901 - VI-Day feat. Mohammad Alsaafin (1/20/25)

All I wanna be is El Jumpo.

All I wanna be is El Joco.

We ain't gonna tell Besos.

All I

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, January 20th, and we are back.

Obviously, I think we'll have more on Thursday covering the inauguration of the second Trump Imperium.

But today, we're joined by our friend Muhammad Al-Safan to talk about what we saw happen over the last weeks and this weekend, which is the initiation of a temporary ceasefire in Gaza and an exchange of hostages.

So I think that's probably the most important thing going on in the world right now.

But just to begin, Mohamed, what can you tell us about

what is the outline of this temporary ceasefire?

And how much, if at all, does it differ from the various ceasefires that have been talked about and teased for the last couple months?

And why do you think this happened now?

Those are a lot of questions, but I think the most important thing is to say that the most important thing happening is actually Melania Trump's hat.

So I take exceptionally

characterizing this as somehow of more interest to the world.

To answer the question about what is different about this one than the others that have been teased over the last year and a half, not much apparently.

We know, for example, that it's very, very, very similar to the deal that Joe Biden put forward in May.

last May, that Hamas accepted,

publicly accepted, and that was ratified

by the United Nations Security Council before Netanyahu reneged on it.

And rather than punish him, Joe Biden supplied him with billions of dollars more in weapons.

What was interesting for me was that the day after the ceasefire was signed last week, the Qatari Prime Minister, and caveat, obviously I work for an organization that is financed by the Qatari government, but the Qatari government has also been the main mediator between Hamas and Israel throughout this war.

And what the Qatari prime minister said was the deal was actually, the framework of the deal was essentially the same as one that had been put forward in December 2023.

So a full 13 months ago.

And he said the minor details where it differs, the minor details where it differs from, where this deal differs from that one,

according to him, were not worth the life of a single person killed since then.

And since then, I think the number of people killed officially is about 30,000 more people.

And that is, of course, a vast undercount.

Now, why did it happen now?

Donald Trump, funnily enough.

Look, the Democrats had every moral and political incentive to end this at any point.

And they chose to double down every single time, especially Joe Biden.

And I think this was an easy win for Donald Trump, and he saw it coming a mile away.

He,

look, a lot of Democrats spent the bulk of the last 15 months trying to convince themselves and everyone else that the United States has no leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel.

And I think Donald Trump, for all his faults, knows what the balance of power is and was like, no, I'm not going to have my presidency.

I'm not going to start my second presidency with a genocide ongoing.

Yeah, it really seemed like the guy that Trump had in the stead of like a Brett McGurk or

uh any of the West exec people that were working under the Blinken regime,

he's just some like fucking New York real estate guy.

But just from a lifetime of like haggling with tenants, he was just, he was that much better at like, not even that much better, just that much more willing to exhibit any pressure at all on Israel as a negotiating partner.

Yeah, I mean,

I think

Tony Blinken tried his hardest.

How is he supposed to know how easy it was?

Well, I mean, I think like an object lesson in the difference in the negotiating strategies of Donald Trump and the Blinken State Department is, yeah, Felix, you mentioned the guy Trump sent over as his representative is a guy named Steve Witkoff, who's like, yeah, like a Bronx real estate guy.

And

he sent a message to Netanyahu.

He was like, yeah, we're meeting today.

And Netanyahu was like, I can't.

It's Shabbos.

And he was like, I don't give a fuck.

You're working on the weekend.

You're like, wait,

you think you can get out of this?

Because Netanyahu is like, you know, in his personal life, almost a totally secular guy so the idea that he can you imagine joe biden saying

you to to netanyahu yeah like yeah joe biden would be like oh my god i'm so i'm i actually celebrate chavez yeah i forgot

i mean like the idea that chill to turn the light off for me yeah i can't believe i forgot the idea that netanyahu spends his saturday like with the lights off and like you know not touching uh money or anything is like is absurd and it was just like it was very clear that yeah like trump wanted this deal because he didn't want this fucking anchor around his neck going into his second term in office and it seems like yeah like once pressure is applied um the results are clear but Mohamed like what are your expectations on the outlines of the ceasefire deer holding are you optimistic about like what the like reaching the next stage and like and because I know like the Israeli government has you know made some public statements indicating that they're like we're going to restart the war as as soon as possible.

Like, is that just a bluff for their domestic political consumption?

But like, what is the next step of this ceasefire?

And are you optimistic about reaching that?

I believe that that is a bluff.

But I think to

explain why I do have hope that this will hold, it's probably worth describing to the audience what the actual deal is.

So it's been phased over three phases.

Each phase lasts around six weeks.

And the success of one phase

supposed to lead to the implementation of the following phase.

So the first phase, which we are in now, will see the release of about 30, I think, or 33 Israeli captives held in Gaza in exchange for a number of

several hundred Palestinian captives held in

Israeli jails.

We saw the first

three Israelis released on, I think it was Saturday, right?

Saturday, yep.

And in exchange, several hundred Palestinians were released in the West Bank.

So the first phase will see, like I said, the exchange of Israeli women, minors, and men over the age of 50

leaving

Israelis of military age that Hamas says are Israeli soldiers captured on October 7th.

And

they will be released in the second phase.

The first phase also includes the entry entry of 600 trucks of aid every single day into Gaza, the entry of temporary housing, tents, since the UN estimates about 90% of Gaza's housing stock has been destroyed by Israel.

And I believe the reason that I have hope that this will hold is I think as more time goes on, there won't be the political incentive for Netanyahu to go back to war will actually decrease, or the political appetite for war amongst Israelis will decrease, especially as they get closer to getting getting more and more of their captives out of Gaza.

So that's my hope.

Now, the second phase will see the release of, like I said, Israeli captives of military age or Israeli soldiers held in Gaza in exchange for some of the more, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners who have higher prison sentences.

Some of them have life sentences.

Some of them are high-profile prisoners.

political leaders, military leaders, etc.

And that is where many people are worried things could break down because Israelis are adamant that some of those people will not be freed.

But assuming all goes well, the third phase then will be a

reconstruction phase where the means for the reconstruction of Gaza and a three to five year plan for rebuilding the territory is implemented.

So that is my hope.

That is my hope.

It's the phase nature of the deal that gives me hope that it would hold because Israelis

would want to see their captives return.

The other thing that I think is important to note here is the Israelis, despite the destruction of Gaza, and you can see the images, it looks like several nuclear bombs have hit Gaza,

failed in achieving the war aims as put out by the Israeli government.

That is, the destruction of Hamas,

the return of Israeli captives by force without a prisoner exchange,

and basically removing Hamas's ability to control and rule Gaza.

It's failed on all three fronts.

And I think the Israeli army was exhausted.

I think the military establishment has been talking for months about the fact that the war is essentially a quagmire, that

they're going back into places that they've destroyed, held, and cleared, and facing resistance all over again every single time.

I think the town of Beit Hanoun is really instructive.

Bethanoun is one of the smallest towns in Gaza.

It's right up on the northeastern border.

And it was the first town that the Israelis entered when they began their land invasion in October 2023.

It's been destroyed several times over.

And when the Israelis went back in two weeks ago, they were shocked at the Israeli army, was shocked at the amount of resistance it faced there, with 15 Israeli soldiers being killed just in the last two weeks.

Yeah, that has been one of the stunning aspects of the war in Gaza specifically.

Just both Hamas's ability to regroup and rebuild, which, you know, that in and of itself isn't totally surprising given that they're incredibly experienced at this and they've prepared for this type of thing exactly.

But really, just

their success this late in the war with, you know, both more conventional seeming anti-tank tactics and just like the

more

urban warfare traps that they seem to catch the IOF forces in routinely.

You would think that like that late, that there wouldn't still be ambushes where 15 Israeli occupation soldiers were killed at once, but they were just still able to do it.

And

just about like optimism towards the deal and everything.

And I think it's important to like lay out exactly what's in it.

But for the people that were just reflexively saying like, they'll completely break this, they'll completely violate this, which, you know, they have broken a ton of agreements before, obviously.

But I just, I don't think we'd see this level of like crashing out by

specifically ministers like Ben Gavir over this if they were just going to completely flaunt it.

in the next day.

Yeah, yeah, I don't disagree with you at all.

It's been really something to see the fact that the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, I mean, hasn't, it's completely cut off from the rest of the world and has been for more than a decade, right?

Or for decades, I should say.

Gaza's been isolated from the world for decades.

And yet, despite 15 months of war, where they probably didn't receive any reinforcements, any resupplies, while the Israelis were receiving daily direct shipments of weaponry from the United States, they managed to hold out this long.

It's been...

It's quite interesting.

It's quite fascinating.

I'm sure there'll be those interested in kind of like the

strategy of

guerrilla

warfare will have more to say on this than I do, but I did not foresee them holding out this long.

Yeah, no, I mean, I to echo what both you and Felix have said, there has been a number of times over the last year and a half or so where I had just kind of assumed or expected that they've resisted as long and hard as they possibly could under the circumstances, but like perhaps they've run out of ammo or just men to fight.

But no, as you mentioned, like the fact that they were still in the field engaging the enemy in in an area of of north gaza that that had been claimed to have been totally pacified is quite remarkable and muhammad like of the images we saw coming out of gaza of like uh the celebrations of essentially a victory parade happening what does this say to to both israel but the world in general about like you know the strength and contours of resistance to basically withstand hell on earth for a year and a half and still be able to fight.

I think it tells the world that the Israelis destroying hospitals and killing doctors was not the best way to take out Hamas, probably.

No, but on a serious note,

I think what it tells the world is that were it not for the resistance in Gaza, that Israel would have been able to build settlements, that would have been able to empty out, especially northern Gaza, would have committed mass ethnic cleansing.

But the fact that the resistance was able to continue holding on and fighting until the very end forced the Israelis to

come to the table and agree to a deal and kind of accept the conditions Hamas had laid out back in October 2023, which is a prisoner swap,

the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from Gaza, and reconstruction.

It also means that, you know,

Back in the beginning of the war, the United States talked a lot about the day after, who would rule Gaza the day after.

And it was taken as inevitable that it would not be Hamas, that Israel would destroy Hamas, and Hamas had no future in Palestinian politics.

Up until just a few weeks ago, that's the kind of stuff that the Biden administration would be talking about.

What is clear is that neither Israel nor the United States, nor their allies in the region were able to impose that on Gaza, and that who rules Gaza going forward and what Palestinian politics looks like going forward will be decided primarily by Palestinians themselves.

Now, obviously, there is a cost to this resistance.

I mean,

they prove that, like, you know, in order, the only really way to fight, like you said, a movement of national resistance is to kill everyone.

And the fact that they haven't been able to do that

says something.

But like, you see, you see the celebrations and the happiness, but obviously that is

in the shadow of the just almost unspeakable toll that this resistance required to like to get it to this point,

which is stunning.

But like, Mohamed, I want to talk about a piece you wrote in The Nation recently, where you talked about how you talked about the sort of the intermingling of like 17th century imperialism with 21st century technology and what the war in Gaza, what this genocide has, what it will augur for like the century that we're all living in here of essentially a world of war without limits.

Could you talk about that and just like the implications of like what this conflict has midwife into the world in terms of like the trashing of international law and a world in which

drone quadcopters can just shoot kids like without without mercy.

Yeah, I mean,

in the early phases of the war, and I think we've gone kind of, I think a lot of us have gone, might have gotten numb to

the brutality of this war as it's gone on and dragged on for 15 months.

But if you remember the utter

devastation and the the savagery of the Israeli attacks in October and November 2023, which is when I read that line by Professor Saeed Makdisi about the intermingling of, or the intertwining of 17th century genocidal policies with 21st century weaponry.

And at the time, I had thought of it as hopefully

a prologue to this era of Israeli

of Zionism.

The brutality and the barbarity of these attacks would force the world to confront what Israel is, what Israeli policies towards the Palestinians have been,

to confront the fact that the West has in general supported Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and occupation, and that we would see a political solution stem from that, from the revulsion that I was sure these attacks would cause.

Instead, we had the West, primarily the United States, but also several countries in Europe, supporting Israel even as we saw and

they knew exactly what the Israelis were doing.

I mean, you had Biden in one of his final interviews before leaving office last week talking about how on the 10th day or the ninth day of the war, Netanyahu had told him that he wanted to basically do to Gaza what the U.S.

did to Hiroshima.

So

the entire time that Matt Miller has been getting up or Tony Blinken has been getting up in front of reporters and saying, oh, we actually don't know what happened or our friends in Israel are investigating.

They knew, they knew from the beginning what the policy was going to be, they knew from the beginning what the goals were.

And I think, as I think back on this notion of 17th and 21st century genocide entwined,

I'm worried that instead this has been an epilogue, that we're looking at a world now

where there is no morality in warfare, there are no rules, where

hospitals can be bombed, attacked, doctors killed, children sniped, entire populations starved, and that this would all be seen as legitimate warfare.

It was very ironic that Biden said his response to Netanyahu's plans to do Hiroshima to Gaza was that, hey, man, we don't do this anymore, not since World War II, and then proceeded to give him all the weapons to do exactly that.

Well, and as you said, like, you know,

absent the

nuclear weapon aspect of it, they basically have done Hiroshima to Gaza.

I mean, I guess there's no radioactive fallout, but there's no radioactive active fallout, but in terms of destruction, I think it's been calculated that several nuclear weapons worth of explosives have been dropped on Gaza.

You bring up

now out as former Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.

But on his way out, at one of his last press conferences, he said, we assessed that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.

I mean, that was a good idea.

Yeah.

I was really disappointed he didn't say that

with his blues singing voice and guitar.

Well,

they were out of shoe polish that day.

Oh, okay.

We estimate that Hamas has been able to replenish their fighting forces of Hoochie-Coochie men.

But like, I mean,

like, he says that on the way out, but like,

is there any follow-up in his mind or in the mind of the U.S.

foreign policy apparatus that like, gee, I wonder why that is?

I mean, you can blame them.

Nothing like this has ever happened.

I think throughout history, when you kill people's families,

when you kill people's families and

throughout history, they tend to just kind of like you.

That's how you make people like you.

I mean, look, Biden's foreign policy

has been a disaster all across the board.

But

going back to what we were saying at the beginning, by virtue of the fact that Trump was like,

this is stupid, stop it now, and was able to get it stopped.

It just just puts into stark contrast how bad these guys were.

I mean, these were supposed to be, they call themselves the A-team, by the way, Biden's foreign policy.

I love it when a plan doesn't come together.

There's a whole book about it.

It was published just before October 7th, ironically.

But yeah, they call themselves the A-team.

That's Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, all these guys.

And, you know, the crazy thing is, Trump is no friend to the Palestinians.

I mean, this is a guy who used Palestinian as a slur on the presidential debate stage.

And yet, he's been much better for Palestinians already than Biden has been, which tells you how bad, how low the bar is.

But, you know, the overriding kind of goal of like your Brett McGurks and your Tony Blinkens has been to fashion kind of a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

And the Saudis have resisted because

it's going to be bad optics optics for them to do that while the genocide was going on in Gaza.

And I think

Trump and his people also have that overarching goal, but they saw what was obvious to everyone else.

The easiest way to get it to happen is to stop the genocide so the Saudis would come on board.

For some reason,

Biden's people just couldn't see that.

Just another moment from the final Blinken press conference.

He was asked by a reporter, quote,

there's a flood of reports and supporting videos of international law violations, yet you've refrained from making a definitive assessment.

There's a sense that you've given Israel a pass.

Blinken's response was, we take international law seriously.

Gaza is unique.

Israel is investigating itself.

I mean, like...

That's, look, everyone phones it in sometimes, but that's like, that's like the notes that you would give to Blinken's understudy if he had food poisoning.

But like,

in his statement that Gaza is unique, is that referring to like, as what I've heard many times from the State Department, that because Gaza and Palestine isn't a state, then like, technically, Israel is the state, and they have courts to investigate this.

So, like, the international law is for states that don't have democratic accountability.

Yeah, look, the Palestinian scholar Nura Arakat wrote a great book on this called Justice for Some, where she looks at how the United States and Israel have kind of carved out an exception in international law when it comes to Palestine.

And

it actually makes no sense on the merits, but basically their argument is that Palestine is not a state and therefore Israel, which controls Palestine illegally, because it's under an illegal occupation, is the sole arbiter of what is right and wrong there, even though Israel is the one committing all these crimes and atrocities.

So, I mean, that's been State Department, that's been a State Department talking point for a while.

I think it's just become as the images that we've been seeing from Gaza become harder and harder to ignore,

the ridiculousness of it all becomes more apparent.

That seems to be like a pattern with anything Palestine-related that there are always going to be people on the Zionist side.

And I think the Zionist side is going to be now probably more

openly bloodthirsty and openly racist and psychotic than ever.

And that's going to be permanent.

But for people who

try to still maintain some like false false stance of neutrality or even like liberal Zionists, they get into this like

mystification thing with everything related to Palestine.

I don't know if people saw the

is it the American Historical Association?

Yeah.

Yeah, whatever the name is for like the Academic Association for Historians, they had a vote.

about recognizing scholasticide in Gaza and

it passed among the members very easily.

But the organization.

I believe it was 480 to 80.

It was 423 to 88 was the funnel.

Yeah, like a gigantic margin.

And the organization, it's like the heads of the organization just vetoed it.

And one of the people who, you know, is on the board and knocked this down, who, by the way, her at is tenured radical, which is just fucking fucking amazing.

Her response was basically, well you know we're historians but like this is still happening so who's to say if it's history or if it's even happened yet

as you said felix it's not history yet it's only news we can't comment on the news because it's not history yet we need like a hundred years to figure out if this happened if it will happen if it's still happening i don't know how time works anymore

yeah i mean look the aha is kind of obscure and i've seen online some historians get upset about it, but I don't think it's something that will register with most people.

But

it's very

symptomatic of what this war has done to a lot of liberal institutions, right?

Whether it's the media, whether it's politics, where there has to be an exception to Palestine.

Otherwise, everything that we say, everything that we take as

we've taken for granted, everything that,

you know, all all the norms that we abide by don't mean anything.

So for example, I mean, Gaza's created a huge crisis of legitimacy for the media, for

representative politics.

I mean, when you have, even in the United States, the most pro-Israel country on earth, when you have 80% of the population, give or take,

wanting a ceasefire for the last 15 months, and yet only, I think, 10% of Congress voting along that line.

We've created a huge crisis.

And we saw it play out in the 2024 presidential election, right?

I don't know if Gaza was a deciding factor, but it was a huge factor for a lot of people.

It was a huge factor why a lot of people, for example, see

Harris's refusal to break from Biden.

It paved the way for Donald Trump to get a lot of votes he wouldn't have gone otherwise from certain communities.

It's why when someone like AOC stands up and says,

Biden and Harris are working around the clock for a ceasefire, Everyone knows that's bullshit.

You just kind of tarnished your entire reputation as this progressive force

in American politics.

You look at the media, right?

I mean, look, just look at the way the coverage of the prisoner swap has been.

So you had three Israelis released, I think

several hundred Palestinians.

The three Israelis were women.

All the Palestinians who were released were either women or children.

You look at the headlines, you look at the statements made by political leaders across the West, you look at news reports on TV, online, the headline is all the same.

It's all about just the three Israelis who were released, right?

And we live in an era where people have access to the rest of the information and people are questioning all the time, why am I not seeing this, right?

The erosion of trust in all this.

And then you have the same people talking who spread propaganda about beheaded babies or about, you know, sexual assaults will now spend the Trump era talking about misinformation and talking about how, you know, so there's Gaza's cause, I mean, not to take away from,

I think, the most directly impacted, which is the people of Gaza, but I think Gaza's created a huge crisis across liberal institutions in the West as well.

Yeah, I mean, you brought it up yourself, but like after

you know, the first Trump administration, I think like the main like cultural tilt among like

liberal media and cultural institutions and like liberal politicians was this idea of like

truth as its own

as its own goal to strive for.

That we were in like a post-truth world and that everything

needed to be reoriented around like reinforcing truth and like verifying things and fighting misinformation.

And now it's like

it isn't just lying, it's like all of these institutions breaking down in such a way that they are, that they're just outright saying, well, who knows like what reality we live in?

It's one thing to lie.

It's another thing to just throw up your hands and go, I don't know.

Maybe I didn't see.

Maybe this isn't happening.

I mean, yeah, like, I think this is causing a great deal of discomfort for, like I said,

otherwise, you know, like people who imagine themselves as well-meaning liberals, because like we spent the last year, particularly in this election year, hearing over and over again, like, oh, you want to punish Biden and Harris for what they've done to Gaza, but like, I hope you like what Donald Trump will do.

And then he gets in and there's a ceasefire deal.

And I guess the reactions to that I've heard is like comparisons to.

Before he even got in.

Yeah, before he even gets in.

Like, yeah.

And it's just like everything they've said over and over again, like, oh, it's not a genocide.

Like, Trump will be worse, we see are, you know, like are being sort of brutally

ripped from them.

And I think like they find themselves on not just the outskirts of their own professed values, but the values of the vast majority of human beings on this planet.

And I think it makes them very uncomfortable and they're lashing out, not necessarily to convince anyone else, but to convince themselves that they're still right.

that they didn't do anything wrong.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's not me who's calling what's happening in Gaza a genocide.

It's most of the world's genocide experts.

It's Human Rights Watch.

It's Amnesty International.

And these are organizations, by the way, that have traditionally been extremely slow at calling out what's happening exactly in Israel.

So it was only a couple of years ago that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch described Israeli apartheid as Israeli apartheid.

And that was seen as a momentous

call.

And yet, you know,

especially as we look at the Trump presidency sandwich, sorry, the Biden presidency sandwich between the two dollars.

Trump presidencies.

This was the guy who was supposed to restore the soul of the nation.

You know,

Blinken talked about putting human rights at the center of his foreign policy.

It wasn't Trump who committed genocide.

It was these guys, right?

And

there's a lot in there that people have to...

grapple with and come to terms with about what that means in U.S.

politics and what that means about what the Democratic Party is and where it's at.

I mean,

I've seen some reactions reactions comparing this to the

like Reagan-Carter Iran hostage deal.

And they're like, I can't believe we're getting played again.

And I'm like, well, that comparison breaks down because Jimmy Carter was actually trying to get the hostages back and not giving weapons to Iran while he was doing it or not doing it.

And yeah, it's just refusal to face reality.

And especially in light of...

I remember like the anger and feeling of betrayal over, for instance, the Arab and Muslim community in Michigan withholding their votes from Biden to such a large degree.

I mean, and now we see them as being utterly vindicated as like, this, yes, this is what you do as a rational actor in a democratic society, is that if you're opposed to something that the party in power is doing, you can't hold them accountable by rewarding their political ambitions.

Yeah.

And not only that, but like, but in fact, Trump is not worse than Biden on this issue.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, man,

the amount of shit people got for saying, look, I'm not going to vote for Biden.

I'm not, I can't, genocide is a red line and I won't abide that by people who felt like you owed the Democrats your vote.

And

I mean, I don't know what the, what Trump's going to do for the next four years.

I don't have any illusions about him or the people around him.

But like you said, a lot of people have been vindicated.

And I think a lot of people will really

understand that politics in this country is transactional and it's not based on giving the Democratic Party a pass and blind support and loyalty no matter what they do.

And I think the Democrats' assumption that minorities, Muslims, and others will always support them no matter what, I think that's broken down forever.

Now,

in terms of what the next four years might look like or in Palestine,

another aspect of this is the

expectation that

if a ceasefire in Gaza holds, that the the Israeli government and military will turn their eyes to the West Bank.

And we've seen a steady escalation of violence in the West Bank and sort of settler pogroms and housing demolition.

And then also like out there is the concept of just the straight-up annexation of the West Bank.

Like, do you think that that's likely to happen?

And if it does happen, in a certain sense, would Israel annexing the West Bank just make official what a process I mean that's that everyone already knows is underway and like it will be sort of almost an acknowledgement of reality, despite how evil it may be.

Like, what do you make of what's happening in the West Bank right now and this concept of Israel just annexing it outright?

Yeah, so

the West Bank has always been kind of the bigger prize for

the more messianic amongst the Israeli political

parties.

They believe it's kind of the heartland of biblical Judaism, and so that is where they have their eyes set.

Now, there are also the heartland of biblical Christianity as well.

Well,

there are

700,000 Israelis living in the occupied West Bank.

That's 10% of the Israeli population, the Israeli Jewish population.

And

Israel exercises full sovereignty over almost the entirety of the region.

So this notion that Israel could annex the West Bank and that would be a disaster, I think it would actually just be making official what has been the reality on the ground for a few years now.

And I think that could be a double-edged sword.

I think the Trump administration, like we've seen, say, with the Golan Heights in Syria, would happily recognize Israel's annexation of more territory, even if it goes against international law.

But I think it would put Israel in a bind because for a long time, Israel's liberal supporters especially have pointed to the idea of a two-state solution where the Palestinian state's primarily based in the West Bank

as being kind of the

goal that's always just over the horizon, but the one we always have to strive for.

And therefore, any notion of kind of

reckoning with what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 and offering any kind of redress for that, for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948,

is a folly and we shouldn't waste our time on that.

We should always be thinking about the two-state solution.

So if the Israelis go ahead and annex it, then

that, which is like a huge, which is

a tenant of liberal Zionism, immediately falls and becomes exposed for what it is.

So

could it happen?

Absolutely, it could definitely happen.

There's nothing stopping the Israelis from announcing today that they've annexed the West Bank.

Functionally, they already control it and have been.

What the outcome of that will be

remains to be seen.

I don't think it will all go great for the Israelis, to be honest.

Now, the violence in the West Bank, yes, there's a lot of violence, Israeli violence.

I mean, the day the ceasefire was announced, you had Israeli settlers going on pogroms, setting houses and vehicles on fire across villages in the West Bank.

But the violence there preceded October 7th, and in fact was cited by Hamas as one of the reasons for October 7th.

The increased violence, the killing, the rate of killing in the West Bank had gone on, gone up year on year on year, even though there was no

big militant presence in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority works side by side with the Israeli army and intelligence services to

fight any kind of Palestinian

militarism against the Israelis.

So what's going to be interesting to see is what the consequences for the Palestinian Authority will be.

Because the Palestinian Authority is favored, say, in official Washington as the entity that could that should be ruling over Gaza instead of Hamas.

And what we've seen through the ceasefire deal is that the Palestinian Authority won't be going back to Gaza.

Hamas remains in power over there.

We've seen the Palestinian Authority clamp down on any protests, expressions of solidarity with Gaza.

They had put a siege on the Jenin refugee camp, which is kind of

one of the bastions of Palestinian militancy in the West Bank.

Has been under siege for six weeks, going on seven weeks by the Palestinian Authority now.

And I think part of that is an attempt by the PA's leadership to burnish their credentials to the United States and to Israel in the hope of being able to take over Gaza.

And that's kind of collapsed now because the ceasefire has gone in place with Hamas intact as a ruling power.

I want to talk about like another another aspect of a potential aspect of if the ceasefire holding is that what do you make of the fact that like at some point the Western journalists who have been covering this war mostly from Tel Aviv and like you know talking to their sources and relaying what their sources tell them at some point do you imagine that the Western press will want to gain access to Gaza?

Like, do you expect them to report what they, I mean, we all know what they're going to report when they see there.

But, like, how do you, I imagine that this is a huge threat both to, I don't know, like, the Israeli state and just the propaganda apparatus?

Because, like,

I think, like, even as propagandists, there is still an expectation that you have to do your job, that you have to show up at least.

What do you imagine the, like, when and if the Western press is granted access to the Gaza Strip, what do you imagine that, like, how, like, how they will metabolize what they see there, and what the effects for that will be, like, to the overall, you know, public understanding of this conflict?

You know, back in November 2023, when you guys recall, there was a week-long truce where the majority of Israeli captives were actually released back then.

And it came out that one of the things that the United States and Israel were worried about was if this truce held

and foreign journalists were allowed into Gaza, that the scale of what Israel had done would be shocking and would cause Israel a lot of a lot of problems.

And this was November 2023, only a month into the war.

So you can imagine 14, 13 months on

what's happened since then.

I don't know.

I don't know what foreign journalists...

Look,

you don't have to be inside Gaza to know what's been happening.

There's a reason why Israel has killed over 200 Palestinian journalists because they were showing the world what was happening.

And, you know, I work for a company where none of of our journalists were able to go in from the outside, but we hired people on the ground to tell the story.

And they did it with dedication and bravery and professionalism that I think matches with anyone in the history of this profession.

Many of them lost their lives.

I mean, just my company, I think we've lost,

I can't keep count, I think seven or eight journalists, cameramen, producers, drivers who've been killed, targeted airstrikes or snipers.

So what the forum press or what the western media is going to see when they go in, I think is something that anyone who has been paying any attention has already seen.

It would be interesting to see

how they then are able to kind of metabolize it, as you say.

But the issue isn't with a lot of journalists themselves, it's with kind of the institutions and the editors that they report back to.

There was a great investigative report in Dropsite News by Owen Jones looking at what's going on in the BBC, where dozens of BBC journalists have been kind of fighting a battle, a losing battle, with their superiors in the BBC about how the BBC is covering this story.

And who's not the journalists who are,

you know, choosing misleading headlines or focusing on just Israeli suffering at the expense of Palestinian suffering or treating what's going on in Gaza as if it's a natural disaster with

no antagonists.

It's the editors and

it's the leadership of these institutions.

And so it would be interesting to see how the journalists themselves are able to deal with that once they file their reports if they get it.

Something that I was curious about, and

it sort of dovetails with this, with the fear both on the American and Israeli side of

people actually being able to fully document the horrors inflicted on Gaza.

I was wondering if you saw the,

I can't quite tell if it's like widespread or just like a trend of like a few dozen people,

almost certainly the latter.

But

right after the ceasefire, these groups of Israeli soldiers giving these like, you know, very

shoot and cry style, I can't believe what they made us do over their confessions.

I was wondering, do you interpret that as like

anything beyond just

either pointless gesturing, or do you think that like there is a real fear that they may actually be prosecuted for these things if they leave Israel?

I think it was the Israelis themselves who invented the shoot and cry genre anyway.

Especially, you know, after their invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

I don't know.

I think that a lot of Israelis, Israelis, especially those who

kind of pay attention to what's going on outside Israel, outside Israeli politics and outside the Israeli mainstream media, are probably acutely aware of the fact that their country is more isolated than ever on the world stage.

And they're aware that there are people and organizations that are committed to trying to get accountability, at least in kind of like a legal sense.

The problem is with a lot of Israeli soldiers is they were the ones posting their own crimes.

It's much easier to prosecute people when they're the ones admitting on camera what they did.

The Hindrajab Foundation, which was named after the little girl who was killed

in a car, she was kind of on the phone with the Red Crescent,

begging paramedics to come rescue her.

If you guys remember the story, she was killed by

Israeli tank fire

alongside her cousins and her uncle.

And then the medics that were sent to retrieve her were also killed.

And her body was only found, I think, seven days later when the Israelis pulled out the area.

So there's a foundation, I think, based in Europe, a legal foundation named after her, which has been going after Israeli soldiers all over the world.

It's kind of paying attention to a lot of where these soldiers are going on vacation

and trying to get them arrested.

I think there have been a few close calls.

I think there was one in Israel who managed to get out after being ferried out by the Israeli embassy.

But I think a lot of Israelis are recognizing that there might be some accountability, especially those who were posting the shit that they were doing.

I mean, that whole genre of Israeli soldiers holding up,

wearing the lingerie of Palestinian women they've displaced or killed.

I mean, that's something out of, I don't know.

I never thought I'd see people lose that themselves.

One of the weirdest fucking things I've ever seen by a supposedly professional army i mean and like i see we saw this over and over again and like a point i made is like oh throughout the history of war like the of soldiers taking sort of like trophies

battle it is a common thing but it was like the weird thing to me or like the notable thing to me is i didn't see a single one of these photos where they were posting with like seized um munitions from hamas like a seized Qassam sniper rifle or even like a dead adult male fighter.

They were only posing with the trophies of battle that were literally women's clothing and children's toys, which should tell you something about who they regard their enemy in this battle as.

Yeah, I beyond that, it just seemed like for an army filled with like fucking psychotic, like sexual predators, it's like it is a way to like try to humiliate and like violate women and girls when they're not physically there.

There's a very weird obsession

with kind of sexual depravity.

I mean, it's also expressed in the way that a lot of Israeli propagandists talk about the Israeli captives in Gaza.

And the only reason I bring this up is because it's made it into mainstream media.

So, you know, like the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, Cameron Brewer, took this notion that some Israelis were worried about the Israeli women who were captured in Gaza being impregnated and, you know, wrote about it in a newspaper, complete with AI-generated image of a lady in a tunnel, a pregnant lady in a tunnel, wearing,

it's just like

this weird obsession and projection about

twisted sexual fantasies and the fact that I think it comes from also from

two places.

One, we know that there is widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails.

We saw Israelis riot when

the Israeli military police tried to arrest soldiers who were caught on camera gang raping a Palestinian detainee last year.

We saw recently that

Israeli authorities banned a UN investigation into supposed Hamas sexual assault on October 7th because they were worried the investigation would instead expose how widespread Israeli sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees was.

And

it also comes from the fact, I think, that

a lot of Israelis do not want to see the political meaning behind Israelis being taken captive, right?

It's just this refusal to understand that actually they were taken captive to be exchanged for the thousands of people you're holding captive, not to be used as kind of sexual playthings.

I mean,

my favorite of the reactions to the hostage release was the woman who said the hostages have been drugged to look healthy.

I want that drug.

Yeah, which is great because, like, I would love to know what drug that is, because usually drugs have the opposite effect on me.

Kassan brigades are manufacturing this substance that's right yeah but what can't they do someone should give it to elon musk

but um i it's just like i i i think we're seeing like that for the for the for israeli society that this piercing of a bubble that like uh one of the things that like met many people have noted that like

they have become completely divorced from like under this bubble of total immunity provided by the united states they have kind of become um immune to the idea that their actions have consequences or even just the concept that actions

necessarily have results that you have to deal with.

And an anger at sort of seeing that reality.

But when I see the reactions to the hostage releases and the anger over it, I also see there's an anger about like that these people aren't living up to our expectations of them.

And underneath that, We all know what we do to Palestinians.

And the fact that they're not doing the same thing to us makes them furious.

And they think it's like it's almost a betrayal of that.

They feel betrayed by the people they've been killing because when they release their hostages, they give them gift bags.

Well, I'll get to the gift bags in a sec, Will, but you, did you, I mean, you can see even in the November 2023 prisoner exchange, the condition.

Yeah, the condition in which the Israelis were released in and the condition in which a lot of the Palestinian detainees have been released in.

We know.

at least 55 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody just over the last year through torture and medical neglect.

I mean, the case of Dr.

Adnan el-Bush, who was one of Israel's top physicians, sorry, one of Gaza's top physicians and surgeons, who refused to leave Shifa hospital until he was forced out, went to the Ehli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City to help out over there.

This man has decades of experience.

He was a surgeon, a doctor.

One of the genuinely one of the bravest and most heroic things I've ever seen in my life.

Sure, right.

And he was arrested

and disappeared, essentially.

And it came out in April that

he'd been killed in Israeli jail.

And it's expected that he was actually raped to death in an Israeli jail.

And his family have not been able to, you know, the Israelis are still holding on to his body.

This man was a surgeon.

And we also saw, you know, Dr.

Hassan Abu Safiyo, who

was

holding out in Kamad Adouan hospital in Beit Lahia for 60 days, you know, every day calling on the world to save the hospital, to save the people in the hospital.

The Israelis killed his son just outside the hospital grounds.

The man refused to leave his patients and his staff until the Israelis eventually, after 60 days,

raided the hospital.

And you saw the last images of him that we saw were of him walking into an Israeli APC.

footage that the Israelis themselves released as well, which I thought was really weird.

This man in his white doctor's coat walking into into an Israel, you know, into an armored personnel carrier.

Just, like you said, one of the most bravest, most courageous things I've ever seen.

And he's also been disappeared.

And it's just like this,

when some of these prisoners come out, you saw Khaled de Jarrar, who is one of the leaders of the PFLP, she's been held without trial, charge or trial for over a year now, the last six months of which have been in solitary confinement.

This lady went in with raven black hair and came out yesterday with a shock of white hair.

Looked like she was aged 20 years.

This is the condition that Palestinians are living in under in Israeli jails.

And this, by the way, is one of the stated reasons for October 7th.

I cannot emphasize enough how much the issue of Palestinian prisoners is a primary issue for so many Palestinians.

Almost every family knows someone or has someone in an Israeli jail.

Yeah, I the thing that I really wish that like Westerners observing this understood was like how easy it is for Israelis to just bring in literally thousands at a time by dragnet for you know either flimsy or zero pretense.

Like there's countless instances

documented on video, attested to in courts of children dozens at a time being scooped up and dropped in these fucking concentration camps.

Yeah,

you know,

Josh Paul, who was the first major resignee from the Biden administration over Gaza, he was basically, he worked in the State Department signing off on weapons transfers and he resigned in October 2023.

He was like,

this is going to get crazy.

I don't want any part of it.

One of the things he said was that this was in an interview with Christian Amapur of CNN.

He spoke about the fact that the State Department received credible information about a 13 or 14 year old Palestinian boy being raped inside an Israeli detention center in Jerusalem.

And when the State Department raised that issue,

the Israelis followed up by raiding the human rights organization that had taken this boy's testimony and prescribed it as a terrorist organization.

This was all years before October 7th.

This is the condition that, I mean, even today, I was in Qarqidiyah, the Israelis are just rounding up dozens and dozens of people.

There's

the phenomenon of

administrative detention, where thousands of Palestinians are held without charge or trial.

You're not allowed to know what the charges are against you.

You have no way of seeing any evidence against you.

You're just held for infinitely renewable six-month sentences.

And, I mean, you're basically held as a hostage indefinitely.

And this is something that the world needs to understand about what Israel does to Palestinians.

And when we're talking about the things that lead to Palestinians taking Israelis captive to exchange them for prisoners, this is the kind of stuff that leads them there.

And also, I mean, the way it's described in the American press, it's Israel releases prisoners, Hamas releases captives or hostages.

It's possible.

They're in prison because they broke the law or did something wrong.

Yeah.

The official conviction rate.

So

there's the phenomenon of administrative detention, which thousands of Palestinians are held without without trial or charge, like I said.

But then the ones that do make it to trial, all Palestinians are tried under a military court, including children and minors.

And the conviction rate in those courts is 99.7%.

So Palestinians have no recourse from these drag nets.

They have no recourse from...

being held for months and years at a time

without even knowing why you're being held.

And the only way that Palestinians have been able to secure the release of their prisoners has been in the past through prisoner swaps with Israelis.

One of the last things I want to ask you about is,

in light of this ceasefire and this exchange of hostages, what are the implications for the Israeli government, for Netanyahu and Israeli society writ large?

Like, will this destabilize the government?

Will Netanyahu have to resign?

Will there be an election?

Like, what do you foresee for the future of the Israeli government in having to deal with this?

Yeah, I'm not quite sure.

I think time will will tell exactly how this plays out.

What we do know is that the Israeli government failed its stated goals in this war.

You know, Netanyahu had insisted that he would not stop the war until what he called total victory.

That meant the complete destruction of Hamas and its military resistance, failed to remove Hamas from power, failed to hold on to kind of like the

military corridors it had established inside Gaza because as part of the ceasefire deal, they have to begin withdrawing from them in the next few days,

failed even to kind of

establish the settlements that a lot of the more extreme members of his government had sold their followers on as being something that was going to happen.

So where it goes from here, I'm not sure, but I think what people need to understand is there is no significant political constituency in Israel that opposed the genocide.

or that does not dehumanize the Palestinians.

There is no significant constituency that preferred the safety of Israeli captives in Gaza over the destruction of Gaza.

If there were, then you would have seen, I don't think that you would have seen Netanyahu be able to carry this out for as long as he did or his government for as long as he did.

It's really instructive to remember that even when we talk, I mean, I know your question was about Israeli politics, but one of the things that Tony Blinken talked about in one of his farewell interviews was the fact that, you know, Netanyahu's hands were tied because of his coalition.

There's only so much he can do.

There's only so many concessions he could make.

It was really interesting that a U.S.

State Department, the U.S.

Secretary of State would say this because some of those captives, some of those Israeli captives were also U.S.

citizens.

And essentially what he was saying was that the Biden administration had deferred the fate of those American citizens to the whims of Netanyahu's political alliances and coalition.

Yeah, you think for a country that was footing the bill for this entire war, domestic political, political you know oh net no can't keep his political coalition together like that's that's a yp not an mp that's your problem not ours yeah yeah it's going to be interesting like i said to see where israeli politics goes i think you know a few months ago israelis were riding high on you know the assassination of ismay'l honey and hasan nasrullah of then kind of their uh

their destruction of a lot of hezbollah's leadership um their killing of Yahya Sinwar, which was completely accidental, by the way.

I know

a lot of Israel's boosters like to kind of put it in the assassination column.

They had no idea they killed the guy

because he was out there fighting on the front lines.

And that was another video that they released.

Yeah, that was another video they released themselves, like killing this old guy with a, with a blowing up a drone or whatever.

And they were like, oh, like, this is a video that makes us look good.

What a coward

fighting till his last breath.

The enemy soldiers, like at what, the eight, how old is he?

He was in his 60s, 60s.

He was in his 60s, yeah.

yeah um hasn't been a good year and a half for israeli propaganda i'll say that yeah but just like so they were riding high off that a few months ago and i think if you look at uh the israeli media you look at uh the things that israeli politicians ministers have been saying is they consider this this deal to be essentially um an admission of of defeat or at least that they weren't able to accomplish any of their goals because like i said at the beginning this was the deal that was on the table 12 months ago 13 months ago and they were unable to make Hamas change their negotiating position.

And I think it's important to, again, kind of looping back to something we were talking about earlier, the reason that Hamas did not budge from its negotiating position was because its fighters held out as long as they did.

If the fighters had, if the Hamas, if the Qassam brigades were defeated or degraded in a meaningful way where they could not fight anymore, Hamas's negotiators would not have been able to stick to their demands and stick to the conditions they laid out a year ago.

Looking forward a bit, and we've talked a little bit about

Israel's perceptions abroad.

And I thought that was an interesting point you brought up how for a lot of liberal Israelis who probably have more

contact with the outside liberal Western world, there's an increased nervousness because they're more aware of how Israel is perceived.

But

now with Trump back in office and

probably

at least hoping to do some type of like Abraham Accords 2 with Saudi Arabia, what do you think the prospects for that are?

Because I would probably personally consider them like

slightly better for that than like before the ceasefire.

But I just still see it being like such a

nuclear third rail for

the Saudis.

Yeah, I mean, if you asked me on October 6, 2023, I would have said highly likely today, much less likely.

I don't think there's as much.

Look, I think the balance of power in terms of who this benefits more has shifted, right?

I think the Israelis need this a lot more than the Saudis do.

That's not to say that you know the Saudis could not be incentivized to change their tune.

It's just that I think the Israelis would be required to give up a lot more than

they were a year and a half ago.

Yeah, it just I I, between what they would have to give up and just

how much it would take to incentivize the Saudis to do this and risk not just like infuriating their entire populace almost, but sort of like giving up this mantle as like regional and sort of religious leaders.

I just, I don't even know what we could give them that that would make it worth doing.

Well, Biden wanted to give them a defense treaty he wanted to make nato with saudi arabia um

um but yeah look i think i think the like the future the immediate future of of the region is is not quite as uh clear-cut as some some might want it to be look what happened in syria in december has led me to to also um kind of reinforce the point that things that you think are in stasis and things that are not moving can move very very fast if the right catalyst is there.

So I don't think anyone in Syria, beginning of December, thought that within a week, Bashar al-Assad's regime would finally have collapsed.

And yet here we are.

And

what the new kind of powers in Syria end up doing, vis-à-vis Israel,

is going to be interesting to see in the next few years as well.

That changes the balance of power there.

The ceasefire with Lebanon is due to expire in a week.

The Israelis have said

they probably won't retreat from all of southern Lebanon the way the ceasefire calls on them to.

So it'll be interesting to see where that goes.

Then you've got kind of Iran.

So I think

the conventional wisdom in DC is that Iran is a lot weaker now

after defeat of Bashar al-Assad and degradation of Hezbollah, that.

And so that the time is ripe, finally, for that long-awaited Israeli-U.S.

strike on Iran.

Is that something Trump is going to be interested in?

I don't know.

But all of these things are like they're moving parts right now.

And

there's nothing settled.

And I think there's a lot that can change, both in favor of the Israelis and against them.

And we'll have to wait and see.

I mean, look,

the development of kind of Yemen's military capabilities.

I mean, we talk about...

Yemen being able to hit Israel with missiles and drones from a thousand miles away.

This is something that the Yemenis could could not do a year and a half ago, but they've talked about how they kind of dedicated their themselves to developing a military industry that is able to hit Israel, and now they are.

How does that play out in the future?

All of these things are,

these are huge, huge shifts in a region that was kind of ossified politically a year and a half ago.

And so

I don't think we've seen the end of the implications of October 7th yet.

I mean, speaking of Yemen, I saw a report today that indicated that the shipping companies are asking Yemen if they have the green light to resume shipping in the Red Sea, not Israel and the United States, which is you want to talk about like a monumental shift and like what that implies about that's awesome.

Like, yeah, like a country like Yemen, like one of the poorest on the planet, uh, who like, you know, has withstood war now for God knows how long, that, like, they're now in a position to say yes or no to these gigantic shipping companies about like whether they can go through the Red Sea again.

Yeah, I don't think the U.S.

Navy is very fond of Yemen right now.

I mean, I'm just amazed like because when you think about how many say Reaper drones the Yemen has been able to shoot down over the last year and a half, I mean the Reaper drone was

a nightmare weapon for a lot of people from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen.

They were just bringing death from the skies on all these people, all these countries.

And the Yemenis have figured out how to shoot them down now very easily.

So again, like these changes, I'm not a military expert, but these changes are,

to borrow something that Jared Krishner said, the entire region is very liquid.

And

so, you know, it'll be interesting to see where things go.

All right, Mohamed, the last question, we alluded to it earlier, but do we have any indication of what was in the gift bags given to the released Israeli captives?

We do.

You were going to ask me that.

So

when the Qassam Brigades released the three Israeli captives

the other day,

they gave them each a gift bag, a small brown paper gift bag with the logo of the Qassam Brigades on it.

And I saw online a lot of Israelis going absolutely crazy.

I don't know why getting a gift bag from your captors on your way out is seen as so offensive, but you know, don't ask me to analyze Israeli society.

But apparently what was in the gift bags were photographs that were taken of the captives during their captivity.

And so I guess like a memento from their time in captivity, a map of Gaza.

And they were each given a certificate.

Now, a lot of people were laughing at the certificate, but there's actually a deeper meaning behind that.

When Palestinians are released from Israeli jails, they have to sign an official kind of release certificate saying that the Israeli have decided to release this person based on whatever following conditions are.

And I think the certificate that the Hassan Brigades gave to these ladies was based on the same idea.

I know we said that was the final question, but.

Now let's keep going.

Not even a question, but like, did you guys see, this was like

when news of the ceasefire was like minutes old.

What the Israeli journalist Ari Siegel said.

Oh,

what did you say?

We've been raped.

Like, I, like,

at a certain point,

I don't know.

Like, there, there has to be some

examination on Israeli society.

I just, like, the news had just broken and he, like, went to the near, like, to the closest American source and was like, God raped us.

I mean, for those who don't know, Amit Segal, he's a, look him up.

He's a really pleasant guy.

I think he tweets only in Hebrew, but

the translate button on Twitter is always great.

Well, as long as we're talking about reactions from some of our favorites, I simply have to give a name check and a tip of the hat to old friend of the show, the Eggman, Eli Lake, who was

really, really angry at the idea that this was a victory.

for the people of Gaza.

And he said, oh, so I suppose that like, how can it be a genocide when like they won the war?

And it goes back to this weird, this, this weird thing that I've seen over and over again in the anger at calling this a genocide is that like, you can't call this a genocide because

it hasn't worked yet.

It's not complete.

And the thing is,

most genocides in human history are didn't, like, they weren't successful in eradicating an entire group of people.

And the Nazis did indeed lose World War II.

Yeah, I mean, that's not even the, the eradication of the entire people is not even the definition of genocide.

But as

our friend Seamus Malakovsali said, in response to Eli, they need to reopen the Hebrew schools.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just like, what, did he see a version of the band of brothers episode Why We Fight?

Where they get to the camp and they're like, oh, looks like we lost.

War is over.

They beat us.

Yeah, that's why we're living under the Fourth Reich.

Well, we may be, but we may be.

Listen, I I know we talked a lot about kind of the big political implication of this, but one thing I do want to say is when speaking to a lot of people in Gaza over the last couple of days, there's a sense of joy, yes, relief,

but also like a palpable sense of extreme sadness amongst a lot of people.

You see kind of the images of people cheering in the streets, but that's not necessarily how people might feel once they're back home or in their tent or amongst away from the cameras.

The losses have been

so momentous and so kind of indescribable.

Whether we're talking about, you know, the losses of loved ones,

you know, entire kind of families eradicated, the loss of everything that Gaza and Gazans have built from their homes to their schools, their universities, their hospitals, the things that people were proud of rightly.

of being able to build under decades of occupation and siege, things that the Israelis seem to take joy in destroying.

I mean, mean, how many videos have we seen of Israeli soldiers kind of blowing up a house or bulldozing something and saying, this is so they have nothing left to left to return to when they come back?

And that is real.

That is real.

Like,

people are saying that the real war begins now.

And it's a war of survival and a war of trying to hold people's attention to make sure that people don't move on because the bombs have stopped falling.

Because what the Israelis have done to Gaza is absolutely heinous

and utterly devastating.

And I think people need to keep paying attention and doing what they can to help out, whether it's, you know, helping out financially, finding someone that you can assist in any way.

But the real war truly has just begun.

Maho, you don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but have you been able to communicate with any of your family who are still in Gaza?

Yeah, yeah, I don't like talking about this too much, but the majority of my family from my dad's side are still in Gaza.

And

my family, one of the reasons I don't like talking about it is because my family has gone through what everyone else has gone through.

So a loss of homes, every single home that was owned by anyone in the family has been destroyed.

I've lost a cousin.

It's not just the physical homes that people have lost, but also kind of the neighborhoods that they lived in, which I think is actually, in in a way far more devastating.

When I was sent a video a few months ago of where my grandparents house was,

I experienced a kind of like a psychic dissociation because I actually could not recognize the neighborhood.

So it wasn't just that I couldn't recognize the house which had been bulldozed, which had been hit by an airstrike initially and then had been bulldozed and turned into sand, but

the notion that everything around it has also gone.

The people that were there, neighbors that

had been there for decades.

Again, going back to that sense of indescribable loss and grief, people there have been in pure survival mode for 15 months.

And I think now that the bombing has stopped, everything else is starting to catch up and it's extremely overwhelming.

We're still seeing people, there's still thousands of people missing, by the way.

There are people who were buried under the rubble of their their homes that, you know, people know where they are.

They just haven't been able to recover their bodies for over a year.

So who knows what kind of state they're in.

The reason they haven't been able to recover their bodies is either because it was too dangerous to go into those areas or primarily because one of the things the Israelis did throughout this war is ban the entry of heavy machinery to remove the rubble.

So you had people digging other people out with their bare hands until they couldn't anymore.

And I've heard from many people in Gaza who talked about the feeling of walking down in areas where that had just been bombed and hearing the voices of people trapped under the rubble until it all went silent.

Something that a lot of people experience is a lot of skeletons, literal skeletons, people's bodies have decomposed until they're just bones now.

Under the rubble, there are a lot of people who've disappeared because A, either they've been taken captive by the Israelis without their families knowing their fate or we've seen many people killed and then the Israelis just bulldoze their bodies over.

One of the articles you were referencing, Felix, about kind of you know Israeli soldiers talking about the things they made us do is talking about the fact that quite often especially in the Netsarim area which is the central part of Gaza that the Israelis occupied anyone getting close to an arbitrarily defined kill zone would be shot and killed.

And then many times their bodies would just simply be bulldozed over without anyone being notified that this person has been killed.

So a lot of people are missing.

The fate of many people is unknown.

Destruction is absolutely overwhelming.

The hope is, you know, I started off by saying, I hope this ceasefire, I have hope it will hold, and I do.

But people can't forget what the toll of this has been.

I suppose, like, I just want to ask, like,

if you could send along, if you have any, like, any links to like verified sources of where like perhaps us or our listeners could donate money to assist in any way we can with the

struggle, the word, like the word you said now, the war to rebuild, the war to

recreate or at least some tiny thread of a livable life or

a community or just in terms of like basic amenities or just like to feel like a human being again.

If you know of any verifiable sources out there that we can include in the show description, that would be a big help.

Yeah, well, thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mohamed.

I think we will leave it there for today.

Thanks once again, Mohamed Al-Salafin, for just your reporting and for joining us again today on the show.

It's always a pleasure.

And please say hi to Mr.

Chapo.

Still haven't met him.

We'll do this in person one day and we'll bring him by.

All right.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, everybody.

Till next time, everybody.

Bye-bye.