talk about Israeli citizens, I mean, yeah, there are protests. People are not happy with Netanyahu, and there is, especially the families of the hostages and other people who are worried about the hostages are protesting and are getting arrested for these protests. And there is a crackdown. I wish I had something a little bit better or more hopeful to say about Israeli society because I spent so many years in the occupied territories and worked with some wonderful Israelis, Israelis who put their safety and their lives on the line and firmly believe in true equality and spend their time in Palestinian villages and standing up to their own soldiers.
But those numbers are so, so few, the polls are showing that a vast majority of Israelis support what their government has been doing in Gaza. If they didn’t have hostages in Gaza, they wouldn’t care at all about the Palestinian civilians there and what’s happening to them. And that’s really frightening. I mean, that’s frightening, just from a humanitarian perspective, that’s frightening when you think about any society to be supportive of such ruthless violence. And if it wasn’t for having some of your own people there wouldn’t care at all what happens to the population that your government is occupying, oppressing and killing. And so that is scary. And what we have been seeing in Israeli society is this decline, this decline towards more isolationism, fascism, violence. And it’s not good for anybody, certainly not good for Israeli society. And even the future where I say, I’ve always said that we need to live together in what we’re working to create.
We’re working to end Israeli colonialism and apartheid so that there can be a future where anybody and everybody who wants to live in historic Palestine in this land can do so as equals. Right. And what we have been seeing, again on the enormous violence unleashed on Palestinians and the almost complete disregard by Israelis except for where it concerns their own population, it means that it’s going to be very, very, very difficult to rebuild a lot of that. And this is, we’re talking about it because we don’t have too much time, but we shouldn’t just gloss over the amount of violence being used. And that’s not just in Gaza, that’s not just when we come to the death and dismemberment and amputations and the starvations, but the torture, the deliberate killings, the humiliation, the people, children who have seen their parents killed dismembered, the humiliated, what kind of psychological effect this has on people is really hard, really hard to fathom.
And especially when we’re looking at Gaza, but also the West Bank, this is all Palestinians have known most Palestinians for their entire lives is this kind of violence, is this kind of complete disregard by the international community and the rest of the world. And just this overwhelming oppression and this attempt really to get rid of you. You’re an undesirable, your life doesn’t matter. That’s all Palestinians have known. And despite this, they try to continue, they try to insist on, but what kind of psychological effect this has on people is really hard to know as of like 20 years ago, 20 years ago, before these massive bombing started in Gaza, there’s, it’s a Gaza community mental health program that was saying over 90% of Gaza’s children are traumatized. And that is back in 2006, you have seen at least five massive bombing campaigns since then and now an act of full-blown genocide if over 90% of Gaza’s children were traumatized before all this, what do we say now? So it is really, really dismal. But that doesn’t mean we give up. We have no choice but to keep going and fighting because we are fighting for the rights of people to live.
Marc Steiner:
It’s true. And those children now you talk about are now in their twenties and thirties and trying to survive.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yeah, trying to survive, probably trying to keep their children alive, probably trying to find a way to keep their children safe to find food. And these are children that have been traumatized themselves. In 2009, after Israel’s first major bombing campaign operation cast led on Gaza, this was 2008, 2009, I went in with a delegation of US attorneys to try to document and report on US weapons that were used in Operation Castlight to commit war crimes. And we did produce a report after that, but some of the stories that we heard, I mean one home that was bombed and Israel did not allow the Red Crescent or any rescue services to get to the home for three days. And when they got to the home, found a number, most of the adults in that home killed
And number of children who were still alive, injured, and forced to stay with the relatives, with the bodies of their dead parents for three days without food or water. Those children, that was 2008, 2009, if those children even survived, what they’re trying to do now in keeping their, they probably hope that their children wouldn’t have to endure the same. But not only are they doing the same, it’s so much worse now. It’s as bad as it has ever been. And that doesn’t even come remotely close to describing it. There’s a report that just came out from the un, and I’m almost, I’ve read the bullet points, but I can’t even bring myself to read it because even though the summary is so bad, it is so bad about the kind of torture, what people have been subjected to things that humans should never, ever do to each other. I can’t, as a human rights attorney, I’m almost embarrassed to admit I just can’t even bring myself to read it.
Marc Steiner:
What’s the name of the report?
Huwaida Arraf:
It was done by the, there’s a un fact finding patient. It’s an independent commission that is investigating what Israel is doing in the occupied policy and territory and in Gaza. And they came out, I’d have to pull up the report, but one of their findings is that Israel is committing genocidal acts. Israel has deliberately targeted the maternal wards, the ability of Palestinian, Palestinian women to reproduce in various ways. But part of that also covers the torture that Palestinian hostages also have endured in Israeli captivity and some of the torture tactics and the rape that is described is just horrific. And that’s just the summary. So I can pull the exact name of the report for you, but it was done by an independent fact finding commission.
Marc Steiner:
Well, we’ll add that just so people can access that, because I think that’s important. I mean, as you describe the reality that Palestinians face, and I mean, just think about you personally. I’ve been reading all the things you’ve been writing and I’ve been reading about you and the bravery you showed on the Flotillas and other, the places in the face of Israeli violence standing up to it, putting your life on the line. And you’re married to a Jewish man who’s thrown out of Israel because he stood up. I mean, this is something people have to understand. I think for us to get beyond this and to find this path to peace, and there are over one and a half to 2 billion Israelis who no longer live in Israel and live in Europe and live in the United States. Most of ’em would be the people who oppose this government that’s taking place in Israel at this moment.
Huwaida Arraf:
I mean, that’s what we’re hearing. And then the large number of Israelis who are leaving would be the more moderate ones, leaving the Israelis, more the ideological. This land was given to us by God. It’s only our land and everybody else needs to be kicked out, are the ones that are remaining. And we see the government that is now in power is a right wing fascist government. And that is the, as I said earlier, that the Israeli society where it has going and the fact that it’s become so extreme, it doesn’t bode well for anyone. But how do we break that? And for a lot of the work that I’ve done originally when I went over to Palestine in shortly after college, it was in the year 2000, it was to work for a conflict resolution organization that was bringing Palestinian and Israeli youth together.
Marc Steiner:
Seeds of peace.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yes, yes.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Huwaida Arraf:
And I quickly realized the problem with these organizations, because they don’t actually get to the heart of the matter, they don’t do the work that needs to be done to dismantle the racist structures or the structures of oppression that tear people apart. And it’s more about getting to know each other and doing these normalization projects. Becoming friends is great. Obviously we lifelong friends, but when you don’t actually, or when you avoid the work that needs to be done to dismantle the structures of oppression, then you are just normalizing oppression, right? So I don’t necessarily support these organizations, but I went on, even in founding the International Solidarity Movement, it was bringing internationals, but also bringing Israelis and bringing everybody irrespective of religion, of ethnicity, of nationality. I mean, we are all humans and we are all standing for freedom and for equality and for dignity, for everybody.
And there is this attempt to also reach Israelis with the actions that we were doing. A lot of the protests I was face to face with Israeli soldiers and trying to say, look, what are you doing? You are here shooting at children. You are invading these people’s villages, maybe getting them to think about what role they’re playing in this violence. And then I think that we are so far from that right now. People just have been so siloed, I feel, and so hard. There’s those that are hardened and just don’t want to hear anything that has to do with Palestinian humanity. And then there are those, the ideological Israelis that are bent on having this Jewish state that was promised to them by God. And everybody else needs to either agree to be subservient or they can be killed or they can get out. And that is really what we are fighting here. We are fighting this idea that there can be any kind of religious or ethno religious supremacy for anybody. And we are fighting for a world, a region, a country, I mean everywhere, certainly in Israel, Palestine, but around the world where everyone is respected in everyone is equal. And we seem to be so far away from that. But I say this because there is this idea, and you probably know well, anytime that we in the United States or in other places speak up for Palestinian rights, we are automatically labeled as antisemites
Marc Steiner:
Or self-hating Jews
Huwaida Arraf:
Or yourself Jews, my husband celebrating Jews all the time. And we seem to just lost this ability to look at each other as humans. And it doesn’t bode well for where we are in this moment in time. It is very dangerous what is happening, certainly in the region. But then what is happening here, and I mentioned, we started talking also about the restrictions on our civil liberties here.
We know that we are creating certainly Trump’s policy, cracking down even more on those who speak up for Palestinian rights. But one thing that I want to say there is that it didn’t start with Trump, right? It has been US policy. And certainly I blame the previous administration, the Biden administration, for laying the groundwork for where we are now. For 15 months we were protesting trying to get the Biden Harris administration to put an arms embargo on Israel to stop the genocide. And they gaslit the American people in that Israel has a right to defend itself. That’s what we always hear. But Israel is not defending itself. Israel is fighting for a land that is free of the indigenous Palestinian population. And the United States has been supporting that. But what is positive, I don’t want to be all negative. What is positive is that so many people like yourself, mark, but so many also younger American Jews, and even when we started the International Solidarity Movement, so many of those who came to join us were young American or European Jews.
We look at the protests on college campuses, so many of them Jewish students who reject this notion that what Israel is doing and what the US is doing in cracking down on protesters in any way serves Jewish safety. Certainly not Jewish Americans. And where I am in Michigan, the University of Michigan, we have 12 protesters that are being prosecuted actually by the Attorney General in a shameful, really prosecution. But about half of those protesters being prosecuted for protesting in the encampments and for Palestinian rights are Jewish. So on one hand, there are those who are really pushing really hard to label all advocates of Palestinian rights as antisemitic and supporting this kind of crackdown, whether what Israel’s doing or what this administration is doing as fighting antisemitism or protecting the Jewish people when it’s just the opposite. And it’s heartening to see that so many young Jews, but also of all ages that are, I have a good friend who is well into her eighties Jewish activist, and she’s just so feisty and that I really consider my family, my family, and these are the kind of people that I always want to stand side by side with and fighting for everybody’s rights.
Marc Steiner:
So before we end, a couple of things. One is I’m curious, in your life now, you’ve been through a lot facing violence in the Israeli Army, Navy violence, dealing on flotillas, the work you’ve done over there, the work you’re doing here, educating your life to this, what are you in the midst of now? Where is the struggle taking you? Now,
Huwaida Arraf:
That is a good question because I feel like I’m torn in so many different ways because there’s so much work to be done, and I want to always do as much as I can. One of my most important roles right now, although my kids would probably beg to differ, is raising the next generation. But I frequently hear from them that I’m always busy and I’m always doing something for Palestine or some other social justice issues. So I might be not doing as well as I should be in that arena, but raising the next generation, my kids are 10 and 11, and if I impart anything on them, I want it to be a strong belief in their ability and their obligation to do something when they see that something is wrong, whether it is in their elementary classroom, if somebody is being racist or somebody is being bullied to stand up to, if it’s the president of the United States, you can get out and protest when something’s happening that is not right.
You are able to, and you should do something about it. If I impart anything on them, I want it to be that. So that is one of my most important jobs. But I am also an attorney and I’m also working with other attorneys both to defensive liberties here at home. So I am one helping with the defense of students who are being persecuted for standing up for Palestinian rights and also suing the University of Michigan for violating the constitutional rights of these students by treating them differently, by curtailing the First Amendment rights. Because these institutions and these state power that is cracking down on our students, on protestors, on citizens should not be allowed to get away with this. So it’s defense and offense there and activism. We are still trying to support people to go to the occupied Palestinian territory, to volunteer with the international Solidarity movement if they are able to.
And if somebody can, unfortunately we cannot get into Gaza, but people are still able to get into Jerusalem and the West Bank and the international solidarity movement there is trying as much as possible to be a presence, to witness, to document, to stand in solidarity with the people there who are being terrorized by settlers and soldiers. Just in the past month, over 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their refugee camps in and in Janine. So in these Palestinian cities, Israeli soldiers would come through and literally blow up their homes or demolish their homes. And those that are still in their villages are being attacked by settlers, supported by soldiers. So having people there to witness to try to deter some of the violence by saying to the state of Israel, like, Hey, we’re here and we see what we’re doing can help deter violence sometimes and can help let Palestinians know that they’re not alone.
So I encourage anyone who is able to travel to look up the international solidarity movement and see about volunteering there. At the same time, we are trying to stop the atrocities in Gaza in a variety of ways. I am still involved with the Freedom Flotilla and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and that we have been trying for years to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza. We started, as you mentioned, I mean the first time we got into Gaza with two small fishing boats in 2008. And that was a deliberate action to challenge, to confront, to try to break Israel’s stranglehold and its naval blockade on Gaza. We were able to get through a few times, but then Israel started lethally attacking our ships, but we did not give up. And we, as of last year also, were pulling together if flotilla, unfortunately, some states sabotaged our mission, but again, we are not giving up.
We are readying ships to try to sail again. And we are encouraging these organizations that are being blocked from entering Gaza and from rendering aid to people to join us, to put their aid on these ships and directly confront Israel’s policy. Because Israel’s policy is illegal. A siege on an entire civilian population is illegal, and it is part of a larger genocide, a crime against humanity. But what is infuriating is that these organizations and world governments only talk, they do not do anything to actively confront Israel’s policy. So effectively, you have every single government in the world that is respecting Israel’s control over Gaza. They are complicit. They are complicit in the starvation and the genocide of the Palestinian people. I mean, the government of Turkey held back three of our ships that were supposed to sail to confront Israel’s blockade. Why isn’t Turkey itself sailing?
Why isn’t Greece sailing? Why aren’t these Arab countries sailing and daring Israel to confront them and to insist that we are getting to the people that you are trying to annihilate in Gaza. So we are still trying to do that as a civilian initiative and hopefully within the next few weeks or months, I hope it’s not longer, your listeners will hear about and are able to support the Freedom Flotilla coalition and try to break through this blockade. And here at home. Aside from the legal front, there’s also the political front and continuing to push our elected representatives and continuing to encourage people that really represent our ideals and our principles, our vision of human rights and inequality for everybody to run for office. I am trying to encourage young people, the Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, to actually get involved. And so our voices are represented and we are heard. So it’s a lot of work on a lot of different friends. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to be in too many spaces and not doing anything particularly relevant. Well, we continue to try to do what we can. I think that that’s important just as continue to do what we can and there’s a space for everyone.
Marc Steiner:
I want to first say thank you, hued our off. You’re doing amazing work. I want to stay in touch with you to see how this Portilla gathering is growing and what the next moves are, so we can then support to that and bring those voices to the people in this country and across the globe. So I appreciate the work you’re doing, and thank you so much for being here today.
Huwaida Arraf:
Thank you for having me, and please continue to speak out because as we know, our freedom of speech is really being threatened right now. And I encourage your listeners to really follow the case of il, who is the government is trying to set an example by deporting him illegally for speaking out for Palestinian rights. And they’re again, trying to not only make an example of him, but silence speech by sending this chill through the communities, the pro-Palestinian community or anyone would dare to speak out. And it is, like I say again, the extent to which our own civil liberties, our right to the first amendment, our right to due process are really at stake right now is really hard to overemphasize. We need everybody to be watching, to be speaking out, and to be letting our elected representatives know that we will not stand for this and that they need to fight. So thank you for doing your part in continuing to speak out and bring voices of protests, of dissent to your listeners, and I would love to stay in touch.
Marc Steiner:
We will stay in touch. Thank you very much.
Huwaida Arraf:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, thank you to Huda Araf for joining us today. And thanks for David Hebdon for running the program and audio editor Alina Neek and producer Roset Sole for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Huwaida Arraf for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
The Palestinian American lawyer and activist explains why the fight for our civil liberties and Gaza go hand in hand.
The ceasefire in Gaza has shattered, and Israel’s military has resumed the genocide. Simultaneously, organizations and activists in the US are sounding the alarm over Trump’s persecution of Mahmoud Khalil and other student activists. Palestinian American lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the situation in Gaza, and the urgency of ramping up the solidarity movement with Palestine to combat genocide and the rise of fascism.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. We’re talking today with Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian woman, a lawyer born in Israel, an international renowned human rights lawyer, trilingual and English, Arabic, and Hebrew. A nonviolent activist who co-founded International Solidarity Network fighting for Palestinian rights and nationhood. She ran for Congress in Michigan’s 10th congressional district writes extensively and which her mind, body, literally, and spirit on the line for Palestinian freedom and Hu to welcome. Good to have you with us.
Huwaida Arraf:
It’s good to be with you, Marc. Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
You have been, I mean, doing this for a while.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yeah, I had hoped it wouldn’t be this long, but the fight goes on.
Marc Steiner:
As we had this conversation today, I was looking at the news before I walked into the studio and Israel has resumed their operations in central and South Gaza. They’ve started their airstrikes, 20 Palestinians were killed. Almost all of them health workers for a hundred Palestinians were killed in airstrikes. Since the beginning is conflict. I mean, what’s happening in Gaza is almost unbelievable. I think it’s hard for people to fathom the extent of death and destruction that’s taking place. This is not simply a war.
Huwaida Arraf:
Absolutely. I don’t like to use that term at all because war implies you have two equal sites and that’s absolutely not what you have here. Have a population that has been oppressed and colonized for nearly eight decades and for the past almost two decades in Gaza specifically really has been caged and cut off from essentials. And you take that and over the years also every few years Israel bombs decimate the society, the infrastructure. You have a medieval siege that’s imposed on the entire civilian population that really leaves people not able to control even their daily lives. I mean, forget about just being able to leave the Gaza Strip to go get what you need to go to school, to visit family, to get the medical attention that you need, what you might be able to find food that day is completely determined by what Israel allows in and what doesn’t allow in.
And for the past two and a half weeks before it restarted, this barbaric bombardment of Gaza has been cutting off all food and medical aid and then just cut off also electricity, which means they can’t desalinate water. I mean people have nothing. It is truly a caged, beleaguered star population that Israel has also restarted viciously bombing from the air. So just in the past couple of days, nearly 500 killed so many children. At least the last number, and I don’t even like to say numbers because it changes by the minute, but over 180 children, babies, infants, and no one seems to be able to stop Israel. No one is willing to do it. And the reports are that the United States, the White House has given the green light. They were briefed on it, and the slaughter continues. It really, I am unable to find words these days to describe to the evil that we went missing.
Marc Steiner:
And you mentioned the United States. I mean the kind of lack of political will in the Biden administration to intervene and stop it. And now we’re faced with a government in this country which actively supports Israel in its destruction of Palestinians and the murder of Palestinians. It is really time for, I think those of us in America to step up and really heighten the protests and the confrontations with our own government to say, no, this can’t take place. So I’m curious as an activist here, where you see that going, where you see what our role is here in the United States to stop this kind of genocide taking place in Gaza.
Huwaida Arraf:
Absolutely, and that is the question, right? Because I worked for a long time volunteering in the occupied Palestinian territory and welcoming people from around the world to come see what’s actually happening in Palestine. And Palestinians would be so grateful for the international solidarity and for people leaving the comforts of their own home to travel to stand with them. But what we would hear over and over again from Palestinians is just please go back to your countries, especially the United States, and change the policies there because it is the policies of especially the Western countries led by the United States that’s enabling Israel. And so what we do here in the United States really, really matters. I mean, it’s not adequate to just say it’s not our problem, it’s not happening here. It’s thousands of miles away because we are so actively involved and complicit. It’s our tax dollars.
It is our elected representatives that are making these choices to continuously fund Israel’s genocide. So it comes down to us to create that political will to change policy. Now, how do we do that? It seems to be really overwhelming. A lot of it really comes down to educating people because for decades we have been programmed here in the United States by the mainstream media, by popular culture to dehumanize Palestinians and to think that Israel is the victim here. So there’s a lot of education that goes into it, opening people’s eyes in terms of what has really been happening and then changing that act or moving that education into mobilization and really pushing our elected representatives to make the right choices to stop funding genocide and colonialism and apartheid. And so that requires us making our voices heard, whether in the streets, in protests, to going to town halls, making appointments with our elected representatives, calling them, writing to them every day and letting them know that this is an issue that matters, that we care about, that we will vote on.
Yes, there are other issues that affect our daily lives, but this is also an issue that affects life, that affects life, and it affects our daily lives because it is not just about being what happens in Palestine. Yes, that’s horrible, but I have other concerns. What happens in Palestine and the extent in which the United States is funding and enabling what Israel is doing comes back here to affect us. If we look at the billions and billions of dollars that this government and the previous government and for decades, the United States has been giving of our tax dollars to Israel, that money can be spent in our own communities. I mean, $3.8 billion, that’s just yearly without all of the extra packages that Israel has gotten, which is now in the last 16, 17 months, has topped I think 30 billion. Billion. So yearly is 3.8 billion of our tax dollars.
And on top of that, the United States has authorized more and more money and weapon shipments to Israel that can be used in our own communities. Then when we talk about our own civil liberties here, the extent to which there is a crackdown on freedom of speech and on education, and that people are being doxed and fired from their jobs and silenced if they dare to criticize Israel. That affects our own civil liberties here. And I am involved in cases to defend students’ rights who have been persecuted, who have been kicked out of school. Their organizations suspended because they advocate for Palestinian rights. So if it’s not our tax dollars in our own communities and life in Palestine, it is our own ability to speak out and to exercise our freedom of speech that is being curtailed and actually really threatened all to protect a country that is committing a genocide.
It is really shameful. And I think that when we look back at this time, and I firmly believe there will come a time where we will look back and truly feel ashamed that we allowed this to happen. Those who were silent or those who advocated for this policy of supporting this genocide, it will be seen as a stain on US history. And I think what I keep saying is to everyone around me, this is happening in our lifetime on our watch. What are we going to say we did to stop it? And if we think about that every day, we will find our place what we can do. It could be joining a protest. I’m heading to a protest today, but it could be talking to your neighbor. It could be picking up the phone to talk to your member of Congress. Each one of us have a role to play.
And I think that if we understand that we can’t always be the top, we can’t always be at the front of those demonstrations, but if you do what you can from where you are and we each do that, it will build up. It will create that critical mass that we need to change policy. And I do believe that things have, in all of the years that you mentioned, I have been doing this, but we need to keep pushing. We need to keep pushing until we reach that tipping point. And I just seeing all the carnage, you just have to wonder how many more lives destroyed until we get to that tipping point where policy has changed. I mean, that motivates me every single day, and I hope we can all find it in ourselves to realize that there is something we can do about it.
Marc Steiner:
I hope so too. And I think that from your work, from helping to found a free gaze in 2006 with your co-founding international solidarity, the non-violent movement to fight for Palestinian rights, that we seem to be an precipice of the moment though, given what’s happening in Gaza, given the crackdown in this country on Palestinians who are standing up and given the crackdowns taking place inside Israel at this moment, people I’ve talked to who are both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis are talking about the intense pressure that they’re under every day. Some even being arrested because they’re standing up to the government saying, no, I don’t think people just really get and understand the depth of the repression that’s taking place on the West Bank in Gaza and in Israel itself.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yep, absolutely. I have family. So my family is partially from the West Bank and the other part is from inside 48, what is now Israel. And so,
Marc Steiner:
And you’re an Israeli citizen as well, or was were right,
Huwaida Arraf:
An Israeli citizen. Yes, of course. I mean, I always say I’m not the kind of citizen that Israel wants. Unfortunately, I’m considered a demographic threat because of, again, Israel’s project of really colonization. And when we call it apartheid, it’s not just throwing out words. It really is a government and a regime that wants to create a society and the state with specific rights for certain people based on your religion. So even though my village and my family was there before the state of Israel was created, we are not equal citizens. And the last time I talked to my family, I mean, they’re terrified. They can’t say anything in their place of work. If they like a Facebook post, they could be arrested, right? And they have Israeli citizens that are walking around armed, coming into their place of business, whether it is their clinics or their shops.
And you don’t know if what you’re going to say is going to get you injured, killed, arrested. And those are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who Israel likes to say are equal or have more rights than they would have anywhere else, which is just not true at all. And then when you talk about Israeli citizens, I mean, yeah, there are protests. People are not happy with Netanyahu, and there is, especially the families of the hostages and other people who are worried about the hostages are protesting and are getting arrested for these protests. And there is a crackdown. I wish I had something a little bit better or more hopeful to say about Israeli society because I spent so many years in the occupied territories and worked with some wonderful Israelis, Israelis who put their safety and their lives on the line and firmly believe in true equality and spend their time in Palestinian villages and standing up to their own soldiers.
But those numbers are so, so few, the polls are showing that a vast majority of Israelis support what their government has been doing in Gaza. If they didn’t have hostages in Gaza, they wouldn’t care at all about the Palestinian civilians there and what’s happening to them. And that’s really frightening. I mean, that’s frightening, just from a humanitarian perspective, that’s frightening when you think about any society to be supportive of such ruthless violence. And if it wasn’t for having some of your own people there wouldn’t care at all what happens to the population that your government is occupying, oppressing and killing. And so that is scary. And what we have been seeing in Israeli society is this decline, this decline towards more isolationism, fascism, violence. And it’s not good for anybody, certainly not good for Israeli society. And even the future where I say, I’ve always said that we need to live together in what we’re working to create.
We’re working to end Israeli colonialism and apartheid so that there can be a future where anybody and everybody who wants to live in historic Palestine in this land can do so as equals. Right. And what we have been seeing, again on the enormous violence unleashed on Palestinians and the almost complete disregard by Israelis except for where it concerns their own population, it means that it’s going to be very, very, very difficult to rebuild a lot of that. And this is, we’re talking about it because we don’t have too much time, but we shouldn’t just gloss over the amount of violence being used. And that’s not just in Gaza, that’s not just when we come to the death and dismemberment and amputations and the starvations, but the torture, the deliberate killings, the humiliation, the people, children who have seen their parents killed dismembered, the humiliated, what kind of psychological effect this has on people is really hard, really hard to fathom.
And especially when we’re looking at Gaza, but also the West Bank, this is all Palestinians have known most Palestinians for their entire lives is this kind of violence, is this kind of complete disregard by the international community and the rest of the world. And just this overwhelming oppression and this attempt really to get rid of you. You’re an undesirable, your life doesn’t matter. That’s all Palestinians have known. And despite this, they try to continue, they try to insist on, but what kind of psychological effect this has on people is really hard to know as of like 20 years ago, 20 years ago, before these massive bombing started in Gaza, there’s, it’s a Gaza community mental health program that was saying over 90% of Gaza’s children are traumatized. And that is back in 2006, you have seen at least five massive bombing campaigns since then and now an act of full-blown genocide if over 90% of Gaza’s children were traumatized before all this, what do we say now? So it is really, really dismal. But that doesn’t mean we give up. We have no choice but to keep going and fighting because we are fighting for the rights of people to live.
Marc Steiner:
It’s true. And those children now you talk about are now in their twenties and thirties and trying to survive.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yeah, trying to survive, probably trying to keep their children alive, probably trying to find a way to keep their children safe to find food. And these are children that have been traumatized themselves. In 2009, after Israel’s first major bombing campaign operation cast led on Gaza, this was 2008, 2009, I went in with a delegation of US attorneys to try to document and report on US weapons that were used in Operation Castlight to commit war crimes. And we did produce a report after that, but some of the stories that we heard, I mean one home that was bombed and Israel did not allow the Red Crescent or any rescue services to get to the home for three days. And when they got to the home, found a number, most of the adults in that home killed
And number of children who were still alive, injured, and forced to stay with the relatives, with the bodies of their dead parents for three days without food or water. Those children, that was 2008, 2009, if those children even survived, what they’re trying to do now in keeping their, they probably hope that their children wouldn’t have to endure the same. But not only are they doing the same, it’s so much worse now. It’s as bad as it has ever been. And that doesn’t even come remotely close to describing it. There’s a report that just came out from the un, and I’m almost, I’ve read the bullet points, but I can’t even bring myself to read it because even though the summary is so bad, it is so bad about the kind of torture, what people have been subjected to things that humans should never, ever do to each other. I can’t, as a human rights attorney, I’m almost embarrassed to admit I just can’t even bring myself to read it.
Marc Steiner:
What’s the name of the report?
Huwaida Arraf:
It was done by the, there’s a un fact finding patient. It’s an independent commission that is investigating what Israel is doing in the occupied policy and territory and in Gaza. And they came out, I’d have to pull up the report, but one of their findings is that Israel is committing genocidal acts. Israel has deliberately targeted the maternal wards, the ability of Palestinian, Palestinian women to reproduce in various ways. But part of that also covers the torture that Palestinian hostages also have endured in Israeli captivity and some of the torture tactics and the rape that is described is just horrific. And that’s just the summary. So I can pull the exact name of the report for you, but it was done by an independent fact finding commission.
Marc Steiner:
Well, we’ll add that just so people can access that, because I think that’s important. I mean, as you describe the reality that Palestinians face, and I mean, just think about you personally. I’ve been reading all the things you’ve been writing and I’ve been reading about you and the bravery you showed on the Flotillas and other, the places in the face of Israeli violence standing up to it, putting your life on the line. And you’re married to a Jewish man who’s thrown out of Israel because he stood up. I mean, this is something people have to understand. I think for us to get beyond this and to find this path to peace, and there are over one and a half to 2 billion Israelis who no longer live in Israel and live in Europe and live in the United States. Most of ’em would be the people who oppose this government that’s taking place in Israel at this moment.
Huwaida Arraf:
I mean, that’s what we’re hearing. And then the large number of Israelis who are leaving would be the more moderate ones, leaving the Israelis, more the ideological. This land was given to us by God. It’s only our land and everybody else needs to be kicked out, are the ones that are remaining. And we see the government that is now in power is a right wing fascist government. And that is the, as I said earlier, that the Israeli society where it has going and the fact that it’s become so extreme, it doesn’t bode well for anyone. But how do we break that? And for a lot of the work that I’ve done originally when I went over to Palestine in shortly after college, it was in the year 2000, it was to work for a conflict resolution organization that was bringing Palestinian and Israeli youth together.
Marc Steiner:
Seeds of peace.
Huwaida Arraf:
Yes, yes.
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Huwaida Arraf:
And I quickly realized the problem with these organizations, because they don’t actually get to the heart of the matter, they don’t do the work that needs to be done to dismantle the racist structures or the structures of oppression that tear people apart. And it’s more about getting to know each other and doing these normalization projects. Becoming friends is great. Obviously we lifelong friends, but when you don’t actually, or when you avoid the work that needs to be done to dismantle the structures of oppression, then you are just normalizing oppression, right? So I don’t necessarily support these organizations, but I went on, even in founding the International Solidarity Movement, it was bringing internationals, but also bringing Israelis and bringing everybody irrespective of religion, of ethnicity, of nationality. I mean, we are all humans and we are all standing for freedom and for equality and for dignity, for everybody.
And there is this attempt to also reach Israelis with the actions that we were doing. A lot of the protests I was face to face with Israeli soldiers and trying to say, look, what are you doing? You are here shooting at children. You are invading these people’s villages, maybe getting them to think about what role they’re playing in this violence. And then I think that we are so far from that right now. People just have been so siloed, I feel, and so hard. There’s those that are hardened and just don’t want to hear anything that has to do with Palestinian humanity. And then there are those, the ideological Israelis that are bent on having this Jewish state that was promised to them by God. And everybody else needs to either agree to be subservient or they can be killed or they can get out. And that is really what we are fighting here. We are fighting this idea that there can be any kind of religious or ethno religious supremacy for anybody. And we are fighting for a world, a region, a country, I mean everywhere, certainly in Israel, Palestine, but around the world where everyone is respected in everyone is equal. And we seem to be so far away from that. But I say this because there is this idea, and you probably know well, anytime that we in the United States or in other places speak up for Palestinian rights, we are automatically labeled as antisemites
Marc Steiner:
Or self-hating Jews
Huwaida Arraf:
Or yourself Jews, my husband celebrating Jews all the time. And we seem to just lost this ability to look at each other as humans. And it doesn’t bode well for where we are in this moment in time. It is very dangerous what is happening, certainly in the region. But then what is happening here, and I mentioned, we started talking also about the restrictions on our civil liberties here.
We know that we are creating certainly Trump’s policy, cracking down even more on those who speak up for Palestinian rights. But one thing that I want to say there is that it didn’t start with Trump, right? It has been US policy. And certainly I blame the previous administration, the Biden administration, for laying the groundwork for where we are now. For 15 months we were protesting trying to get the Biden Harris administration to put an arms embargo on Israel to stop the genocide. And they gaslit the American people in that Israel has a right to defend itself. That’s what we always hear. But Israel is not defending itself. Israel is fighting for a land that is free of the indigenous Palestinian population. And the United States has been supporting that. But what is positive, I don’t want to be all negative. What is positive is that so many people like yourself, mark, but so many also younger American Jews, and even when we started the International Solidarity Movement, so many of those who came to join us were young American or European Jews.
We look at the protests on college campuses, so many of them Jewish students who reject this notion that what Israel is doing and what the US is doing in cracking down on protesters in any way serves Jewish safety. Certainly not Jewish Americans. And where I am in Michigan, the University of Michigan, we have 12 protesters that are being prosecuted actually by the Attorney General in a shameful, really prosecution. But about half of those protesters being prosecuted for protesting in the encampments and for Palestinian rights are Jewish. So on one hand, there are those who are really pushing really hard to label all advocates of Palestinian rights as antisemitic and supporting this kind of crackdown, whether what Israel’s doing or what this administration is doing as fighting antisemitism or protecting the Jewish people when it’s just the opposite. And it’s heartening to see that so many young Jews, but also of all ages that are, I have a good friend who is well into her eighties Jewish activist, and she’s just so feisty and that I really consider my family, my family, and these are the kind of people that I always want to stand side by side with and fighting for everybody’s rights.
Marc Steiner:
So before we end, a couple of things. One is I’m curious, in your life now, you’ve been through a lot facing violence in the Israeli Army, Navy violence, dealing on flotillas, the work you’ve done over there, the work you’re doing here, educating your life to this, what are you in the midst of now? Where is the struggle taking you? Now,
Huwaida Arraf:
That is a good question because I feel like I’m torn in so many different ways because there’s so much work to be done, and I want to always do as much as I can. One of my most important roles right now, although my kids would probably beg to differ, is raising the next generation. But I frequently hear from them that I’m always busy and I’m always doing something for Palestine or some other social justice issues. So I might be not doing as well as I should be in that arena, but raising the next generation, my kids are 10 and 11, and if I impart anything on them, I want it to be a strong belief in their ability and their obligation to do something when they see that something is wrong, whether it is in their elementary classroom, if somebody is being racist or somebody is being bullied to stand up to, if it’s the president of the United States, you can get out and protest when something’s happening that is not right.
You are able to, and you should do something about it. If I impart anything on them, I want it to be that. So that is one of my most important jobs. But I am also an attorney and I’m also working with other attorneys both to defensive liberties here at home. So I am one helping with the defense of students who are being persecuted for standing up for Palestinian rights and also suing the University of Michigan for violating the constitutional rights of these students by treating them differently, by curtailing the First Amendment rights. Because these institutions and these state power that is cracking down on our students, on protestors, on citizens should not be allowed to get away with this. So it’s defense and offense there and activism. We are still trying to support people to go to the occupied Palestinian territory, to volunteer with the international Solidarity movement if they are able to.
And if somebody can, unfortunately we cannot get into Gaza, but people are still able to get into Jerusalem and the West Bank and the international solidarity movement there is trying as much as possible to be a presence, to witness, to document, to stand in solidarity with the people there who are being terrorized by settlers and soldiers. Just in the past month, over 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their refugee camps in and in Janine. So in these Palestinian cities, Israeli soldiers would come through and literally blow up their homes or demolish their homes. And those that are still in their villages are being attacked by settlers, supported by soldiers. So having people there to witness to try to deter some of the violence by saying to the state of Israel, like, Hey, we’re here and we see what we’re doing can help deter violence sometimes and can help let Palestinians know that they’re not alone.
So I encourage anyone who is able to travel to look up the international solidarity movement and see about volunteering there. At the same time, we are trying to stop the atrocities in Gaza in a variety of ways. I am still involved with the Freedom Flotilla and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and that we have been trying for years to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza. We started, as you mentioned, I mean the first time we got into Gaza with two small fishing boats in 2008. And that was a deliberate action to challenge, to confront, to try to break Israel’s stranglehold and its naval blockade on Gaza. We were able to get through a few times, but then Israel started lethally attacking our ships, but we did not give up. And we, as of last year also, were pulling together if flotilla, unfortunately, some states sabotaged our mission, but again, we are not giving up.
We are readying ships to try to sail again. And we are encouraging these organizations that are being blocked from entering Gaza and from rendering aid to people to join us, to put their aid on these ships and directly confront Israel’s policy. Because Israel’s policy is illegal. A siege on an entire civilian population is illegal, and it is part of a larger genocide, a crime against humanity. But what is infuriating is that these organizations and world governments only talk, they do not do anything to actively confront Israel’s policy. So effectively, you have every single government in the world that is respecting Israel’s control over Gaza. They are complicit. They are complicit in the starvation and the genocide of the Palestinian people. I mean, the government of Turkey held back three of our ships that were supposed to sail to confront Israel’s blockade. Why isn’t Turkey itself sailing?
Why isn’t Greece sailing? Why aren’t these Arab countries sailing and daring Israel to confront them and to insist that we are getting to the people that you are trying to annihilate in Gaza. So we are still trying to do that as a civilian initiative and hopefully within the next few weeks or months, I hope it’s not longer, your listeners will hear about and are able to support the Freedom Flotilla coalition and try to break through this blockade. And here at home. Aside from the legal front, there’s also the political front and continuing to push our elected representatives and continuing to encourage people that really represent our ideals and our principles, our vision of human rights and inequality for everybody to run for office. I am trying to encourage young people, the Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, to actually get involved. And so our voices are represented and we are heard. So it’s a lot of work on a lot of different friends. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to be in too many spaces and not doing anything particularly relevant. Well, we continue to try to do what we can. I think that that’s important just as continue to do what we can and there’s a space for everyone.
Marc Steiner:
I want to first say thank you, hued our off. You’re doing amazing work. I want to stay in touch with you to see how this Portilla gathering is growing and what the next moves are, so we can then support to that and bring those voices to the people in this country and across the globe. So I appreciate the work you’re doing, and thank you so much for being here today.
Huwaida Arraf:
Thank you for having me, and please continue to speak out because as we know, our freedom of speech is really being threatened right now. And I encourage your listeners to really follow the case of il, who is the government is trying to set an example by deporting him illegally for speaking out for Palestinian rights. And they’re again, trying to not only make an example of him, but silence speech by sending this chill through the communities, the pro-Palestinian community or anyone would dare to speak out. And it is, like I say again, the extent to which our own civil liberties, our right to the first amendment, our right to due process are really at stake right now is really hard to overemphasize. We need everybody to be watching, to be speaking out, and to be letting our elected representatives know that we will not stand for this and that they need to fight. So thank you for doing your part in continuing to speak out and bring voices of protests, of dissent to your listeners, and I would love to stay in touch.
Marc Steiner:
We will stay in touch. Thank you very much.
Huwaida Arraf:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, thank you to Huda Araf for joining us today. And thanks for David Hebdon for running the program and audio editor Alina Neek and producer Roset Sole for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Huwaida Arraf for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
By: Mahmoud Mushtaha
Bleeding out from moderate shrapnel wounds. Dying from illnesses doctors don’t have time to treat. Going blind waiting for medical evacuation abroad. These are the manifold victims of Israel's war on Gaza's health system.
In recent days, details have emerged about a particularly gruesome Israeli massacre targeting Palestinian medical teams in southern Gaza. On March 23, a team of Red Crescent and Civil Defense personnel were sent on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been targeted earlier in the day in the Rafah governorate. At a certain point, contact with the team was lost, and they were assumed dead.
But it wasn’t until days later, when joint crews from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Red Crescent, and the Civil Defense gained access to and exhumed the site that the full horror was revealed: zip-tied hands and feet, signs of execution at point-blank range, and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. These were not casualties of crossfire. Israeli forces had executed them in cold blood, before using a bulldozer to bury their crushed vehicles on top of their bodies.
“We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on,” Jonathan Whittall of OCHA said in a statement after the mass grave was discovered in Tel Al-Sultan. “One of them had his clothes removed, and another one was beheaded,” Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Civil Defense, explained.
According to the Gaza Media Office, the Israeli army has killed 1,402 medical workers since October 7, making it one of the deadliest campaigns against health workers in modern history. The targeting of medical personnel is part of a wider assault on Gaza’s health care infrastructure: 34 hospitals have been destroyed and forced out of service, along with the 240 health centers and facilities and 142 ambulances that have also been targeted. The total damage to the health sector is estimated to exceed $3 billion, leaving it utterly incapable of meeting the urgent needs of a population trapped under siege and bombardment.
Over the course of the war, Israeli forces have also raided multiple medical facilities and converted them into military outposts, as documented by a recent Human Rights Watch investigation. Major hospitals including Al-Shifa and Nasser were not only raided but occupied, endangering patients and staff, resulting in the death of patients who were forcibly removed or left without treatment.
These actions, combined with the broader blockade and deprivation of essential aid, reflect a deliberate strategy of dismantling Gaza’s health care system — a tactic that may amount to crimes against humanity, including extermination and acts of genocide.
During the recent ceasefire, Gaza’s medical facilities were teetering on the edge, disabled by the aftermath of sustained Israeli attacks for 15 months. But with the resumption of Israel’s military campaign and a full blockade on the Strip, Palestinian hospitals in the Gaza Strip have declared that the devastated health care system has now entered a state of “clinical death.”
Dr. Mohammed Zaqout, director-general of field hospitals at the Health Ministry, warned that Israel’s ongoing war is worsening what he called “an already unbearable humanitarian crisis.” He stressed that the continued closure of border crossings by Israeli forces has blocked the entry of desperately needed medicines, medical equipment, and fuel.
The scenes inside Gaza’s hospitals no longer resemble medical facilities. Patients lie strewn across floors slick with blood, their wounds left untreated. Some gasp for air as oxygen runs out; others lie in silence, waiting for relief that will never come. It is a health system not just under siege, but deliberately dismantled.
“Our hospitals are overwhelmed, and we’re running out of everything,” Zaqout said. “We’re not just talking about shortages — we’re talking about total absence.”
‘We use our bare hands and flashlights — it’s medieval’
What once served as a vital network of hospitals, clinics, and referral pathways in Gaza has been reduced to a shattered landscape of field tents, overcrowded shelters, and makeshift wards. These are often without electricity, clean water, or basic medical supplies. The remaining doctors, under siege and targeted alongside their patients, are working far beyond human capacity, operating with little more than gauze and determination.
Still, medical teams are continuing to do everything in their power to help their patients. “We don’t have the luxury to rest,” Dr. Ahmed Khalil (a pseudonym), a physician who has spent the past 540 days moving between bombed hospitals, told +972. “We treat patients on the floor, without electricity, without anesthesia. We use our bare hands and flashlights — it’s medieval.”
In March 2024, Israeli forces surrounded and besieged Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — the enclave’s largest medical facility — for a second time, cutting off access to food, fuel, and medical supplies. Trapped inside for days, Khalil watched it transform from a bustling center of care into a military target. “We were surrounded by tanks, drones buzzing overhead, no power, no food. We were operating by the light of mobile phones,” he recalled.
“When the oxygen machines began to fail and the heart monitors went dark, I knew we were no longer in a hospital,” Amna, a 32-year-old nurse who has worked at Al-Shifa for around 10 years, told +972. “We were inside a mass grave in the making.”
Amna had lived through previous wars and sieges, but what happened that month, she said, was unlike anything before. “There were too many of them,” she recalled. “We had to make impossible choices — who to treat first, who we could try to save, and who we had to let go. Many died not because their injuries were too severe, but because there were no machines, no space, no hands left to help.”
When Israeli forces invaded Al-Shifa, Khalil — along with patients, staff, and displaced civilians — was forced to evacuate under fire. His path southward led through flattened neighborhoods and overcrowded shelters, until he reached Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of the last semi-functioning medical centers in Gaza. But even there, the conditions were nightmarish.
“People were bleeding out in the hallways,” he says. “There was no morphine. No antibiotics. Sometimes, not even gauze.” The medical teams were unable to save many injured people waiting to be admitted to intensive care units. “I saw patients — children, the elderly — die while waiting in line for help that never came.”
One memory still haunts Dr. Khalil: a young man around 20 with shrapnel wounds to the abdomen, carried in by relatives on a piece of plywood. “We had no imaging, no operating room, no pain relief. He died within the hour — not because we didn’t know how to save him, but because we had nothing to save him with.”
The conditions Khalil and his colleagues have endured would be unimaginable in any other context. “We’ve operated after 48 hours without sleep,” he said. “We haven’t eaten — there’s no food. Sometimes we work entire shifts without a drop of clean water. We work while our own families are displaced or buried. Sometimes we treat patients knowing there’s no chance, but we try anyway. Because we have to.”
Bombs fall nearby as surgeries are conducted; the whirring of drones and the screams of the wounded echo through darkened corridors. “We’re not just treating trauma — we’re living it,” Khalil added. “We are the wounded treating the wounded. But we refuse to let our people die alone.”
‘No one had time for someone who wasn’t bleeding’
According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7. Yet those numbers do not capture the full scale of the crisis: many additional deaths could have been prevented if Gaza’s health system had not been dismantled piece by piece.
On March 2, 2025, Haithm Hasan Hajaj, a 41-year-old civil engineer and father of three, died in northern Gaza after months of suffering from a treatable illness — one of many silent deaths amid a destroyed health system, where medical needs become impossible requests.
His wife, Mona, still can’t accept it. “He wasn’t killed in an airstrike. He died slowly, quietly, because no one could help him,” the 37-year-old told +972, holding back tears. “We searched for help for nine months. We begged for a diagnosis, for medicine, for anything. But there was nothing.”
Hajaj’s symptoms began in July 2024: sudden stomach pain, fatigue, and unexplained anaemia. “At first, we thought it was stress from the war and starvation,” Mona said. “But within weeks, he could barely stand. We went from place to place, but every hospital was overwhelmed. They told us: ‘We’re only treating war injuries.’ No one had time for someone who wasn’t bleeding.”
Trapped in the north under siege, they had no access to specialists or functioning labs. “One day we went to the Baptist Hospital,” Mona explained. “We waited from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. — 16 hours in a queue. But they turned us away. The lab had no materials. They couldn’t even do a blood test.”
As the months passed, Hajaj’s condition worsened. His skin broke out in painful rashes. He lost 30 kilograms. “By January, he was skin and bones. My children were scared to touch him — not because they were afraid [of him], but because they could see he was hurting.”
Finally, in the seventh month of his decline, they learned he had coeliac disease, a condition triggered by gluten. The solution should have been simple: remove wheat from his diet. But in Gaza, there was no alternative. “All we had was wheat, and even that was scarce,” Mona said. “We didn’t even know. For months he was eating what was slowly killing him, just to survive.”
Two months later, Hajaj died — not from coeliac disease itself, but from the absence of everything Gaza could no longer provide: diagnostic tools, treatment, food security, and dignity. Their children, aged 9, 11, and 13, now ask questions Mona doesn’t know how to answer. “They keep asking when Baba is coming back,” she said. “The little one told me, ‘We can share our bread with him now. Maybe that will make him better.’ How do you explain to a child that their father died because we couldn’t even find bread that wouldn’t hurt him?”
Before the war, Hajaj was close to completing his PhD. “He only had a few months left,” Mona said. “He had dreams. He wanted to teach. He wanted to build something for this country. We had bought a home in Tel Al-Hawa a year before the war. We learned last November that it was destroyed in an airstrike. But Haithm didn’t complain. He just said, ‘We’ll build again — for the kids.’” She paused, choking up. “But now he’s gone. And I don’t know how to rebuild without him. How can I live without him?”
Their 13-year-old son, Hasan, is trying to fill his father’s place. “Hasan wants to be the man of the house, to help his youngest brother and sister,” Mona said. “Yesterday, he came back from the street in tears, sobbing, saying, ‘I wish I died with Baba. I don’t want to live like this.’ He had gone to try and find food for us, but he couldn’t. He’s only a child. He’s terrified to walk alone in the street with the bombs falling. He needs his father — we all do. I don’t know how to make them feel safe again.”
‘This isn’t just about medicine. It’s about dignity’
For 64-year-old Nabil Zafer (full disclosure: the author’s uncle), the war didn’t take his life — but it took his sight, his independence, and his role as the provider for a family already struggling to survive.
Before the war began, Zafer was receiving regular treatment for severe glaucoma. Twice a week, he would visit the hospital for eye injections to manage the pressure and preserve what remained of his vision. He was also scheduled to travel to Egypt in February 2024 for a surgery to install drainage valves in his eyes, a relatively straightforward procedure that could have saved his vision.
But in late 2023, amid Israel’s intensifying assault, access to eye injections inside Gaza became almost impossible. And with no functioning referral system, Zafer couldn’t make it out — one of more than 10,000 Gazans whose requests for medical evacuations were never approved during the first year of the war. “The doctors told us: ‘If he doesn’t get the surgery soon, he’ll lose his sight’ — and then it was too late,” his wife, Hanan, told +972.
“At first, he started seeing shadows,” the 58-year-old continued. “Then things blurred completely. Day by day, we watched his vision fade. By last November, he was completely blind.”
The loss of his vision has changed every aspect of Zafer’s life and deeply impacted his family. He was the sole provider for a household already marked by hardship: two sons, Hani and Sarah, both living with disabilities; a widowed daughter; and Hanan herself.
“He used to do everything,” she said. “He fixed things around the house, walked to get food, and helped the sons. Now he can’t even see their faces.”
Zafer’s days are now filled with silence and fear. “He always asks me, ‘What if we have to evacuate again? Who will help me? Who will guide me?’” Hanan said. “He tells me, ‘Leave me behind — just don’t leave Hani and Sarah. Make sure they’re safe. That’s all I want.’”
Sometimes, he sits near the window and asks her to describe the street — the people, the sky, the trees. “He wants to remember what the world looks like,” she said, her voice trembling. “But even more than that, he misses seeing our children.
“He keeps asking, ‘When will the border open? Maybe I can still go?’” Hanan continued. “But deep down, we both know there’s nothing waiting on the other side. This isn’t just about medicine. It’s about dignity — and it’s being taken away from us day by day.”
‘All I wish for is to leave Gaza before it’s too late’
For the past six months, 19-year-old Ata Ahmed (a pseudonym) has been lying flat on his back in a tent, paralyzed from the waist down. His life changed in an instant on Sept. 12, 2024, when an Israeli airstrike hit a neighboring home in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood. Shrapnel from the blast tore through his spine, leaving him with permanent damage and a long list of complications. He has since undergone several surgeries — but doctors say they’ve done all they can.
“Every day, I feel my condition getting worse,” Ata told +972. “I applied for a referral to be treated abroad over months ago; I can’t wait much longer. All I wish for is to leave Gaza and get proper treatment before it’s too late. The ceasefire gave me hope, but now I feel as if everything is closed.”
Ata is just one of nearly 35,000 wounded and chronically ill Palestinians in Gaza currently stuck on medical evacuation lists. With hospitals crippled by repeated bombardments, severe shortages, and the total collapse of medical infrastructure, thousands are being denied access to life-saving care. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 40 percent of those who applied for treatment abroad since the war began have died while waiting — victims of closed borders, a broken referral system, and a health care system that no longer functions.
At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, one of the last partially operating facilities in southern Gaza, 81-year-old Umm Saeed Ghabaeen leans back in a plastic chair, visibly drained as another dialysis session begins. She has been battling kidney failure for three years, dependent on routine dialysis to survive. But since the war began, her condition has deteriorated sharply. Forced displacement, severe medicine shortages, and even a lack of clean water have placed her life in constant jeopardy.
“Since we fled our home, everything has changed,” she said. “The sessions are shorter. The machines are fewer. The care is weaker. And I feel more tired every day.”
With only a few dialysis units still operational in the south, hospitals have been forced to reduce the number of weekly sessions and shorten their duration — a dangerous compromise, especially for elderly patients. Doctors warn that these changes could result in a wave of avoidable deaths.
“We’re being pushed to the edge,” Ghabaeen said. “Some days I wonder if I’ll survive until the next session.”
Bleeding out from moderate shrapnel wounds. Dying from illnesses doctors don’t have time to treat. Going blind waiting for medical evacuation abroad. These are the manifold victims of Israel's war on Gaza's health system.
In recent days, details have emerged about a particularly gruesome Israeli massacre targeting Palestinian medical teams in southern Gaza. On March 23, a team of Red Crescent and Civil Defense personnel were sent on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been targeted earlier in the day in the Rafah governorate. At a certain point, contact with the team was lost, and they were assumed dead.
But it wasn’t until days later, when joint crews from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Red Crescent, and the Civil Defense gained access to and exhumed the site that the full horror was revealed: zip-tied hands and feet, signs of execution at point-blank range, and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. These were not casualties of crossfire. Israeli forces had executed them in cold blood, before using a bulldozer to bury their crushed vehicles on top of their bodies.
“We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on,” Jonathan Whittall of OCHA said in a statement after the mass grave was discovered in Tel Al-Sultan. “One of them had his clothes removed, and another one was beheaded,” Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Civil Defense, explained.
According to the Gaza Media Office, the Israeli army has killed 1,402 medical workers since October 7, making it one of the deadliest campaigns against health workers in modern history. The targeting of medical personnel is part of a wider assault on Gaza’s health care infrastructure: 34 hospitals have been destroyed and forced out of service, along with the 240 health centers and facilities and 142 ambulances that have also been targeted. The total damage to the health sector is estimated to exceed $3 billion, leaving it utterly incapable of meeting the urgent needs of a population trapped under siege and bombardment.
Over the course of the war, Israeli forces have also raided multiple medical facilities and converted them into military outposts, as documented by a recent Human Rights Watch investigation. Major hospitals including Al-Shifa and Nasser were not only raided but occupied, endangering patients and staff, resulting in the death of patients who were forcibly removed or left without treatment.
These actions, combined with the broader blockade and deprivation of essential aid, reflect a deliberate strategy of dismantling Gaza’s health care system — a tactic that may amount to crimes against humanity, including extermination and acts of genocide.
During the recent ceasefire, Gaza’s medical facilities were teetering on the edge, disabled by the aftermath of sustained Israeli attacks for 15 months. But with the resumption of Israel’s military campaign and a full blockade on the Strip, Palestinian hospitals in the Gaza Strip have declared that the devastated health care system has now entered a state of “clinical death.”
Dr. Mohammed Zaqout, director-general of field hospitals at the Health Ministry, warned that Israel’s ongoing war is worsening what he called “an already unbearable humanitarian crisis.” He stressed that the continued closure of border crossings by Israeli forces has blocked the entry of desperately needed medicines, medical equipment, and fuel.
The scenes inside Gaza’s hospitals no longer resemble medical facilities. Patients lie strewn across floors slick with blood, their wounds left untreated. Some gasp for air as oxygen runs out; others lie in silence, waiting for relief that will never come. It is a health system not just under siege, but deliberately dismantled.
“Our hospitals are overwhelmed, and we’re running out of everything,” Zaqout said. “We’re not just talking about shortages — we’re talking about total absence.”
‘We use our bare hands and flashlights — it’s medieval’
What once served as a vital network of hospitals, clinics, and referral pathways in Gaza has been reduced to a shattered landscape of field tents, overcrowded shelters, and makeshift wards. These are often without electricity, clean water, or basic medical supplies. The remaining doctors, under siege and targeted alongside their patients, are working far beyond human capacity, operating with little more than gauze and determination.
Still, medical teams are continuing to do everything in their power to help their patients. “We don’t have the luxury to rest,” Dr. Ahmed Khalil (a pseudonym), a physician who has spent the past 540 days moving between bombed hospitals, told +972. “We treat patients on the floor, without electricity, without anesthesia. We use our bare hands and flashlights — it’s medieval.”
In March 2024, Israeli forces surrounded and besieged Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — the enclave’s largest medical facility — for a second time, cutting off access to food, fuel, and medical supplies. Trapped inside for days, Khalil watched it transform from a bustling center of care into a military target. “We were surrounded by tanks, drones buzzing overhead, no power, no food. We were operating by the light of mobile phones,” he recalled.
“When the oxygen machines began to fail and the heart monitors went dark, I knew we were no longer in a hospital,” Amna, a 32-year-old nurse who has worked at Al-Shifa for around 10 years, told +972. “We were inside a mass grave in the making.”
Amna had lived through previous wars and sieges, but what happened that month, she said, was unlike anything before. “There were too many of them,” she recalled. “We had to make impossible choices — who to treat first, who we could try to save, and who we had to let go. Many died not because their injuries were too severe, but because there were no machines, no space, no hands left to help.”
When Israeli forces invaded Al-Shifa, Khalil — along with patients, staff, and displaced civilians — was forced to evacuate under fire. His path southward led through flattened neighborhoods and overcrowded shelters, until he reached Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of the last semi-functioning medical centers in Gaza. But even there, the conditions were nightmarish.
“People were bleeding out in the hallways,” he says. “There was no morphine. No antibiotics. Sometimes, not even gauze.” The medical teams were unable to save many injured people waiting to be admitted to intensive care units. “I saw patients — children, the elderly — die while waiting in line for help that never came.”
One memory still haunts Dr. Khalil: a young man around 20 with shrapnel wounds to the abdomen, carried in by relatives on a piece of plywood. “We had no imaging, no operating room, no pain relief. He died within the hour — not because we didn’t know how to save him, but because we had nothing to save him with.”
The conditions Khalil and his colleagues have endured would be unimaginable in any other context. “We’ve operated after 48 hours without sleep,” he said. “We haven’t eaten — there’s no food. Sometimes we work entire shifts without a drop of clean water. We work while our own families are displaced or buried. Sometimes we treat patients knowing there’s no chance, but we try anyway. Because we have to.”
Bombs fall nearby as surgeries are conducted; the whirring of drones and the screams of the wounded echo through darkened corridors. “We’re not just treating trauma — we’re living it,” Khalil added. “We are the wounded treating the wounded. But we refuse to let our people die alone.”
‘No one had time for someone who wasn’t bleeding’
According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7. Yet those numbers do not capture the full scale of the crisis: many additional deaths could have been prevented if Gaza’s health system had not been dismantled piece by piece.
On March 2, 2025, Haithm Hasan Hajaj, a 41-year-old civil engineer and father of three, died in northern Gaza after months of suffering from a treatable illness — one of many silent deaths amid a destroyed health system, where medical needs become impossible requests.
His wife, Mona, still can’t accept it. “He wasn’t killed in an airstrike. He died slowly, quietly, because no one could help him,” the 37-year-old told +972, holding back tears. “We searched for help for nine months. We begged for a diagnosis, for medicine, for anything. But there was nothing.”
Hajaj’s symptoms began in July 2024: sudden stomach pain, fatigue, and unexplained anaemia. “At first, we thought it was stress from the war and starvation,” Mona said. “But within weeks, he could barely stand. We went from place to place, but every hospital was overwhelmed. They told us: ‘We’re only treating war injuries.’ No one had time for someone who wasn’t bleeding.”
Trapped in the north under siege, they had no access to specialists or functioning labs. “One day we went to the Baptist Hospital,” Mona explained. “We waited from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. — 16 hours in a queue. But they turned us away. The lab had no materials. They couldn’t even do a blood test.”
As the months passed, Hajaj’s condition worsened. His skin broke out in painful rashes. He lost 30 kilograms. “By January, he was skin and bones. My children were scared to touch him — not because they were afraid [of him], but because they could see he was hurting.”
Finally, in the seventh month of his decline, they learned he had coeliac disease, a condition triggered by gluten. The solution should have been simple: remove wheat from his diet. But in Gaza, there was no alternative. “All we had was wheat, and even that was scarce,” Mona said. “We didn’t even know. For months he was eating what was slowly killing him, just to survive.”
Two months later, Hajaj died — not from coeliac disease itself, but from the absence of everything Gaza could no longer provide: diagnostic tools, treatment, food security, and dignity. Their children, aged 9, 11, and 13, now ask questions Mona doesn’t know how to answer. “They keep asking when Baba is coming back,” she said. “The little one told me, ‘We can share our bread with him now. Maybe that will make him better.’ How do you explain to a child that their father died because we couldn’t even find bread that wouldn’t hurt him?”
Before the war, Hajaj was close to completing his PhD. “He only had a few months left,” Mona said. “He had dreams. He wanted to teach. He wanted to build something for this country. We had bought a home in Tel Al-Hawa a year before the war. We learned last November that it was destroyed in an airstrike. But Haithm didn’t complain. He just said, ‘We’ll build again — for the kids.’” She paused, choking up. “But now he’s gone. And I don’t know how to rebuild without him. How can I live without him?”
Their 13-year-old son, Hasan, is trying to fill his father’s place. “Hasan wants to be the man of the house, to help his youngest brother and sister,” Mona said. “Yesterday, he came back from the street in tears, sobbing, saying, ‘I wish I died with Baba. I don’t want to live like this.’ He had gone to try and find food for us, but he couldn’t. He’s only a child. He’s terrified to walk alone in the street with the bombs falling. He needs his father — we all do. I don’t know how to make them feel safe again.”
‘This isn’t just about medicine. It’s about dignity’
For 64-year-old Nabil Zafer (full disclosure: the author’s uncle), the war didn’t take his life — but it took his sight, his independence, and his role as the provider for a family already struggling to survive.
Before the war began, Zafer was receiving regular treatment for severe glaucoma. Twice a week, he would visit the hospital for eye injections to manage the pressure and preserve what remained of his vision. He was also scheduled to travel to Egypt in February 2024 for a surgery to install drainage valves in his eyes, a relatively straightforward procedure that could have saved his vision.
But in late 2023, amid Israel’s intensifying assault, access to eye injections inside Gaza became almost impossible. And with no functioning referral system, Zafer couldn’t make it out — one of more than 10,000 Gazans whose requests for medical evacuations were never approved during the first year of the war. “The doctors told us: ‘If he doesn’t get the surgery soon, he’ll lose his sight’ — and then it was too late,” his wife, Hanan, told +972.
“At first, he started seeing shadows,” the 58-year-old continued. “Then things blurred completely. Day by day, we watched his vision fade. By last November, he was completely blind.”
The loss of his vision has changed every aspect of Zafer’s life and deeply impacted his family. He was the sole provider for a household already marked by hardship: two sons, Hani and Sarah, both living with disabilities; a widowed daughter; and Hanan herself.
“He used to do everything,” she said. “He fixed things around the house, walked to get food, and helped the sons. Now he can’t even see their faces.”
Zafer’s days are now filled with silence and fear. “He always asks me, ‘What if we have to evacuate again? Who will help me? Who will guide me?’” Hanan said. “He tells me, ‘Leave me behind — just don’t leave Hani and Sarah. Make sure they’re safe. That’s all I want.’”
Sometimes, he sits near the window and asks her to describe the street — the people, the sky, the trees. “He wants to remember what the world looks like,” she said, her voice trembling. “But even more than that, he misses seeing our children.
“He keeps asking, ‘When will the border open? Maybe I can still go?’” Hanan continued. “But deep down, we both know there’s nothing waiting on the other side. This isn’t just about medicine. It’s about dignity — and it’s being taken away from us day by day.”
‘All I wish for is to leave Gaza before it’s too late’
For the past six months, 19-year-old Ata Ahmed (a pseudonym) has been lying flat on his back in a tent, paralyzed from the waist down. His life changed in an instant on Sept. 12, 2024, when an Israeli airstrike hit a neighboring home in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood. Shrapnel from the blast tore through his spine, leaving him with permanent damage and a long list of complications. He has since undergone several surgeries — but doctors say they’ve done all they can.
“Every day, I feel my condition getting worse,” Ata told +972. “I applied for a referral to be treated abroad over months ago; I can’t wait much longer. All I wish for is to leave Gaza and get proper treatment before it’s too late. The ceasefire gave me hope, but now I feel as if everything is closed.”
Ata is just one of nearly 35,000 wounded and chronically ill Palestinians in Gaza currently stuck on medical evacuation lists. With hospitals crippled by repeated bombardments, severe shortages, and the total collapse of medical infrastructure, thousands are being denied access to life-saving care. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 40 percent of those who applied for treatment abroad since the war began have died while waiting — victims of closed borders, a broken referral system, and a health care system that no longer functions.
At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, one of the last partially operating facilities in southern Gaza, 81-year-old Umm Saeed Ghabaeen leans back in a plastic chair, visibly drained as another dialysis session begins. She has been battling kidney failure for three years, dependent on routine dialysis to survive. But since the war began, her condition has deteriorated sharply. Forced displacement, severe medicine shortages, and even a lack of clean water have placed her life in constant jeopardy.
“Since we fled our home, everything has changed,” she said. “The sessions are shorter. The machines are fewer. The care is weaker. And I feel more tired every day.”
With only a few dialysis units still operational in the south, hospitals have been forced to reduce the number of weekly sessions and shorten their duration — a dangerous compromise, especially for elderly patients. Doctors warn that these changes could result in a wave of avoidable deaths.
“We’re being pushed to the edge,” Ghabaeen said. “Some days I wonder if I’ll survive until the next session.”
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