Glenn discusses the undeniable mass starvation crisis in Gaza and Western governments' scramble to cover up their complicity. ------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Friday, July 25th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube tonight. | |
| As I previewed last night, we had scheduled and intended to speak with Norman Finkelstein, the professor and one of the leading experts in the world, in my view, on the situation in Israel and Gaza and Israel in generally. | |
| Unfortunately, due to technical issues, we were not able to have that interview today. | |
| We hope to have it sometime next week. | |
| And in lieu of that interview, we will instead cover several of the topics we intended to speak with him about, leading with what is now the rapidly growing body of indisputable evidence that mass famine, mass starvation is sweeping through Gaza in a way we haven't really quite seen in many decades, given how deliberate and planned it is by the Israeli government. | |
| And by evidence, I don't just mean testimony of people in Gaza or Gaza journalists or world health organizations, but many physicians, Western physicians who are in Gaza, who are coming back from Gaza and reporting on the horrors that they're seeing, as well as official statements from Israeli government officials about exactly what they are carrying out and what their intentions are with regard to the blockade that they continue to impose to prevent food from getting into the people in Gaza. | |
| We're seeing babies and young kids and even now adults starving to death. | |
| Again, as the result of a deliberate starvation policy that, again, is part of a war that the United States is paying for, that the United States under two successive presidents has been arming, and the United States and the West continues to diplomatically support. | |
| One of the ways that you know that the horrors have become so immense is that many Western politicians, even Western governments, are now suddenly, after 18 to 20 months of steadfastly supporting everything Israel is doing, are starting to try and distance themselves with all sorts of statements and expressions of concern and even occasionally trying to pretend that they're doing something concrete because they know that what is taking place in Gaza is of historic proportion in terms of atrocity and | |
| war crimes, and they do not want that associated with them. | |
| They don't want that on their conscience or especially on their legacy. | |
| And so they're attempting to pretend all along as if this were something that they had opposed when from the very first moments that the Israeli destruction of Gaza began, it was extremely obvious what the Israelis intended to do primarily because of the fact that they said it. | |
| Still, these atrocities are ones that simply can't be ignored because it's not just the human suffering that is deliberately being imposed on a population of 2 million people for 20 months now with no one in sight, but one that is paid for by your government if you're an American citizen or if you're a British citizen or a citizen of Europe, one that has been paid for and armed and continues to be enabled and protected by those governments as well. | |
| It has all kinds of political repercussions here at home. | |
| And so we're going to cover those as well. | |
| Before we get to all of that, a couple of programming notes. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right after this short message from a sponsor. | |
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| Ever since the start of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli government following the October 7th attack, there have been all kinds of concerns that one of the things the Israeli government would do was impose mass starvation and famine on the population of 2.2 million people of Gaza. | |
| At least that was the population when all this began. | |
| Half of whom, half of that population, 1.1 million, are children, are under the age of 18. | |
| And this has been something we've seen evidence of, and in part people were concerned about it because the Israeli government immediately announced that that was their intention. | |
| And we've now gotten to the point after a full-scale Israeli blockade. | |
| And by blockade, I don't mean that Israel is failing to feed the people of Gaza. | |
| I mean that the people and groups and organizations that are trying to bring food into Gaza are physically impeded from doing so by the IDF as a result of official Israeli policy. | |
| There was a complete and full blockade for three months. | |
| At the same time, they've imposed policies such as destroying any fields or plants where food could grow. | |
| They are now killing, or at the least arresting, anybody who tries to just go a little bit out. | |
| Remember, Gaza has a beach and a sea to try and fish for food. | |
| That also is prohibited. | |
| It clearly is a policy designed to starve the population to death, which is why even Israeli experts in genocide who long resisted applying the word genocide to what Israel is doing in Gaza have now relented and said it's the only word that applies. | |
| And the number of groups and governments and people who previously supported what Israel was doing or at least refused to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocities have now, in their view, no choice to do so. | |
| The evidence has started to become so overwhelming that only the hardest core Israel loyalists are left to try and deny it or blame somebody else for it. | |
| Here from ABC News, today more than 100 aid groups warned of, quote, mass starvation in Gaza amid Israel's war with Hamas. | |
| Their statement warned of, quote, record rates of acute malnutrition in its aid groups and World Health Organization and groups from all over the planet that have immense credibility and having worked with conflicts many times before. | |
| A leading Israeli newspaper, which has been more critical of the Net Yang government than most, but which at the same time was supportive for months of what Israel was doing in Gaza following October 7th, which is the Israeli Daily Heritage, had in its lead editorial yesterday, the editorial under this headline, Israel is starving Gaza. | |
| And the language they used was so clear, straightforward, direct, that it's unimaginable to think of any Western media outlet, large corporate Western media outlet, saying anything similar. | |
| Quote, the famine that has been created in Gaza is another facet of Israel's cruel inhumanity toward the people of Gaza. | |
| It constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a clear violation of the orders issued a year and a half ago by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. | |
| The famine does not contribute anything to the war effort against Hamas. | |
| Its gunmen will be the last to suffer hunger in Gaza. | |
| Before that, it will be children, women, and Israeli hostages still captive there who starve. | |
| Last week, we interviewed a leading scholar of famine, actually I believe that was this Monday, who has studied famines around the world for his entire life. | |
| And not only did he describe how what's taking place in Gaza is unprecedented, at least since World War II, because of how minutely planned it is, and because they're unlike famines, say, in Ethiopia or Sudan or Yemen, there are all sorts of organizations with immense expertise and resources who, | |
| just a couple of miles away from where children are starving to death, have huge amounts of food and other aid that they want to bring to the people of Gaza yet are blocked from doing so by the IDF. | |
| And although I suppose it's encouraging, or at least better than the alternative, that even Western governments and the long-standing Israel supporters who are American politicians are now issuing statements about how disturbed they are by the mass famine in Gaza, how Israel needs to immediately cease this inhumane activity. | |
| None of this is surprising. | |
| None of it is new. | |
| Israel made very clear from the very beginning what exactly their intentions were, and people just decided that they were too scared to stand up and object at the time. | |
| Here is a reminder, this is September, I think this is October 10th, not September, right, it's October 10th. | |
| We have the wrong date on the screen, 2023, quote, no electricity, food, water, or gas. | |
| Israel orders, quote, a complete Gaza siege. | |
| Oftentimes you hear that it's only far-right, extremist ministers in Netanyahu's government who say things like this, like Ben Gavir or Stromich or people like that. | |
| But in reality, the Israeli defense minister was one of the moderate people comparatively at the start of the war, to the point where Netanyahu ended up ousting him. | |
| And he was the one who announced the following, quote, Israel's defense minister, Yoav Golant, has ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, saying Israeli authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food, water, and fuel. | |
| In April of this year, just three months ago, another Israeli minister, Smatrich, said at a conference, quote, not even a grain of wheat will enter Gaza. | |
| Proudly boasting of the actions that the Israeli military, the Israeli government intended to take and then took, and his words to ensure that not even a grain of wheat entered a place where 2.2 million people or 2 million people or 1.9 million people are clinging to survival in between dodging shelling from tanks and bombs and having everything from schools and UN refugees and | |
| refugees and even their own tents from being blown up. | |
| From CNN, May 1st, 2025, Gaza edges closer to famine As Israel's total blockade near its third month. | |
| So, just as a reminder, it was in February after Trump was inaugurated that Israel explicitly announced to the world that it was blockading all food from entering Gaza. | |
| They didn't hide it, it wasn't in dispute, it wasn't in doubt, it was an official Israeli policy to starve the entire population, which is collective punishment, as a way of forcing Hamas to negotiate or to surrender. | |
| And this is exactly sort of the thing that after World War II, we decided would be intolerable, that people who did it would be guilty of war crimes and treated as such, the way that the Nazis who did things similarly, like starve entire cities, starve entire ghettos of Jews were treated as war criminals and held responsible and actually executed. | |
| So none of this is new for all the people who are now just seeing the babies who are emaciated in skin and bones and dying of malnutrition and increasingly older children and adults as well to suddenly come out and say, oh my God, I can't believe this. | |
| What have we been supporting? | |
| This has to stop. | |
| This is all months in the making. | |
| And as hunger experts and famine groups will tell you, once it gets to this stage where people are actually dying now of famine in large numbers, it becomes irreversible. | |
| Irreversible physically, because even if you get the food in, their bodies aren't equipped to process it. | |
| They need much more extensive medical care than that. | |
| And of course, in children, it impedes brain growth for life and physical vitality for life, to say nothing of the mass death from starvation, which we're now starting to see. | |
| Here is from the NPR on May 13th. | |
| Quote, since early March, shortly before the breakdown of a tenuous ceasefire, Israel has been imposing a blockade of Gaza, denying the entry of all goods, including food, medical supplies, and critical supplies. | |
| Quote, now the entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with one in five people facing starvation, according to the most recent report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. | |
| That's why all these sudden attempts to distance oneself that we're seeing from Western governments and Western politicians is utterly nauseating. | |
| They're the ones who enabled it. | |
| They're the ones who have been paying for it. | |
| They're the ones who have been arming it. | |
| They're the ones who have been cheering for it, despite Israeli vows to starve to death the people of Gaza. | |
| We've been hearing for a year and a half about stories of doctors in Gaza having to perform major surgeries, amputations on children without so much as any painkillers, let alone anesthesia, horror stories of the worst kind imaginable. | |
| But what we're now seeing is a body of evidence so conclusive and so indisputable from so many different sources that it's essentially become impossible for denialists of these atrocities to maintain their denialism any longer. | |
| There's been a long trend, basically Israel and it has trained its loyalists throughout the West. | |
| Anytime there's a study, anytime there's a pronouncement, anytime there's a finding or criticism to immediately say, oh, you can't listen to them. | |
| They're anti-Semitic. | |
| They hate Israel. | |
| They lie to attack Israel. | |
| They're even guilty of blood libel. | |
| So if you present a UN report, that's instantaneous. | |
| If you hear from journalists in Ghazi even showing video, they're all liars, they're all anti-Semitic, haters of Israel. | |
| The Israeli daily Herits, oh, throw everything they say out. | |
| But now we're starting to see all sorts of Western doctors. | |
| And these doctors are people who belong to groups like Doctors Without Borders, which I've always described as one of the noblest things you can do. | |
| You go to school for years, you have medical training, you become a surgeon, you become a specialist in your field treating all kinds of major injuries. | |
| And instead of staying in London or Beverly Hills or Miami or Paris and making massive amounts of money treating wealthy people, you volunteer to go around the world to war zones that are very dangerous, where countries don't have the sufficient medical expertise to treat people who are being harmed or killed by the byproducts of war in order to save as many lives as you possibly can. | |
| These people don't just go to places where there are Israeli bombs falling. | |
| They've been all over the world in multiple war zones. | |
| And the bravest of them have been going to Gaza. | |
| We've been hearing from them, American nurses, American doctors, Western doctors, and medical workers. | |
| And what they're now coming back and saying are some of the most horrifying things you will ever hear. | |
| And how is it possible for Israel loyalists to just constantly dismiss all of these people as anti-Semitic liars or fabulous or guilty of theater? | |
| These are people describing what they've seen with their own eyes. | |
| And unlike in the United States, where there's still mostly a blackout of this kind of reporting, in the UK, it's starting to really seep through into mainstream television outlets, despite the long history of the UK's steadfast support for Israel, including right up until this day, where the Starmer government, the government under Serkier Starmer, the Labour government, flies reconnaissance missions over Gaza, provides weapons to Israel. | |
| Here is Nick Maynard. | |
| He's a British physician who was on the mainstream program Good Morning Britain. | |
| It's just like Good Morning America in the United States. | |
| And he got back from Gaza. | |
| He's a surgeon. | |
| And here's what he described in his own words. | |
| Now, of course, you know, the IDF will claim that their intention is not mass starvation. | |
| However, and I want to warn people here, because what we're about to talk about now, which I've already talked about already, is just astonishing. | |
| And I don't think this is, it doesn't matter which side of you are on, even if indeed you are on a side. | |
| This particular account of what you've seen about the pattern of injuries and your claims of what you think the IDF soldiers are doing to cause these injuries is alarming. | |
| Would you mind explaining that to us? | |
| Yes, I mean, one of the big differences between this most recent trip, these last four weeks I've been in Gaza, was the large number of gunshot wounds. | |
| I've seen on previous trips as predominantly explosive injuries from bombs, but I saw on this occasion multiple gunshot wounds almost exclusively on young teenage males, some of them as young as 11, 12, 13, 14, all of whom had been shot at the food distribution points, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution points. | |
| And the pattern of injuries, the stories I was getting from their families, from the patients, and indeed from Gazan healthcare workers who went to these food points to get food for themselves. | |
| One anesthesis used to go between operations to get food. | |
| But I saw terrible injuries to the abdomen and the chest, but there was a very clear pattern of injuries, a cluster of injuries to specific body parts on particular days. | |
| So one day, for example, we'd see patients coming in with gunshot wounds just to the head and neck. | |
| On another day, they'd be coming in with gunshot wounds to the chest or the abdomen. | |
| The next day, the legs. | |
| On one day, about 12 days ago, we saw four young teenage boys, 13, 14, all of whom had been shot specifically in the testicles. | |
| So the very clear clustering of these injuries appeared to us like a target practice. | |
| A game was being played. | |
| We should point out, yeah, that Israel have said, you know, they don't intentionally shoot civilians. | |
| Troops near the aid sites have been firing warning shots, and they say they work to minimize friction between the population and forces as much as possible. | |
| He just gets done saying exactly what he's been seeing, that every day they kind of, for fun almost, IDF soldiers pick which part of the body they're going to snipe young children, teenagers, young teenagers with, oh, today their heads, tomorrow their chest. | |
| How about their kneecaps? | |
| How about their testicles? | |
| And they come in clutches with all the same injury. | |
| We've been hearing stories of IDF soldiers purposely targeting young boys who come in with bullets in their brains. | |
| We've been hearing about this for quite a long time now. | |
| He's in Gaza. | |
| He's seeing exactly what he's describing. | |
| Here he is again talking about something in one way not quite as brutal, but in another way almost more horrific in terms of the intentionality that it shows in terms of what the Israeli government and the IDF are actually up to in terms of their objectives in Gaza. | |
| You were saying to us that your colleagues that have tried to help, who've tried to take baby formia in, for example, have been prevented from doing so. | |
| Yes, absolutely. | |
| I mean, I spent quite a bit of time on the pediatric and tentacare unit because I had patients there. | |
| Appalling malnutrition and a lot of doctors I know who have taken in formula feed because they knew there was such a shortage. | |
| None has been allowed in by the Israelis since the last year. | |
| You go through a checkpoint, you get searched as a doctor, and if you've got any baby formula in your pockets or in your bag, they will confiscate it from you? | |
| Very specifically confiscating that. | |
| Nothing else. | |
| They confiscated every single carton of formula feed that these doctors were taking. | |
| Can you think of any reason other than that they just don't want you to give it to the babies? | |
| We're very cautious in what we take in because we know much would be confiscated. | |
| And certainly they always say anything that could be remotely used as a weapon, such as surgical instruments, we can't take in. | |
| But I cannot think of any reason why they would confiscate formula feed. | |
| If you are deliberately preventing the entrance into Gaza of baby formula, knowing that there is severe malnutrition among the women giving birth to these babies, and not when Hamas operatives are trying to bring them in, but from Western doctors who work with organizations known around the world for treating people with injuries in war zones. | |
| If that isn't evidence of genocidal intent, someone needs to tell me what is. | |
| Now, as I said, all of this is finally percolating because the horror of it is so visible and therefore so undeniable. | |
| And one of the things you're seeing, there's this book that came out last year by a writer, Omar Al-Akkad. | |
| And when I saw it, I immediately knew there's a much more elegant artistic title. | |
| We couldn't show it because of the need to fit it into the screen. | |
| But essentially, the idea of it is the title of the book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. | |
| And in between that, there's this tax, One Day, Once It's Too Late to hold anybody accountable, Once It's Too Late to have stopped it, Once there's no more personal risk in objecting, Everyone will have always been against this. | |
| And that's exactly what we're starting to see with the people who have enabled this and supported this for so long, who finally now want to distance themselves from it from their own purely personal motives. | |
| Here's Senator Amy Kolbuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, with a very steadfast pro-Israel record in the Senate for the entire time she's been there. | |
| And today she decided to stand up, this was actually yesterday, on the Senate floor to talk about how deeply worried and concerned and upset she is by the stories of malnutrition coming out of Gaza and the role that the Israelis are playing in blockading food to starve the people in Gaza to death. | |
| She's so moved by it. | |
| She had to stand up and make her voice heard. | |
| Here's what she said. | |
| Humanitarian aid must immediately reach the civilian population in Gaza. | |
| As one pediatric doctor, the leader of the ward at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said, there is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself. | |
| This is the pediatrician who leads the ward. | |
| He says, I am speaking to you as a health official, but I too am searching for flour to feed my family. | |
| As the New York Times notes, the World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, said this week That the hunger crisis in Gaza has reached, in their words, new and astonishing levels of desperation, with one-third, that's right, one-third of the population now eating for multiple days in a row. | |
| If you could ask our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to tell them this is an important matter. | |
| Give order, please. | |
| The suffering we are seeing every day is unacceptable. | |
| More measures can be and must be taken to allow Palestinian families to access basic necessities. | |
| Those include food, medicine, and shelter. | |
| At the same time, we must focus on achieving a ceasefire as soon as possible, one that would release hostages held by Hamas and allow displaced Palestinians to return home. | |
| Ultimately, what so many of us want to see is a lasting peace and a two-state solution. | |
| But that cannot happen when people are starving. | |
| As we pursue that goal, however, it is clear that the system for distributing aid that is now in place, run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is nowhere near adequate. | |
| Yesterday, more than 100 non-governmental organizations issued an urgent call to action, including CARE, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, Save the Children, and so many more. | |
| Acute malnutrition is rising. | |
| Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks while seeking. | |
| I've heard enough of that performance. | |
| Very well delivered. | |
| The voice cracking was a nice touch. | |
| But as you'll see, as you'll notice, there's no advocacy of any concrete call. | |
| You would think this is just some country doing this that the United States has nothing to do with. | |
| The United States pays for the Israeli military. | |
| It pays for their wars. | |
| It pays for the munitions they use to carry all this out and has for decades. | |
| And Amy Kolberchard is a steadfast supporter of that, as are pretty much all of her colleagues in the Senate from both parties. | |
| And in fact, just two weeks ago, here is a photograph of 14 senators, seven from the Republican Party and seven from the Democratic Party. | |
| The perfect balance to illustrate how bipartisan the reverence and support for Israel is in Washington. | |
| And there you see Amy Klobuchar. | |
| She's right here, smiling. | |
| And here's Benjamin Netanyahu. | |
| Here's Chuck Schumer. | |
| Here's Ted Cruz. | |
| Here's Adam Schiff. | |
| Just all the kinds of people we're constantly told can never get along in anything. | |
| There they all are gathered. | |
| You see Netanyahu sort of posing there in front of everybody as some kind of like warrior strut. | |
| Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal. | |
| Required to be arrested by any signatory to the International Criminal Court. | |
| Just like Vladimir Putin is. | |
| Just the week before the IDF and soldiers and settlers in the West Bank murdered yet another American citizen, this one 20 years old, who was born in the United States, lived in the United States, was visiting relatives in the West Bank. | |
| And not only did settlers at the backing of the IDF storm their house and beat him to death, they then blocked ambulances from getting to the scene in order to pick him up and bring him to get medical care. | |
| And the American citizen died, killed by Israelis. | |
| And none of these people had anything to say about this because their loyalty is more to Israel than to even their own fellow citizens. | |
| So it's nice that Amy Klobuchar wants to engage in public displays of emotionality about how deeply moved she is, except she was just standing right next to the leader of the government responsible. | |
| And again, this is not anything new. | |
| He is indicted exactly for these kinds of crimes, for deliberate starvation, among many other things. | |
| I should also point out that Amy Klobuchar's statement about the hostages is preposterous. | |
| The Dentyao government has said many times very explicitly that even if Hamas turned over every hostage today, they've said this for months, that they would not stop their war. | |
| Their war aim is not to get the hostages back. | |
| That's the pretext. | |
| Even the hostages' own families know that and have said that, which is why the government has deprioritized getting the hostages back because that's not their goal. | |
| Their goal is to expel all Arabs and Palestinians from all of Gaza, as another minister in the Israeli government yesterday said, and make sure that all of Gaza is exclusively Jewish. | |
| They want to cleanse all of Gaza of every Arab and Muslim who lives there, every Palestinian, including Christian Palestinians and Palestinian Catholics, and make it part of the Israeli state where only Israeli Jews are permitted to live there. | |
| That's the goal of the war. | |
| It doesn't have anything to do with the hostages. | |
| That's the pretext. | |
| There's a Israeli scholar who is one of the leading scholars on Holocaust studies and the study of genocide named Omar Bart Bartov. | |
| And he served in the IDF. | |
| He's an Israeli. | |
| He now teaches at Brown University where he teaches Holocaust studies and the study of genocide. | |
| And for quite a long time, until very recently in fact, he rejected the idea that the word genocide is applicable to what Israel is doing in Gaza. | |
| In fact, even when other human rights groups and other experts in genocide were saying, no, the word absolutely applies, he was insisting it did not. | |
| He then wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last week where he said, I'm an expert in genocide. | |
| I know it when I see it, and laid out a very long case with documentation and evidence. | |
| Again, there's an Israeli citizen who fought in the IDF, who dedicated his life to Holocaust studies, is a steadfast supporter of Israel. | |
| Writing in the New York Times, I bet I long resisted the conclusion, but there's no other word that can be used to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza besides genocide. | |
| And he laid out a long case using his historical understanding, his scholarly analysis of what genocide means, of how it's been applied in the past, and why it applies today. | |
| He then went on Piers Morgan and elaborated on his view, and here's part of what he said. | |
| Yeah, we've heard that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. | |
| Even when I served in the IDF in the 1970s, it was not the most moral army in the world. | |
| If somebody said, more moral than the Danish army, I mean, how moral is it? | |
| But now, it's a totally different organization from the one that I was in in the War of 1973. | |
| Look, the statistics that are being cited are simply false. | |
| The number of civilians, the ratio of civilians to militants, depends on how many militants have been killed. | |
| And curiously, even the IDF is citing the numbers being given by the health authorities, the so-called Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza. | |
| So the figures are false. | |
| The statistics are that between 2 and 5% of the population have been killed. | |
| 60 to 70% of them civilians. | |
| A third of those killed are children. | |
| Over 1,000 of those killed are children below the age of one. | |
| That's a ratio that has not existed in the 21st century. | |
| And indeed, you have to go back to World War II for these figures. | |
| Some of the destruction in cities in Gaza is greater than the destruction of Hiroshima in nuclear weapons. | |
| And so we now have only one part of Gaza that is not completely flattened. | |
| And right now, as we speak in Deir al-Balach, the IDF is involved in destroying it. | |
| And as one reserve Israeli officer said just a couple of days ago, what the IDF is involved in now is actually not fighting. | |
| And there hasn't been a war there since June of 2024. | |
| It's involved in destroying the place, flattening it, or protecting contractors that are being brought from Israel, paid very well for it, to destroy one building after another, so that over 70% of the structures in Gaza are no longer standing. | |
| 90% of the schools have been destroyed or damaged. | |
| So this is a rate of destruction that is unprecedented. | |
| In Syria, in the Civil War in Syria, in 13 years, 2% of the population were killed. | |
| And Israel has accomplished that already, apparently, by the summer of 2024. | |
| So the rate is huge. | |
| And the intent is quite clear. | |
| And you can see it from all the reports coming in from Gaza. | |
| And that's been true for a very long time. | |
| The war aim of this war has always been to destroy civilian life in all of Gaza, whether by killing the people there or making life so impossible that it forces them to try and find some way out. | |
| That's the goal. | |
| It has nothing to do with the hostages or dismantling Hamas or anything else. | |
| It's to steal the land that the fanatics in the Israeli government believe God promised to them without regard to what the rest of the world believes or thinks about international borders or anything else. | |
| And they don't regard the people in Gaza as human. | |
| That's the reality. | |
| Israel as a country, obviously lots of exceptions, but the prevailing ethos in Israel is that these are not human beings. | |
| These are less than human beings. | |
| Which is why there's very little opposition. | |
| There's some, some has grown, but still an absolute minority in Israel who are objecting to any of this. | |
| These people represent the government. | |
| In response to this Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, not just pronouncing that what Israel is doing is a genocide, but laying out a very extensive case, for whatever reason, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who you might recall is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the Secretary of State, felt compelled to go onto Twitter and to say this in response to somebody who denied this claim. | |
| The genocide charge is a blood libel. | |
| Thank you, Major Spencer, for this withering deconstruction. | |
| So you now have Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not Jewish, of course, he's part of a Catholic family, accusing Israeli Jews of spreading blood libels against Jews because they invoke their field of expertise and the decades-long study that they've done of genocide to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as the manifestation of genocidal intent. | |
| It's a blood libel against Jews. | |
| Blood libel is now a term that has the exact same effective definition operationally as anti-Semitism, which just means criticizing Israel. | |
| I have, though, been really amazed, I've noticed this for quite some time now, at the way in which non-Jew Jewish supporters of Israel, you can call them Christian Zionists, or just Zionists in general. | |
| I don't think RFK Jr.'s reverence for Israel comes from any kind of evangelical Christianity. | |
| I just think it comes from political expediency. | |
| He was on my show once talking about it, where he gave this big, long speech about how we have to immediately stop financing the war in Ukraine because we can't afford it any longer. | |
| This is when he was running for president. | |
| Can't afford it any longer. | |
| Our studies are falling apart, all of that. | |
| All of which was true, all of which I agreed with. | |
| And then I asked him, does that same thing apply to Israel? | |
| And he immediately rejected it, started saying, oh, Israel is a crucial ally, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Although at the end, he did say, you know what, maybe you're right. | |
| Maybe it is time to stop funding Israel and let them stand on their own two feet. | |
| But then the Democrats decided to attack RFK Jr. as anti-Semitic. | |
| And he ran into the arms of the most extremist Israel supporters like Rabbi Shmuly. | |
| And ever since he has been as extremist of a supporter of Israel as it gets to the point that he now accuses Israeli professors of Holocaust studies of spreading blood libels against Jews. | |
| It reminds me so much of the way white liberals felt completely free to accuse black conservatives or even any black people questioning all of the dogma of Black Lives Matter, of Black Lives Matter as of being racist and upholding white supremacy. | |
| You would frequently see white liberals accusing black people of upholding white supremacy or being racist because they deviated from the liberal dogma on race. | |
| This is exactly the same thing. | |
| Where does RFK Jr. get off telling somebody who fought for the IDF, who is Israeli, who spent his whole life defending Israel and studying the Holocaust, that he's guilty of a blood libel against Jewish people? | |
| One of the most repugnant things I've seen is there's this new attempt, this new PR attempt, to shift from, oh no, there's no problem in Gaza with food. | |
| There's no famine in Gaza. | |
| They have plenty of food. | |
| And then for a while it became, to the extent people don't have food, it's Hamas's fault. | |
| They're stealing the food. | |
| And then, you know, the question is, like, where are they getting it from to steal it? | |
| There's no food that can be allowed in. | |
| They destroyed the ability to grow food and crops. | |
| They shoot and kill, or at best arrest people who try and fish off the coast. | |
| So that denialism didn't work any longer, and now the shift in rhetoric has become, oh, it's the UN's fault. | |
| There's all this aid sitting there that they refuse to distribute. | |
| The UN has been screaming bloody murder about trying to get into Gaza. | |
| Not just the UN, but the World Health Program, which is part of it that Cindy McCain runs. | |
| And what happened was the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund, this group that was invented out of nowhere, paid for by the U.S. government with American contractors that the IDF supports, they are the ones distributing food in Gaza, this tiny portion of food in only four places many miles away from where most people live, having to go through extremely dangerous areas where they get massacred and killed all the time just to try and get some. | |
| They get there. | |
| It stays open for 90 minutes to two hours with a little warning. | |
| They mostly go back without anything. | |
| And what they're trying now to say is the Skada Humanitarian Fund actually hired PR consultants who were former Obama officials. | |
| And what they advised them to do was to stop denying that people in Gaza are starving and shift the blame from themselves or the Israeli government to the UN. | |
| And the Israelis very cynically brought in international journalists. | |
| As you might know, international journalists are barred from getting into Gaza by Israel. | |
| Israel doesn't want them to see what the reality is, which is why they barred them from being in Gaza. | |
| They take them in for a few minutes when they want to show them something very specific. | |
| They don't get to investigate. | |
| And they said, oh, look, here's a bunch of UN boxes of AIDS sitting here undistributed. | |
| So it's the UN's fault to the extent people on Gaza aren't getting the food that they want because the UN won't take it in. | |
| The last time the UN tried to take food into Gaza when they finally got the authorization of the Israeli military to allow trucks to come in was July 20th, which is four days ago. | |
| And what happened was, even though they had the authorization of the IDF to come in, as soon as they enter with trucks of food, desperate Gazan civilians whose families are dying of hunger run over to the trucks. | |
| And when they do, the Israeli military, the IDF, starts gunning them down, starts massacring them. | |
| And obviously, when you're shooting that many bullets at people by UN trucks, you're also endangering the lives of the drivers of those trucks and the aid workers who are on those trucks. | |
| And Cindy McCain, who tries to be very, very diplomatic, because that's her job, when talking about the role Israel is playing, she's the head of the World Food Program. | |
| But it's also her job to get food to the people of Gaza. | |
| And she comes from a family that is as pro-Israel as it gets. | |
| Her husband was John McCain. | |
| Even more fanatically pro-Israel is her daughter, Megan McCain, who accuses everybody of anti-Semitism on a daily basis, basically. | |
| If you don't support everything Israel is doing. | |
| That's the family she comes from. | |
| That's the political tradition out of which she emerged. | |
| And so she's often very careful and cautious in her words, and she wants to be able to get food to the people of Gaza as well. | |
| That's her job. | |
| And yet, for Cindy McCain, this was quite extreme language when she went on CNN the following day to describe the massacre aimed at the people getting the food from the UN and also the UN aid workers themselves imposed by the Israeli government. | |
| Here's what she said. | |
| Worst tragedies we've seen so far. | |
| This is one of the worst tragedies we've seen so far in this particular war. | |
| What happened was, is we had clearance to go through the Zakim gate. | |
| We were through the gate. | |
| The Israelis had, as you know, they clear everything and they decide when and if you go in. | |
| And we began our trek down the road and what we saw were thousands of people running towards us. | |
| And they were hungry. | |
| They're starving. | |
| And all of a sudden, the Israeli tanks, Israeli guns, Israeli weapons from all kinds started firing on the crowd. | |
| And it's something that I hope never happens again. | |
| But more importantly, our group, WFP, our people at Workforce were there too, and they were put in grave danger as a result of that. | |
| No humanitarian aid worker should ever be a target of anything. | |
| This follows a trend over the last two months where over 800 Palestinians have been killed around aid distribution sites. | |
| The majority of those are at the Controversial US-backed and Israel-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. | |
| Can you be very specific? | |
| Are you coordinating in any way or supporting in any way that operational model? | |
| And what is your view on the GHF? | |
| Well, we are not coordinating and we do not work with GHF. | |
| As you know, we're a UN agency and so we have our UN, the way the UN operates is different from what GHF is doing. | |
| I don't really have any information about them at all because we don't even talk. | |
| So the last time the UN tried to deliver aid and food into Gaza, they were massacred by the Israeli military. | |
| And now the IDF and the Gaza Health Foundation, guided by scumbags who used to work for the Obama administration, who are paid to advise them on PR strategies, have told them to stop denying that there's hunger in Gaza and famine in Gaza and instead blame the UN, a group that has been desperately trying to get food to the people of Gaza for more than a year. | |
| The reason those boxes are sitting there and undistributed is because the UN has no safety guarantee that if they enter, that same thing won't happen. | |
| Why would they send their aid workers in? | |
| How can they responsibly when the IDF the last time just started randomly shooting and killing a bunch of people? | |
| Caroline Willeman is a member of the Doctors Without Borders group who has also been in Gaza. | |
| And you'll notice the CNN coverage of this is CNN international, not CNN domestic, although there's been some coverage on CNN, more so than before, because for the same reason that I described earlier, that it's just too extreme to ignore. | |
| They're trying to create some plausible deniability for themselves. | |
| But she was interviewed by Becky Anderson about the things she's been seeing in Gaza. | |
| And I have to say, a lot of these people in Gaza, even the Western workers, are describing how they can't get food. | |
| There are media outlets in the United States who work with freelance journalists in Gaza. | |
| And I've heard from every single one of them that they are hearing that their freelance journalists haven't eaten for two or three days anything. | |
| I mean, when I say haven't eaten for two or three days, I mean not a morsel of food. | |
| It's extremely common. | |
| And it's now crippling the already crippled medical system because the doctors and the nurses are also suffering malnutrition. | |
| The journalists who are the only people to report and tell us what's going on in Gaza, it's deliberately affecting every person in Gaza. | |
| As we just heard, even the head of hospitals can't get flour for their own families. | |
| So here is what she described, again, seeing firsthand. | |
| Becoming increasingly difficult to disparage all of this as the byproduct of just anti-Semitism by the UN or left-wing media outlets or whatever. | |
| You can't just scream anti-Semite at the entire world, or you can, but it's not going to be very effective, as liberals found when they started doing that with racism. | |
| Here's part of what she described. | |
| Caroline, thank you. | |
| Can you just walk us through what you are seeing on the ground right now? | |
| Honestly, it's unfathomable and unconscionable what we are seeing here right now. | |
| I work in a primary healthcare clinic where we have a malnutrition program. | |
| We are enrolling 25 new children under the age of five or pregnant and lactating women into our malnutrition program every day. | |
| Every single day, I'm having to tell desperate parents, your child is not malnourished yet. | |
| So it cannot enroll on the program. | |
| We know very well that this child will be malnourished within a matter of time because there is simply not enough food for people to feed themselves, to feed their children. | |
| I have been doing this work for nine years. | |
| Never in my life have I seen, have I been in a place where my own colleagues come to work hungry. | |
| My colleagues who have a job, who have a salary, cannot find food, are not able to feed their families. | |
| And these are the very healthcare workers supposed to take care. | |
| Caroline, can I just ask you, at what point do you assess a child to have malnutrition? | |
| So the way that my medical colleagues assess this is through the middle upper arm circumference. | |
| So we measure the circumference of the arm. | |
| That's the medical way of establishing whether a child has either moderate or severe acute malnutrition. | |
| We see both cases. | |
| Despite being a primary healthcare center, we see both moderate and severe cases. | |
| It's extremely difficult to take care of the severe cases who need very specialized inpatient care that at this moment also we are not able to provide. | |
| Can you just describe for us what a child is going through who is malnourished and what death from starvation is like? | |
| Okay, I am not a medical professional, but what I know is that, for example, also a lot of the other medical issues that we see are compounded by this malnutrition. | |
| We also have a small inpatient ward that is full of people who have horrendous burns, including very many small children that they get from the airstrikes. | |
| We have very many people who have orthopedic injuries, whose bones are being kept together by external fixators. | |
| These wounds also don't heal. | |
| So it's important even to look beyond the issue of malnutrition as people dying from malnutrition. | |
| Also, any other medical issue will be horrendously compounded. | |
| And I mean, you've all seen the images of children wasting away because they also get to a point where it becomes incredibly difficult to start feeding them again, to start to get them back to a point where they can catch on to life. | |
| People clearly know that they are putting their lives At risk in order to get food or food aid. | |
| Hundreds have been killed at aid distribution points recently. | |
| What though are their options? | |
| I mean, you are on the ground. | |
| If they don't eat, they will starve to death. | |
| Exactly. | |
| I mean, there are no options and people, as you say, they know very well that they risk their life going to these sites. | |
| My own colleagues were on site at an emergency room that we support here in Gaza City when two days ago dozens and dozens of dead and wounded arrived. | |
| These were all people who had gone towards a trucks of the world food program who had just been entering the Gaza Strip and they all died or were wounded by gunshots. | |
| So the fact that this is happening on top of the malnutrition crisis, it's honestly, I do not have words to describe the shame on humanity that we see here on a daily basis. | |
| I mean, that is, you know, as somebody who's been covering this now for 20 months, 21 months, that is what you feel like is what words are left. | |
| It is a level of inhumanity and war criminality and genocide and ethnic cleansing. | |
| Just kind of a level of sadism and cruelty that is impossible to fathom and extremely difficult to describe. | |
| And I've seen increasingly a lot of people trying to say, oh, look, what does this have to do with us? | |
| I don't really care about this situation in Gaza, which I guess is an understandable feeling if you don't want it on your conscience. | |
| But the reality is, is that your government is what pays for it. | |
| Your government is what arms it. | |
| Your government is what diplomatically supports it. | |
| It could cut it off at any moment. | |
| And under one Democratic president, one Republican president, it has deliberately chosen to do the opposite, which is to continue to enable it and support it. | |
| And so your tax dollars are what's responsible for this and are paying for it. | |
| Just last week, AOC came out and said, I'm not going to vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill to remove $500 million in U.S. military aid so that the Israelis can buy missile defense systems. | |
| I want to send $500 million to the Israeli government so that they can buy those systems. | |
| When obviously they could just pay for it themselves, but by having the U.S. subsidize it the way AOC wants, that means the Israelis don't have to spend $500 million on those systems and instead can use it to buy the weapons that are enabling all of this. | |
| It's the responsibility of essentially everybody in the West. | |
| And what you hear from multiple people, and these are people who, again, have been in war zones of the worst kind. | |
| This is what they do for a living. | |
| This is what they do as part of their existence on the planet. | |
| I mean, imagine being a Westerner, living all the comforts of Western life and choosing to go to Gaza and seeing this and being around it simply as a way of trying to help people. | |
| These are, again, the most noble and self-sacrificing people on the planet. | |
| These people have seen everything. | |
| And it's just like what the famine expert told us on Monday night, who studied famine, who's been around the world seeing famines, that there is nothing like what they're seeing in Gaza and never has been. | |
| And there hasn't been anything like this in this century or even since World War II. | |
| It's not just a war with people being killed and suffering. | |
| Like it happens in every war. | |
| It's not even just a particularly cruel war. | |
| It's not even a war. | |
| There's no war taking place. | |
| It's a systematic, deliberate, heavily planned program by one government backed by the richest and most powerful countries on the planet, beginning with the United States, carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against a helpless population composed primarily of children. | |
| That's what it is. | |
| And you can call it anything you want, anti-Semitism, or blame Hamas, but all those games are finished because of how abundant, how compelling all of this evidence is. | |
| And while, yes, we do see some rhetorical changes, we still haven't seen any real action even by Western governments. | |
| Yesterday, President of France, Emmanuel Macron, came out and recognized Palestine as a state. | |
| It's a nice symbolic act. | |
| It enraged the United States and it raged Israel. | |
| But sanctioning Israel, cutting off weapons to Israel, cutting off financing to Israel, none of these major Western countries have done that. | |
| The Prime Minister of Australia came out yesterday with a statement, very melodramatic, about how upset he is and how disturbed he is. | |
| 29 countries issued a letter that we read you late last week. | |
| But this is all just symbolic. | |
| This is all just ways of, as that book cover says, pretending that they were against us all along. | |
| Only the West, and particularly the United States, has the power to stop the Israelis from what they're doing. | |
| And instead, the American government, like they did under the Biden administration, now under the Trump administration, is doing the opposite, expressing more and more support for what Israel is doing. | |
| And we're just witnessing in real time the kind of war crimes and atrocities that 20 and 50 and 100 years from now, people are going to be reading their history books and looking back and wondering how this could possibly have happened. | |
| We're seeing it right in front of our faces unfold, and we all do bear a significant amount of responsibility for it. | |
| All right, so that concludes our show for this evening. | |
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