Chris Hedges - The Israeli-Palestinian War

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The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza will soon surpass 20,000 with many more wounded^[1]. The UN says Gaza is “a graveyard for children^[2].” The history of the Israeli-Palestinian war did not begin on October 7. While the atrocities of that day cannot and should not be excused, they have to be located in the context of decades of Israeli annexation, occupation, sieges, blockades and extrajudicial killings of Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians are in Israeli prisons being held without trial or charges. Illegal Israeli settlements continue to grow and expand. Meanwhile, while all attention, understandably is on Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen several hundred Palestinians killed by the Israeli army and by rampaging settlers since October 7. The Jewish Voice for Peace organization denounces^[3] U.S. complicity with Israel’s never-ending occupation saying, “The unchecked military-funding and diplomatic cover enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime. Those who continue calling for ‘ironclad’ U.S. support for the Israeli military are only paving the path to more violence.”

Recorded at the Sanctuary for Independent Media.

Speaker

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is an award-winning journalist who has reported from war zones around the world. Cornel West calls him, “The greatest radical writer and journalist of our generation.” He writes a weekly column for scheerpost.com. He is the host of The Chris Hedges Report. He is the author of many books including War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, Wages of Rebellion, Our Class, and The Greatest Evil is War.

David Barsamian: Our guest today is Chris Hedges, an award-winning independent reporter who has covered the Middle East for many years. Cornell West calls him the greatest radical writer and journalist of our generation. He's the author of many books. His latest is The Greatest Evil is War. He spoke at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York on December 6th, and now Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: The skies over Gaza are filled with projectiles of death, attack helicopters, drones, artillery shells, tank shells, mortars, bombs, missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings in the Gaza concentration camp. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south. To render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter, and infectious diseases. The aid convoys bring in token amounts of food and medicine.

The Biden administration refuses to set conditions that will disrupt the $3.8 billion is a result of what Israel receives in annual military assistance and the $14.3 billion in supplemental aid. It mutters useless bromides about surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, where thousands of Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era. Nothing is off limits. Hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches, homes, apartment blocks, refugee camps, schools, cities, media offices, sewer systems, telecommunications, infrastructure, water treatment plants, libraries, wheat mills, bakeries, markets, entire neighborhoods. Israel's intent is to destroy Gaza's infrastructure, to make Gaza a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life.

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called Habsura, the gospel, which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI system is described on the Israeli sites, plus 972 magazine and local call as facilitating a, quote, a mass assassination factory. Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells, a wide area around the target killing and wounding dozens, sometimes hundreds of people. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht assault on Stalingrad, where over 90% of the city's buildings were destroyed.

Israel's goal is to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine.

It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects that believe that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people whose land they stole go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden, locking out foreign reporters and photographers, cutting phone and internet service. And it is targeted Palestinian reporters, my colleagues, for assassination, killing over 50^[4]. Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza^[5]. Nearly the equivalent of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gaza, by the end of Israel's scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw ghetto, and later Warsaw itself. Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder, and whose labor we exploit is coded within the DNA of industrialized nations. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Harel in Namibia, who liked the Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. 80,000 of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are. Israel's distorted settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping and occupying and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land, and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the inferior races of the earth. We give these inferior races names that embody evil, Isis, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas. We used racist slurs to dehumanize them, haji, sand, the N word, camel jockey, Ali Baba, dung shoveler. And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed as Nissam Faturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud Party, said to erase the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth. Naftali Bennett, Israel's former prime minister, said, quote, we're fighting Nazis. In other words, absolute evil. Not to be outdone, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with a German chancellor as the new Nazis. Think about that. A people imprisoned in the world's largest concentration camp for 16 years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking in army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet and they are the Nazis.

There is an historical analogy here, but it is not one that Bennett Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge. When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our civilizing mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts. We accuse the oppress of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization.

We are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the wretched of the earth. It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed. Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts. Joseph Conrad reminds us. They are only people without knowing, understanding or feelings who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction. Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination.

The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness, although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest. Our use are the useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice in Wonderland fairy tale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong and they never go away.

Israel, like all settler colonial projects, including our own, are founded on lies, the lie that Palestinian land was unoccupied, the lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during the ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by their leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78% of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22% of Palestine as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria. Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants to adjust an equitable peace and will support an independent Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism. The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights. The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians, and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel's well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a clean sincerity on international news outlets.

Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth. It inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel's Alice in Wonderland narratives which we dutifully insert into our stories required under the rules of American journalism, although we know they are untrue. Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in the crossfire. The bombing of residential districts with dozens of dead and wounded becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. The big lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit. Racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The big lie fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency, and honor on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism, and medievalism on the other. The big lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities, and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous.

The big lie allows believers to take comfort, a comfort they are desperately seeking in their own moral superiority. It feeds what Edward Bernays called the logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence. All effective propaganda Bernays writes targets and bills upon these irrational psychological habits. Israel's supporters do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion, and complicity and oppression, murder, and genocide. Most important, the big lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The big lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The big lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence. I in the public know what all school children learn, W. H. Auden wrote, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.

The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases, we attended the funerals. We had their names, we had the dates, we had the locations of the shootings. Israel's response was to say that we were not in Gaza: we had made it up. The Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister, and IDF spokesman immediately blamed the killing of my Al Jazeera colleague, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022 on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter. They said, shot and kill the journalist who was wearing a flack jacket and helmet marked press. The lie was peddled until video footage examined by Bedsellum, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunmen depicted in the video. The video the human rights organization found was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.

When Israel caught line, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the thousands of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable and so is the collusion of nearly all the corporate media along with Republican and Democratic politicians. US politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully reputed the old mantra calling for a thorough investigation by the army that carried out the crime. A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a quote, high possibility that an Israeli soldier killed Shireen by accident. But by then the eruption of street protests in the West Bank and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten.

When an Israeli soldier in 2003 murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor's home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.

Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court. It does not cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council. It prohibits the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestinian territories occupied from 1967 from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European States to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organizations that, quote, have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel. And Israel refused a few days ago to renew a visa for Lynn Hastings, the top UN humanitarian aid official for Gaza and the West Bank.

The longer the genocide continues, the more absurd the lies become. There are big lies, the obliteration of Gaza and want and killing of thousands of Palestinians. Israel insists it's a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas. And there are small lies. Al Shifa Hospital is a Hamas command center, a calendar in Arabic on the wall according to the IDF spokesman is a guard list where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here. An Israeli actor dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be a Palestinian and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says of Hamas that they attacked Al-Shifa Hospitaland stole the fuel and medicine. Palestinian militants rather than Israeli tanks, Israel claims are responsible for the shelling of Al-Shifa. Or Israel struck a car full of terrorists in southern Lebanon. Terrorists who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at Al-Akhli Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim even the New York Times questioned when it discredited the video based on an analysis of its time stamp. Israel said it responded to the request of the director of Al-Shifa Hospital to allow Gaza citizens were sheltering in the hospital in a wish to evacuate from Al-Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in Gaza Strip via a secure access. This was a statement that Mohammed Zakut, the director of the hospital's in Gaza said was categorically false, adding quote, we were forced to leave by gunpoint.

The lies will be written into Israeli schoolbooks. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books. Israelis are the eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Turkey, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians. The lies create cognitive dissonance where fact becomes fiction. Fiction becomes truth. The lies make any discussion of genocide and ultimately reconciliation impossible. In Israel, like the perpetrators of past genocides, will pretend it never happened. But the lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. It corrodes moral, religious, civic, intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience. Israel's genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as we mythologize the genocide of Native Americans and turn our own settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes. I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane who was barred from running for office and whose cock party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies by Netanyahu who received lavish funding from right-wing Americans when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu's supporters chanted, death to Rabin. They burned an effigy of Rabin, dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by a Jewish fanatic. And Rabin's widow, Leia, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband's murder.

Netanyahu first became Prime Minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avidor, Lieberman, Gideon Tsar, Naftali Bennett. Netanyahu's father, Benzion, who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as a good fascist, was a leader in the Harut party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Harut party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, and other Jewish intellectuals described the Harut party in a statement published in the New York Times as, quote, a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and fascist parties. There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it is taken control of the state of Israel. The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, Zev Sternhil, a Holocaust survivor, and Israel's foremost authority on fascism warned in 2018. The kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. Sternhil added, we see not just a growing Israeli fascism, but racism, akin to Nazi sm in its early stages.

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel's crypto-fascist heirs of Kahanah's movement. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of Palestinians who Netanyahu compared to the biblical Ammonites massacred by the Israelites. It is a grave mistake not to take the blood-curdling calls. For the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Palestinians for the Israeli state function as little more than human laboratory rats. The Israeli military intelligence services, arms, and technology industries, and Israel's drones and surveillance technology, including spyware, facial recognition, software, biometric gathering infrastructure along with smart fences, experimental bombs, AI-controlled machine guns, they're all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results.

These weapons and technologies are then certified as, quote, battle-tested and sold around the world. Israel is the 10th biggest arms dealer on the planet. It sells its technology and weapons to an estimated 130 nations, including military dictatorships in Asia and Latin America. Israeli weapons sales totaled $12.5 billion last year. Its close relationship with these military, internal security, surveillance, and intelligence gathering and law enforcement agencies explains the fulsome support Israel's allies give to the genocide in Gaza.

When Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to condemn the October 7 attack by Palestinian resistance groups as a terrorist attack and said, quote, terrorism is killing innocent children in Palestine, Israel immediately halted all sales of defense and security equipment to Colombia. This global cabal dedicated to permanent war and keeping its populations monitored and controlled has hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales. These technologies are cementing into place a super national corporate totalitarianism, a world where populations are enslaved in ways that past totalitarian regimes could only imagine.

The genocide in Gaza is another chapter in the century-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli settler colonial project. It is accompanied as is true for all settler colonial projects by the theft of natural resources, land, water, and the natural gas in the Gaza Marine field's 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, which could contain up to 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in a world of diminishing resources, especially water in the Middle East and the dislocations caused by the climate crisis. Gaza is the prelude to a frightening new world order as democracies wither and die, as economic inequality expands, as poverty and desperation mounts, the global ruling class will increasingly do to us once we become restive or attempt to rebel what they are doing to the Palestinians. It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe, from Africa and the Middle East, or from the global south to the United States. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the U.S.

Israel has long supplied some of the most heinous regimes on the planet with weaponry, including the apartheid government of South Africa and Myanmar. India is Israel's largest purchaser of military drones. Israel provided UAV's missiles and mortars to Azerbaijan for its invasion and occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, which displaced 100,000 people more than 80 percent of the enclave's ethnic Armenians. Israel sold napalm and weapons to the Salvadoran military as well as the murderous regime of Rios Montan Guatemala when I covered the wars in the 1980s and Central America. They made Uzi submachine guns were the weapons of choice for Central American death squads. Israel also sold weapons to the Bosnian Serbs, despite international sanctions, when I covered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. Elbit systems Israel's largest private weapons firm supplies U.S. customs and border protection with high-tech surveillance towers, which it uses along the border with Mexico. It also supplied the CBP with its Hermes drones in 2004 in order to test the feasibility of using them on the border with Mexico.

Pegasus, a phone hacking tool produced by the Israeli NSO group, a cyber intelligence agency, has been used by Mexican drug cartels to target journalists and track down the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a friend of mine, and then it was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Pegasus transforms a cellular phone into a mobile surveillance device with microphones and cameras activated without the user's knowledge. Skunk water, a putrid smelling liquid, was tested on Palestinians, often with Israeli film crews recording the attacks to show potential clients, including U.S. police departments, the effectiveness of the chemical. Israel created a sophisticated facial recognition system, Red Wolf, to document every Palestinian in the occupied territories. Israel trains and equips U.S. police forces teaching aggressive tactics backed up by heavy military hardware and vehicles, which were used in Ferguson and Atlanta during the police confrontations with activists who were protesting Cobb City.

This new world begins in Gaza, but it ends at home. Just as Trump is a symptom of our decayed and anemic democracy, the attack on October 7th is a reaction. You can't isolate it. If you look at any uprising against a colonial project, anyone, any of them, they lash out with a kind of inco-hate fury. I mean, what did Nat Turner do? Now, I'm not defending it. And to understand it is not to condone it. But you can't isolate it. If you look at Reed CLR James' great history of black Jacobins of the Haitian slave revolt, the only successful slave revolt in human history, and Haiti's been paying for it ever since, this is very sympathetic, but he doesn't whitewash the torture and atrocities that were committed against the French planter class. He has a wonderful line. These are the—I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like these are the momentary eruptions of an oppressed people rather than the institutionalized torture and atrocity of the state.

Even in the French Revolution, you had clergy and aristocrats had their heads severed and were carried around on pikes through the streets of Paris. This is what happens when you brutalize a people over a long period of time, which I'm not defending it. There's two things that, one, those who carry out atrocities should be held accountable whoever they are and not murdering 6,000 children who had nothing to do with it, most of the people killed in Gaza. Very few, as far as we can tell, very few [...] have been killed. Why is Israel flattening Gaza? Because they don't want to go into the tunnels. So they'll just kill all the palace and they won't go into those tunnels. And of course, it's a conscious effort to destroy an infrastructure which makes life sustainable, that's why they destroy the hospitals. So an appropriate response should have been done decades ago. This sadly is where we've ended up.

But you can't, as Pope Francis said, you can't commit terror and response to terror, but that's been this kind of cycle of violence that has been perpetuated since before Israel's founding. I mean, I just want to say that when the problem without context is that you see a reaction that's brutal, but you don't see the long, slow drip of oppression that created it. And so to those who don't understand that oppression and haven't covered it, which is most of the media, what they see is incomprehensible. And therefore, they certify those people who carried out that action as incomprehensible. And that comes essentially with the conscious decision on the part of the major media, not to tell the truth.

They don't use the word apartheid. They don't use the word genocide. They sanitize the vocabulary in such a way as to obscure the reality. And so when something like this happens, it's a shock because nobody's been paying attention to Gaza. And this is the frustration that I and other reporters had reporting week after week, month after month after. We saw it. We knew what was going to happen. It wasn't a surprise, but the world wasn't listening. Certainly those in power were not listening. The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them.

Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7th Hamas attack on southern Israel adds to the growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen, Max Blumenthal writes in the Grey Zone. To Val Escapa, a member of the security team for Kabut's barrier, set up a hotline to coordinate between Kabut's residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper, Aarats, that his desperation began to set in, quote, the commanders in the field made difficult decisions, including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages. The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were, quote, compelled to request an airstrike against its own facility inside the era's crossing to Gaza, quote, in order to repulse the terrorists who had seized control. The base housed Israeli civil administration officers and soldiers. Israel in 1986 introduced a military policy called the Hannibal Duck Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans. Following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands. Through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians.

The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on August 1, 2014 captured an Israeli officer Lieutenant Hadar Golden. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles, and shells on the area where he was being held. Golden was killed, along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016, but I'm nearly certain it is being applied to the 138 remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. I returned a few days ago from Egypt. On the flight, I wrote a letter to the children of Gaza, and I would like to close my talk with this letter. Dear child, it is past midnight. I am flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkness, thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean. I am traveling to Egypt. I will go to the border of Gaza at Rafa. I go because of you. You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys, the concrete hovels. You know only the security barriers and fences, patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. [...] Fighter jets, attack helicopters, drones, they circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs, deafening explosions, the ground shakes, buildings fall, the dead, the screams, the muffled coals for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop night and day.

Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete, your playmates, your schoolmates, your neighbors gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this. Stench of death, rotting corpses under the broken concrete. You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with a cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are. You are afraid. Explosion after explosion. You cry. You cling to your mother or father. You cover your ears. You see the white light of the missile and wait for the blast. Why do they kill children? What did you do? Why can't anyone protect you? Will you be wounded? Will you lose a leg or an arm? Will you go blind or be in a wheelchair? Why were you born? Was it for something good or was it for this? Will you grow up? Will you be happy? What will it be like without your friends? Who will die next? Your mother? Your father? Your brothers and sisters? Someone you know will be injured soon. Someone you know will die soon. At night you lie in the dark on the cold cement floor. The phones are cut, the internet is off. You do not know what is happening. There are flashes of light. There are waves of blast concussions. There are screams. It does not stop. When your father or mother hunts for food or water, you wait. That terrible feeling in your stomach. Will they come back? Will you see them again? Will your tiny home be next? Will the bombs find you? Are these your last moments on Earth?

You drink salty, dirty water. It makes you very sick. Your stomach hurts. You are hungry. The bakeries are destroyed. There is no bread. You eat one meal a day, pasta, a cucumber. Soon. This will seem like a feast. You do not play with your soccer ball made of rags. You do not fly your kite made from old newspapers. You have seen foreign reporters. We wear flack jackets with the word press written on them. We have helmets. We have cameras. We drive jeeps. We appear after bombing or shooting. We sit over a coffee for a long time and talk to the adults. Then we disappear. We do not usually interview children. But I have done interviews when groups of you crowded around us, laughing, pointing, asking us to take your picture. I have been bombed by jets in Gaza. I have been bombed in other wars, wars that happened before you were born. I too was very, very scared. I still have dreams about it. When I see the pictures of Gaza, these wars were turned to me with a force of thunder and lightning. I think of you.

All of us who have been to war hate war most of all because of what it does to children. I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this. There are very brave Palestinian journalists. Fifty of them have been killed since this bombing began. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in your hospitals. So are the UN workers. Almost a hundred of whom have been killed. So are the ambulance drivers and medics. So are the rescue parties that lift up the slabs of concrete with their hands. So are the mothers and fathers who shield you from the bombs. But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out.

Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafa. We are going because we cannot watch this slaughter and do nothing. We are going because hundreds of people are dying a day, including over a hundred children. We are going because this genocide must stop. We are going because we have children. Like you. Precious, innocent, loved. We are going because we want you to live. I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man. Although to you, I am already very old. In my dream for you, I will find you free and safe and happy. No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering. But you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope, my prayer. We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried, but we did not try hard enough. It will go to Rafa, many of us, reporters who will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest.

We will write and film, this is what we do. It is not much, but it is something you will tell your story again. Maybe. It will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness. Thank you.