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Oct. 21, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:40
Is The Gaza Ceasefire Falling Apart?

More than 80 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the "ceasefire" went into effect nearly two weeks ago. Will Trump's "peace deal" be able to hold? Also today: Why was the CIA lying to Trump Envoy Steve Witkoff?

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The Yellow Line Controversy 00:15:26
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Good.
Good.
But though, I do want to bring up a subject that is not doing well, and that's the peace in the Middle East.
And there was a bit of euphoria not too long ago that everything was wonderful, and people were all going home, and you saw the crowds.
But on occasion, you'd see the damage done in the Palestinian areas in Gaza.
Terrible.
And that was sort of a contradiction of the whole thing.
But people were happy.
We were happy that there was a step in the right direction.
Anytime they step in the right direction, that means maybe they will continue.
But lo and behold, some of our reservations, unfortunately, are yielding some evidence that maybe things aren't doing quite so well.
Headline today from David DeCamp, one of our good friends.
Gaza Health Ministry says at least 80 Palestinians killed by the IDF since the ceasefire went into effect.
Well, that's probably, probably true.
And the opposition answers said, yeah, but maybe the other side killed, you know, maybe the Palestinians killed some people too.
And maybe they did do one or two.
I have no idea.
But I think this really tells a story.
Of course, we think there's an out of balance when you look at how many Israeli cities were blown up compared to the Palestinian cities.
And there's no question about who got slaughtered.
And this is why there's been an attitude change around the world and even in this country in our primary races, it happens to be an issue.
And so the peace in our times does not arrive.
Our time is not yet available for peace.
But eventually, when everybody's broke, they'll have to maybe quit spending too much on armament and spend some money on decency.
And I think when I see all this, I see only that it's a shame that we don't have more of a desire for world peace.
But so there's evidence that this is still fighting and killing, and there will be tribes, individuals trying to salvage it.
But I guess I get annoyed at times because they have to have a little glimpse of the reservations.
I'd rather have to say something, well, it started, it might not be perfect, but we're going to keep working on it rather than saying Nirvana is here, it's wonderful, and peace is here.
And that's a little bit misleading.
So once again, I think we should make the case for how to avoid these situations.
And that's simple.
Just stay out of the business of other people's problems.
We live a long way from the Middle East.
That does not provide the authority and the moral authority to have our government take money from poor people in this country and spend it way out of proportion to what the people here in this country are getting poorer.
And there's a reason for that.
Inflation is here.
The economy is bad.
And it's related to this excitement that people have.
And they're still, even though I think the attitudes are changing, there's still a strong element out there that say, go to it.
I mean, maybe you just didn't, like the diehards in Vietnam.
Even today, you'll find people, well, we only lost because we didn't kill enough people.
So that's the attitude that we work to try to change.
Yeah, let's look at this first clip.
This is, again, thanks to our friends Dave DeCamp over at anti-war.
Who does such great work summarizing multiple articles in one short, easily digestible piece?
The Gaza Health Ministry says at least 80 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire on October 11th.
Now, first of all, Dr. Paul, I mean, you're right.
This is better than the 100 a day that they were killing, 100 civilians a day that the Israelis were killing.
So there is some room for optimism.
It's certainly better to kill 80 in 10 days than 100 every day.
But a couple of things have happened.
First of all, we talked about this on the show.
I guess it was yesterday that the Israelis flipped out and they started doing airstrikes on Sunday after claiming that their troops came under fire.
But it turns out, most likely, according to a White House official, that one of their tanks hit an exploded IED, and that sent them flipping out.
So they hit their own weapon.
But the other thing that happened on Sunday night, go to the next one if you can.
The other thing that people getting killed at is the IDF claimed that they killed two quote-unquote terrorists who crossed the quote yellow line.
Now, this is the gradual line of withdrawal of the Israeli military forces.
They claim they crossed the yellow line and so they shot them.
But here's the problem with that, Dr. Paul.
There have been several incidents of the IDF firing on Palestinians who allegedly crossed the yellow line.
And I highlighted this, which has not been marked, meaning people on the ground are unaware that they're crossing it.
Can you imagine living in a situation, Dr. Paul, where you don't know if you take one step one way, if you could just be blown away?
I'll leave that just for a second.
If you can just be blown away because you step over an imaginary line, it seems terrible.
And hopefully they said they're starting to mark it.
Well, that's a start.
That's a good one.
But the other one is: if you go back, this is a particularly horrifying one, but this happened every day before the ceasefire.
If you go forward to one more, in one attack on Friday, the IDF massacred 11 people, including seven young children and three women who were traveling in a vehicle that allegedly crossed the yellow line.
Again, unmarked yellow line slaughtered a whole family.
And if you go to the next one, I did put up a picture that's not gruesome, but it gives you an idea.
If you can imagine your whole family, the Abu Shaban family killed when an Israeli occupation forces disregarded the ceasefire agreement and struck their vehicle near Gaza City.
Terrible, terrible.
So, yes, there is a problem with the killing continuing.
However, in smaller numbers, which maybe we're going in the right direction.
You know, there was a statistic that was mentioned, an article I mentioned, that it's very disturbing because the Palestinians now have continued to search for 10,000 missing people.
They don't know whether they're dead or alive, have gone away or whatnot, but they can't find them.
So that NSL is not going to be resolved with a couple more of our diplomats doing some propagandizing because it'll be who should we favor and who's really at fault.
And there's certainly a division in this country.
But before there was no division, there was hardly anybody that would speak out against anything that Israel might do.
Now I think it is, but they're being challenged by the First Amendment.
They say, oh, no, the people who don't like the First Amendment say, hey, you can't do that.
You can't have speakers like this on college campuses and whatnot.
So this is commonplace because, you know, truth is treason when the wars start out and they lie us into wars and they lie to perpetuate them.
And that's why it's so discouraging.
And I sort of relish the day, but it's not a very good substitute.
It's maybe if, matter of fact, it wouldn't have to be a substitute.
Why don't we mind our own business and spend the money here and not be the policeman of the world?
Can they imagine how different the world would be right now?
They say, oh, yeah, maybe the Soviets would take over.
Well, we didn't have a war with the Soviets.
The Soviets failed because of their system.
We're failing, not because somebody's going to march in here.
It's our own people that they're fighting.
We're sending troops out through the cities now.
So the war is going on.
But it's just a shame that those understandings aren't there and the propaganda wins out.
But in spite of all that, I think the numbers of people who are waking up and getting disgusted, enough is enough.
Let's stop this nonsense.
Why don't we take a little bit of the advice that came from our founders?
Yeah, that would be a good idea.
Well, one of the things that we notice people are talking about a lot is Stephen Walt, Professor Stephen Walt up at Harvard.
Now, he did a piece in foreign policy.
Think about Stephen Walt, he is widely associated with the realist school of foreign policy, which we don't adhere to.
We're not realists.
We're non-interventionists.
Nevertheless, sometimes we find ourselves in tactical alliances.
They don't want to invade and bomb everybody right away.
So I'm simplifying it.
So they're not neocons.
But Walt is a serious guy, and he wrote a book with Mearsheimer, of course, the famous book, The Israel Lobby.
Mearsheimer spoke in at our conferences.
Might not be a bad idea to invite Professor Walt to come speak next time around.
But if you put that next one up, now he has a sobering article in foreign policy, the peace in Gaza won't last.
And you could say he's just being a naysayer.
But go to the, he makes actually a really good and important point about this.
Go to the next clip.
Now he opens it by saying, we're grateful that the slaughter in Gaza has been suspended at least temporarily and that the hostages have been exchanged and turned away and that the aid can flow more freely to the suffering Gazans.
And then he says, not surprisingly, President Donald Trump is taking a victory lap, which is true.
He's calling the ceasefire agreement the historic dawn of a new Middle East.
He said similar things before, writes Professor Walt.
However, and so did some of his predecessors.
I hope he's right, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Now, here are the two things that he, the main points that he makes, Dr. Paul.
The two lingering questions in the aftermath of the agreement, first is, will it hold?
The second, on which the answer to the first largely depends, and this is key, is whether Israel's relationship with the rest of the world and especially its special relationship with the United States are evolving in ways that might make a lasting peace possible at long last.
Now, that's bringing up something that hasn't been discussed before, because he's suggesting here that at the core of this problem is the unhealthy relationship between the U.S. and Israel, which viewers of our show won't be surprised.
Now, if you go to that supplemental, here's how he fleshes it out, Dr. Paul.
I know I had to send it later because I wasn't going to put it in, but I thought actually sort of important to what we're saying.
Now, this is what he says, Dr. Paul.
And I think we can mostly agree with this.
That's why I and others have repeatedly called for the United States to have a normal relationship with Israel, consonant with its size and strategic importance and its conformity to U.S. interests.
In a normal relationship, Washington would no longer pretend that U.S. and Israeli interests are identical.
When Israel acted in ways that the U.S. thought desirable, it would enjoy American backing.
If it acted in ways that were contrary to U.S. preferences, example, by building more settlements in occupied territories, it would face strong U.S. opposition.
And I don't think, Dr. Paul, we would agree with everything here, but I think it's a more reasonable way.
And it's interesting, fundamentally, the relationship has to change between the U.S. and Israel for the situation in the Middle East to change.
And that's something that Trump and his people do not understand.
Yes, and this thing looks like it's going to continue.
But, you know, the one element that you don't hear spoken about too much, because all of a sudden it brings up, you know, ugly, ugly arguments and anti-Semitism and this sort of thing.
But, you know, there is a religious element involved here because, you know, our current administration has, you know, sought good relationships with, you know, evangelical, the Christians, and they have an attitude, you know, about how it should be, should it be equal?
And, you know, treat people equal.
And that is a good approach.
But the whole thing is, it's not even equal.
There are some people who would argue for religious dedication that it should be treating superior.
And that has been actually in the news and discussed.
You know, under these circumstances, do you really favor Israel over the United States?
And, you know, in a religious sense, if it's your deep downheld religious belief, even though it may only be 110 years old, this belief, it is really motivating.
And who wants to attack somebody's religion?
So that is a strategy.
I think it was contrived.
And I do not think that that's going to go away very easily.
Well, that exact question you just asked, isn't that there's accusations that this would be anti-Semitic and anti-Israel?
Well, Wall addresses this in his piece, which I do recommend reading.
If you put that next one up, he answers that exact question, Dr. Paul.
He says, is this position, i.e. that we should have a normal relationship with Israel, is it anti-Israel?
He answers hardly.
Unconditional support has been bad for the United States.
This is important.
And a disaster for Israel, which is losing support abroad, increasingly divided at home, shifting further and further to the messianic right and suffering from the steady out-migration of highly educated and economically mobile elites.
A policy of benevolent normality would be better for America and better for Israel in the long run.
And he adds, even if it's not in the interest of AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America, Christians United for Israel, which you sort of just suggested now, and the other groups that have kept the special relationship alive.
If you want a lasting peace, he says, in short, a more normal relationship with Israel is required.
And I like the way he couches this because it's not only hurting the United States, it's hurting Israel.
And he says right here, and the figures are there.
Future Challenges in China 00:02:19
I was just looking at out-migration statistics the other day, and it's massive.
People are leaving Israel as fast as they can.
It doesn't bode well for their future.
So they should, you know, if they really care about their future, enough Americans really care about their future, they should start listening to this.
Yes.
You know, I think what pattern or what example they ought to try following is maybe Hong Kong.
You know, one thing about Hong Kong that was fascinating to me is it was small, but for some reason, it was the West and the East for decades accepted the idea that it was a mixing point.
It was a trading area.
And it was based really on free market trading.
And the one amazing thing is Hong Kong geographically is pretty small compared to China.
You know, you see a dot on a map and then you look at China and you look at the people and all the raw materials that are available.
Hong Kong, they were producing more and they were more productive and richer than all of China.
And that is strictly a reality.
You know, we didn't have to bomb and go through a nuclear holocaust with the Soviets.
They did it to themselves.
That's why I fear so much about how we're handling things here because we're at war with ourselves.
And that's going on.
So it is a basic morality that exists in a country, but it's also the political politicization of people born and being dedicated in a sort of a, you know, in an emotional sense.
And then you put it into the religious thing and you end up with a mess like we have.
And then you introduce internationalism as the answer to this failed system.
And just thinking, if you want to pick a place that's been messed up, look to the Middle East.
And it was supposed to be, you know, it was supposed to be giving a great home place, you know, for the Jewish people to settle.
And look, they turned it over to the UN.
And I don't think the UN has a very good record as far as bringing about peace.
And yet we still talk about what's the UN resolution going to do this.
Will they do, oh, we'll help grow up this thing.
Deception In The Middle East 00:07:44
Oh, you can't cross the pink line.
Oh, yeah, you can cross the red line, but don't do this.
It just makes it nuts.
Because there are periods of time in history where these groups of people there, whether they were Muslims and Christians or Jews, got along together.
And the one characteristic was there was less people telling them what to do from afar.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of messed up, this is our second story we're going to cover.
We also saw an anti-war, but people are talking about it a lot, including some that I've actually clipped a little bit.
And this is, I would say it's astonishing, but it actually isn't.
Steve Witkoff, which is the president's special envoy to the Middle East, he went on 60 minutes over the weekend, and he said that the CIA was telling him Hamas didn't want a ceasefire deal, but that actually wasn't true.
Witkoff was interviewed alongside President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
He said that Arab countries mediating the negotiations were telling him Hamas would respond positively, while the CIA was saying the opposite.
I'm going to go to the next one.
Here's Witkoff.
He said, and we were hearing that Hamas was positive on the deal.
So he's on the ground.
He hears they're positive.
And he says, yet, I was reading intelligence points, reports every day and getting briefings from the CIA three times a day.
And those intelligence briefings were suggesting that Hamas was going to say no.
Witkoff said that despite the intelligence reports, he and Kushner thought the talks were going in a positive direction.
So the point here, Dr. Paul, is one of two possibilities.
Either the CIA is so grossly incompetent that they can't, they're incapable of sussing out something very, very important.
These talks are important.
What is the tone?
If they got that wrong, why?
And why do we spend so much money for them to get these things wrong?
Or something even darker, which is that they wanted to poison the well so that this deal wouldn't go through.
The question then being, why?
Why do they want to do this?
You know, when people fudge the facts and they work toward a goal, you could think, well, maybe they think this, and if you want to give them a benefit of the doubt, they want to do what's right.
They're doing it for good reasons.
They have good motivation, but they're deceiving themselves.
And the other answer is the person, and you see it in this article, the deception is on purpose.
That's their goal.
That's the way they operate.
And it's almost all these peace treaties are like that.
Just think of the deceptions and the lions, lies that have gone on in Ukraine.
Most people in this country still believe that the Ukrainians invaded Russia.
And it wasn't the NATO people who violated all the promises to Russia that we would manage our own business and stay out of there.
You know, I keep thinking of that.
That little episode comes to mind is, you know, the biggest crisis I was very much aware of was in November of 62 when the missiles were in Cuba and I was about to be drafted.
So, and because people had a right to be concerned, the enemy, the Russians, the Soviets were on an island 90 miles off our coast.
And how did we feel?
I mean, we were pretty darn scared about it.
But what are we doing now?
We are over there 90 miles, you know, a few hundred miles from Moscow and surrounding them with weapons.
So it's almost reversed that we're the ones that have been provoking, where back then you could argue the Soviets were provoking.
They came over here and put their nukes, you know, in Cuba.
The thing about the CIA misleading Witcoff, if that's indeed the case, if they intentionally misled him, the question is really important because obviously the CIA serves the executive branch.
It serves a president, obviously subject to congressional oversight.
But the CIA is an arm of presidential executive authority.
So if, and they report to the president.
So if they're deceiving the president's envoy, you've got a problem in the U.S. government.
You've got sort of a disloyal organization that's secret, that has power that's going over the head of the president.
That can't be healthy.
Well, you're arguing, if you're going to deceive people, you better be united.
You better be united.
You better be united in your deceptions and your lies.
Well, here's someone who's not taking this very lightly.
Steve Bannon, who very often is quite correct and quite entertaining and very vociferous.
He is mad about this whole deceiving Witkoff thing, and he places the blame, I think, where it belongs on Ratcliffe.
Now go to this next one here.
He was ranting yesterday, appropriately so.
He said, that's the Mossad talking.
Steve Bannon demands that Trump's CIA director resign over the bonkers-Israel conspiracy theory.
Go to the next one: MAGA Firebrand Steve Bannon accused CIA Director John Ratcliffe and his agency of lying to Special Envoy Steve Witkoff on behalf of Israel during a wild, fiery rant on Monday.
Witcoff is briefed three times a day by the CIA and they lied to him, said Bannon.
This is not some marginal mistake in intelligence.
He sat right there and they lied to him three times a day, he said.
Ratcliffe should resign today, he demanded, because that is the Mossad talking, not the U.S. intel.
And you know what that brought to mind, Dr. Paul?
If you remember, right before Trump started bombing Iran, and we saw that Tulsi Gabbard came forward and said, no, they're not working on nuclear weapons.
The CIA, the intelligence community, believes that they're not working on nuclear weapons.
And the same John Ratcliffe, CIA director, ran into the president's office and said, no, no, we've got new intel.
They're just days away from the nuclear bomb.
And then it was bombs away.
So he threw Tulsi under the bus with this groundbreaking, breathtaking new info.
But the fact of the matter, this info came from the Mossad.
This is the Times of Israel itself on the 20th of June saying just as much.
Mossad says Iran is 15 days from a bomb.
U.S. agencies still say up to a year.
But he took that claim by Mossad and he ran with it.
Go to the next one.
He ran to the president's office with this intel from the CIA and presented it to the president as a product of the U.S. intelligence community and was able to get those bombs launched into Iran and destroyed our relationship, undermined the United States, is what he did.
He undermined the United States.
I would tend to agree with Steve Bannon.
Ratcliffe is a big problem.
He's a huge neocon.
He's massively Israel first, and he doesn't take America into his interests.
He's got to go.
We need a loyal person in the CIA, if we have to have it at all, of course.
I wonder when they first used that excuse.
You know, tomorrow they're going to have a bomb.
Yeah.
You know, to exaggerate it.
But they've used it.
It'd be interesting if somebody look it up and ask and see how many times that has been used.
And then the sentiment has changed.
It's flowing out there.
Moving Away from Neocons 00:03:08
And how could you do that?
And the person who stops it and clamps down and drops a couple bombs on Iran and thinks, well, that won't hurt them.
They don't notice anybody bombing them.
And I say the Iranians plus others, they never forget.
We did nasty things in 1953 and they haven't forgotten about that.
That's why there was the turbo really got started and radicalized and got there.
They got power in Iran and it's been going on going on.
So it's the constant lying innuendos that I wish Dad hold all that.
Can't lie if you're going to be working in the government.
Yeah, you should.
Well, then you won't be working in the government.
Sadly, at least right now.
Well, I'm going to close out with thank you to Georges who put in $20 into the kiddie saying thanks.
Israel doesn't care what we think.
They'll just pay off our politicians as we are seeing.
Probably right, but that might be changing.
You never know.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I too want to thank our viewers for tuning in today because the program is really based on the fact that we want to get the message out.
And that message is our efforts to seek the truth and only the truth.
And realizing that no one person or one group can know it.
But I do know the difference between moving toward the truth and righteousness and versus moving away from it.
And too often we see it steps moving away.
But we've been optimistic at times now in the last several years where we see signs that there's a better understanding here and there, but we also know the great dangers that have to be taken care of.
We may be 100% right about warning about inflation, but the truth is that to say, well, we know about it and it could be solved, but it's not going to be and there's going to be hard times.
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