"They Want to CLEANSE Gaza!" Israeli Genocide Scholar Omer Bartov On IDF 'Crimes'
There’s no single authority or panel to determine what constitutes a genocide or who is responsible for it. Activists use the word very freely, drawing on the fact many will be willing to apply it to continuous acts of depravity - and that it might help to stop it. And now more than ever are using the G-word to describe what Israel’s doing in Gaza. But use it too freely and it devalues the meaning of a word that has to be reserved for the gravest crimes against humanity. Israeli-born historian and former IDF soldier Omer Bartov is one of the world’s leading experts on genocide and he joins Piers Morgan to give his view. Then, Piers is joined by Israeli-American journalist Emily Schrader, Palestinian-American journalist Omar Baddar and activist and commentator Shaiel Ben-Ephraim. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Birch Gold: Text PIERS to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
They do that because we all know genocide is the very depth of depravity.
And if we agree that it's happening, then we're more likely to stop it.
But use it too freely and it devalues the meaning of a word that has to be reserved for the gravest crimes against humanity.
Some people began talking about an Israeli genocide within days of the war in Gaza.
I didn't agree.
Hamas had genocidal intentions, and we know that because they kept saying it.
That doesn't mean an initially justified war can't become a genocide.
And the number of sensible people using the G-word about Israel is increasing by the day.
Not just celebrities, anti-Semites or Greta Thunberg, but real experts who study this for a living.
Dutch newspaper NRC recently carried out very detailed interviews with genocide scholars in the United States, the UK, Australia, Croatia, and Israel.
They all agreed that Israel's conduct has passed the legal threshold.
It's a thorny, complicated subject, but a very important one.
Israeli-born historian Omar Bartov is one of the world's leading experts on genocide.
He's also a former IDF soldier, and he joins me now.
Well, welcome to Uncensored Omar Batov.
Really good to have you.
You've written a powerful piece headlined for the New York Times.
Let's say headlined, I'm a genocide scholar.
I know it when I see it.
And immediately, I've been reading rebuttals from people such as John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, who's taken your piece, dismantled it, and explained why none of this is right.
So it's a very emotive issue, this.
But you are a scholar in this subject.
And for those who are watching who are just curious why this constitutes a genocide, explain to me in simple terms why you now believe this is a genocide.
So first of all, hi and thanks for having me.
Look, I mean, like you, I think, I initially, let's say in November 2023, it appeared to me that the IDF was already carrying out war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity, but I did not think at the time that there was enough evidence to say that this was a genocidal campaign.
There had been declarations by Israeli political and military figures, people with executive authority, that appeared to have a genocidal content, but it was not clear that this was being implemented on the ground.
And I changed my mind in the spring of 2024 when I concluded that the official war goals of Israel, which were to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages, were not the actual goal of the campaign itself.
The campaign was geared to accomplish something else, which was to make Gaza as a whole uninhabitable for its population by systematically destroying buildings, including universities, schools, mosques, parks, water plants, museums, whatever would be available for the population after the war to live in, but also to reconstitute itself as a group.
So it appeared to me at the time, and of course now there's far more evidence to show that, that the goal was to push the population out of places where it was living under the cover of saying, well, this is going to be an area of operations, then to move into those areas, totally flatten them, as had been said in the initial statements by these leaders, and concentrate the population increasingly in the southern part of Gaza, of the Gaza Strip, on the Egyptian border,
with the goal of somehow getting rid of them, moving them out.
So this appears like ethnic cleansing, but the big difference is that in ethnic cleansing, you can actually move, hypothetically at least, the population out of the area that you want for yourself.
But since the Palestinians can't go anywhere else, they are locked in that area, then every safe zone that they went to was immediately bombed again, which accounts for the very high number of people killed.
We are talking about a minimum of 60,000, including 17,000 children, a minimum of 130,000 wounded, and many, many people who will never recover from what is happening right now, including, of course, the use of starvation as a goal of war, which we are seeing now unfolding in front of our eyes.
So I concluded that this was clearly an attempt to remove the population from Gaza, flatten it entirely, and then accomplish what the far right in Israel would like to do, which is to make this an area for the settlement of Jews.
The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the, quote, intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.
Now, what pro-Israelis in this debate say when they contradict the claim that it's genocide is that if they wanted to wage genocide by that definition, then how do people explain that, you know,
horrific though the death toll is, 50,000 to maybe 100,000, depending on what reports you want to believe, out of a population of 2.2 million does not constitute the destruction of a whole group.
And that if Israel wanted to kill all Palestinians, for argument's sake, they could do that.
They have the firepower to do that, nuclear weapons if they want to.
And so they dispute the fact that the intent is genocidal, because if it was, the death toll would be much higher.
What do you say to that?
So yes, I've heard this argument too, of course.
And for one thing, I mean, I must say just the underlying moral assumption here is that, well, 60 or 100,000 people, that's not enough.
We need, say, a million people, 50% of the population for it to be genocide, which as such, just on the moral ethical level, is somewhat outrageous.
Specifically to the definition, the definition is important because what it says is that you have to show intent to destroy a population in whole, a particular group, in whole or in part as such.
That is, what you're doing, you're not simply trying to kill people, you're trying to destroy the group, and you can do that through killing, and you can do it by other means.
That is to make life impossible for that group, to degrade it to an extent that it would never be able to reconstitute itself again as a group, even if many of the people remain alive.
And if you think if Israel succeeded, let's say, and there talks about it now, of removing the population to Tunisia, Libya, and Ethiopia, those who would be forced to leave after they were concentrated in a vast concentration camp on the ruins of Rafah, which is what the Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, talked about, then you would be destroying the group as such, although many people would remain alive.
They would never be able to reconstitute themselves again as a group.
And that was Rafael Lemkin, who came up with that definition, specifically stressed that that's the difference between genocide and massacre or crime against humanity or war crime.
It is about the group and not simply about the individuals who make it up.
We've heard Smodric, the finance minister, openly talking about, in his words, cleansing Gaza of Palestinians, which many have taken to be an admission of an intent to ethnically cleanse the area.
What is the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing?
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So that's an important distinction.
Who Is Accountable for Genocide00:05:23
Ethnic cleansing is actually not well defined in international law.
The ICTY, the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, defined it legally, but it did not enter into the Rome statute.
It appears in international law as forcible displacement.
So the ethnic element is missing there.
But the difference is that in ethnic cleansing, what you're trying to do is to remove a particular ethnic group from an area that your own ethnic group would like to have.
And where they go and what they do once they leave is their business.
You don't care about it.
In genocide, what you're trying to do is to destroy that group as a group, wherever it is.
Now, in this case, and in many, many other cases of genocide in history, they began as ethnic cleansing.
And you can go as far back as 1904, the German genocide of the Herero.
You can talk about the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire in World War I.
And indeed, the Holocaust itself began as an attempt by the Nazi regime to be rid of Jews, just to expel them, to force them to emigrate someplace.
But when people don't move because they don't want to leave their homes or because they have no place to go and no one will take them in, then what do you do with them if you've already made the decision that they have to leave?
Then you start using more and more force and that becomes, that's when ethnic cleansing becomes genocide.
And in this case, I do think that the far right in Israel has spoken openly about it.
What they want is to ethically cleanse not only Gaza, but also the West Bank.
And there is a creeping ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and techniques from Gaza being imported from IDF operations in Gaza being imported now to the West Bank.
But the people there don't want to move.
They want to stay in their homes.
And so you use more and more force, more and more violence to persuade them, or as Israeli politicians say, to encourage them to leave, which means forcing them by killing them.
Who is accountable if Israel is waging a genocide here?
And we may not know the full detail of any genocide until international media are allowed in, because at the moment they're banned, so it's very hard to verify a lot of the stuff that's going on, which I think is disgraceful.
But ultimately, who is accountable?
Israel kind of ignores what the International Criminal Court says.
It ignores and degrades and mocks the United Nations.
It really only seems to really listen to the United States in terms of other countries.
So ultimately, who would hold Israel to account if it was perpetrating a genocide?
So first of all, some people are accountable even if the ICJ eventually does not rule that it was a genocide.
There are, for instance, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Galant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a tool of war.
So people should be held accountable even if it is not eventually adjudicated as genocide.
But who is accountable?
Well, first of all, of course, it's the state of Israel.
It's its leaders and military leaders.
And often soldiers are also, because people are carrying out unlawful laws, unlawful orders, which in Israel actually is not allowed by Israeli law.
You are not allowed to accept to operate under unlawful laws.
But as you say, Israel is allowed to do that.
The impunity that Israel has comes first of all from the United States.
The United States is the main supplier of Israel with arms, with economic aid, and most importantly, perhaps, with a diplomatic iron dome.
That is, if the Security Council were to try and impose some sanctions on Israel, the United States would veto it, as it has done historically.
But also European countries, I have to say, are complicit in this.
Germany, the UK, France, countries that are suppliers of Israel with arms.
Germany supplies about 20 to 30 percent of the arms to Israel and again supply it with diplomatic cover.
And the EU is a much more important economic partner with Israel than is the United States.
And so as long as there is no pressure in Israel, and Israeli leaders are aware of that, they can do whatever they like.
Nobody is brought to account, and that is a catastrophe, first of all, for Palestinians, of course.
Also for the state of Israel, which is now becoming increasingly authoritarian and will end up being a full-blown apartheid state that won't be able to exist as such very long.
But finally, also for the entire regime of international law, that you have a state that has just thrown it to the garbage.
It's just not there anymore.
And other rogue states will draw their own conclusions that the entire order of international law that was put into place after World War II, after the Holocaust, after the crime of the Nazis, is now being destroyed by the state that saw itself as the answer to the Holocaust.
Shattering Post-WWII International Law00:09:44
That's a terrible tragedy.
What the Israeli government people have had on would say, because they do say it, is Israel had no choice.
On October the 7th, they were attacked in such a spectacular terrorist attack, with so many killed, so many wounded, so many kidnapped, and with the Hamas leadership openly saying we want to keep doing this through their PR spokesman on camera, we want to keep doing more and more of this, that it was an existential threat to Israelis, that they had not just a right to defend themselves,
but a duty, and that because Hamas had created this huge tunnel system, which protected the terrorists, but not the civilian population, and because they then embedded themselves in places like schools, hospitals, mosques, so on, deliberately in the Israeli government's eyes, that there was no other way to remove the threat of Hamas than to do it the way they've been doing it.
In other words, we could only get rid of the terrorists, as they see it, from Hamas by attacking them where they are hiding, which is in the main in civilian populations.
What would your response be to that justification?
So let me just quote you one figure first.
It struck me recently, that since the re-establishment of these points of food distribution in late May, these four points of distribution, of which right now only two are open for 2 million people, well over 800 civilians seeking food have been shot.
And it appears that they were all shot or mostly shot by Israeli troops as crowd control by artillery, tank fire and gunfire.
That just gives you an idea of what is happening there.
This is the same number as the number of Israeli civilians that were killed on October 7th by Hamas militants.
Now, as for the question itself, yes, of course, Israel had no choice but to respond, and part of the response had to be military.
But we know, first of all, that there is no way of resolving this issue simply through bombs.
And we have seen it again and again and again.
You cannot simply bomb the problem of 7 million Jews ruling over 7 million Palestinians through bombs.
It will come back again and again, specifically for the operation.
If we conclude that the only way to achieve what Netanyahu calls absolute victory in Gaza, if the only way is to entirely destroy Gaza, kill tens of thousands of civilians, including close to 20,000 children, that is, if your response to what could be described as a genocidal attack by Hamas is to perpetrate genocide, then you have lost all moral standing on that.
You cannot answer genocide with genocide and remain a member of the international community.
What do you say to people, John Spencer's one of them, who will argue that if you look at the numbers in terms of combatants, terrorists, militants, however people describe them, I call them terrorists,
who've been killed in relation to civilians, that actually the war in Gaza bears reasonable comparison to other urban wars of the last hundred years, outside of World War II, obviously.
And that Israel has actually gone out of its way to warn civilians to remove themselves from areas they want to target, that it has fed Gazans, albeit many people view it's been criminally depriving Gazans of food, but they would argue which other army has fed their enemy and so on.
And that they are ultimately behaving in a very moral, ethical way.
I mean, we've heard this argument repeatedly.
What do you say to that?
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 was 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 force.
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 a thousand 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 Dir Abbala, 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 race is huge.
And the intent is quite clear.
And you can see it from all the reports coming in from Gaza.
The Israelis say again that this is the biggest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust in World War II.
And that in World War II, the Allies killed many more civilians than have been killed in Gaza.
And nobody seemed as exercised about that as they are now about what Israel's been doing in Gaza.
You know, again, you will have heard that argument many times, but why do you think that is an unreasonable comparison to be made?
Well, there are two things to be said about that.
First of all, this term that was used immediately after October 7th and has been recycled over and over, that this is the biggest killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
It may be true, it may not, that's not, but it's used for a particular purpose.
It's used to evoke the Holocaust, both in the Israeli public and in the international community, not least among Jewish populations in other countries.
That is, that Israel is threatened again with another Auschwitz, and therefore it has to do everything that it takes to thwart that threat.
And in doing so, it cannot abide by any international rules or regulations.
It doesn't have to listen to anyone.
The Gentiles stood by when the Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and therefore we can do whatever we believe we need to do.
So that's the first sort of what this term evokes.
As for the killing of civilians, yes, of course.
The U.S. Air Force, the RAF, bombed and killed, intentionally bombed civilian areas, open cities, and killed an estimated 600,000 German civilians.
And that could have been, had they been put on trial, could have been described as a war crime.
There were others who said it was a legitimate military target, and that could be debated one way or the other.
But when they came to Germany after the war, they did not intend to carry out genocide of Germany.
The Americans produced the Marshall Plan, which produced a German economic miracle.
And I remember living in Britain many years ago, and Brits were saying, you know, we won the war, but the Germans are doing economically so much better than us.
So there was no intent, there was no genocidal intent at the time.
And in fact, political leaders in Britain, in the United States, kept saying we are fighting the war not against the German people, but against the Nazi regime.
No Intent to Destroy Palestinians00:14:19
Had Israel said that, had Israel said, we want to destroy Hamas, we are calling upon the Palestinians in Gaza to come together with us.
We'll defeat Hamas, and then we will help you build your own entity, your own independent entity.
We will help you do that as long as we destroy Hamas, then we would have been looking at a completely different scenario.
But that's not the intent of the Israeli government.
The intent is to take over.
You know, today, the Knesset voted on annexing the West Bank.
This is the first vote, of course, it's not a lawyer.
But the goal is annexation and having the land and having a few of its indigenous population remain there once it's annexed.
Yeah, it's extraordinary.
Omar Bado, thank you very much indeed.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
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To continue the debate on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, I'm joined by the Israeli-American journalist Emily Schrader, Palestinian-American journalist Omar Bada, and the activist and commentator Shail Ben Efreim.
Welcome to all of you.
Emily Schrader, let me start with you.
You know, I had a pretty compelling argument laid out to me that what is happening now in Gaza does indeed constitute genocide because the population has been moved to a small territory in Gaza.
70% of the rest of Gaza has been obliterated, making it uninhabitable.
A large number of civilians have been killed now, anything from 50 to 60 to maybe as many as 100,000 people have died, of which two-thirds at least are believed to be civilians.
And that by any yardstick, and he was a genocide historian, a scholar, by any conventional yardstick of genocide, that is what we're now looking at.
What is your response to that?
Well, I think it's entirely inaccurate, and I have read a lot of the opinion pieces, and I emphasize opinion because it is an opinion, about this issue in particular.
Listen, no one's denying that war is a terrible thing.
No one's denying that there are civilian casualties and that it is, in my opinion, an unsustainable situation that there does need to be significant changes to.
That being said, it's not the same thing as genocide, which does have a very specific legal interpretation that doesn't apply here.
I mean, we're talking about a situation in which there was no pre-planned war.
There was no plan going in whatsoever.
In fact, it's one of my criticisms.
So you cannot say that this wasn't intentional.
So that's not actually the kind of the ridiculous people like Smotris.
All right, but you talk about the definition of genocide.
That doesn't mean that I'm talking about the legal definition of genocide, of course.
Right, but you're talking about these passwords are thrown around that actually take away from the gravity of the crimes that are committed when it comes to ethnic cleansing or death.
But I'm going to read you.
And yet, consistently, we see these terms thrown around.
Well, let me just remind everybody of what it is defined as.
The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the, quote, intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.
And as the scholar, Omar Batov, explained to me, that what is happening in his estimation in Gaza absolutely meets the criteria of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.
Because it seems increasingly obvious that there are many people in this government who want to get rid of all the Palestinians from Gaza.
And they're killing a lot of people in the process.
Well, that is an intent to destroy the group.
Well, I don't agree that that is the intent of the operation.
I think that there are a few people associated with the government and also other Israelis who have made comments like this.
But what's important to understand about the legal definition of genocide and the standard of proof for proving it is that A, it has to be fully conclusive, meaning that there cannot be, it's not a reasonable doubt standard.
This is something that needs to be proven beyond any alternative option.
And when you're talking about dealing with a terrorist organization like Hamas that has been proven and has admitted themselves to hiding and embedded in civilian infrastructure, that is a reasonable explanation for the reason why there are civilian casualties in war.
In fact, those targets aren't even illegal, much less genocide, when it comes to airstrikes because they lose their legal status of a protected status as civilian infrastructure when they're used by terrorist organizations like Hamas.
So you cannot say that that's intentional.
When it comes to the people saying genocidal things, it has to be proven in the court that the people who are saying that actually have the ability to carry it out.
Meaning that some random member of Knesset who is not on the war committee, who doesn't actually make these decisions, doesn't matter what he says or what he thinks about the Palestinian people, however distasteful it may be.
And many of them have been distasteful.
I don't dispute you on that.
What matters when it comes to the international law and the international community is whether or not he has the ability to do so.
And there has not been a demonstrated pattern of a desire to eradicate the Palestinian people or eradicate a Palestinian state.
If there was, you would have seen a war in the West Bank as well.
And in addition to that, I just want to point out once more that this wasn't a war that Israel started.
This wasn't a premeditated plan in order to reduce the population of Gaza or to erase the Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip.
Evacuation notices have been used in Yemen.
They've been used in Iran.
They've been used in Lebanon.
They've been used in Gaza.
In none of those places are we talking about ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Only when it comes to dealing with the Gaza Strip, because it is an untenable situation, but not as a result of the state of Israel, as a result of Hamas.
All right, let Omar Bada respond to that.
Yeah, you have Emily here describing a situation in which in order for there to be genocide, you have to actually witness what is in fact happening.
That is what is happening.
She's describing the reality, and she is talking about, oh, look at the West Bank.
Well, there is a war on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Thousands of homes demolished in the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians being driven from their homes, more than a thousand Palestinians killed since October 7th in a place that is not ruled by Hamas, in a place where there are no hostages.
So you can see that the entire justification really falls apart.
What we are witnessing is a genocide in Gaza that is effectively contested by Israeli leaders.
They've talked about the Amal describing the Palestinians as the Amalek and going in there and destroying them.
You had the defense minister at the beginning of all of this saying that they're going to cut off water, food, and fuel to the entire population of Gaza, describing them as human animals.
You have footage of Israeli soldiers who are celebrating the fact that they are committing genocide.
They are there bragging on their cell phones, talking about how they're destroying everything inside, how there will be nothing for Palestinians left to come back to.
And you have observers who are, you know, doctors documenting the fact that toddlers are being targeted by sniper fire.
And you have Palestinians reporting that this is what's happening to them.
They are being destroyed.
More than 90% of the people are in their homes.
Or is it explainable because they're taking it out of context?
That's just a problem.
Every single thing, Omar.
Every single thing.
At this point, Emily, at this point.
Even the comments you're making, even the comments you're making about Yoav Gallen, if you read the context of what Yoav Gallen said, if you read the context of what he said, you see he's speaking about genocide.
Allow me to finish my gentence.
Allow me to finish my gentleman.
I'm not lying.
Unlike you.
The only people who are left in the face of this destruction that we are witnessing, we are seeing Palestinians being killed, more than 100 of them every single day by Israeli fire.
It is live streamed on our televisions, on our cell phones.
We are witnessing this genocide.
The only people who are denying it at this point are either people who are so incredibly gullible, so emotionally attached to the idea that Israel is morally superior and would never do anything like this, and therefore that's interfering with their critical thinking skills, or you are dealing with lying propagandists who understand very well that it's obvious that we're witnessing is the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.
Netanyahu himself is admitting to this.
When he was confronted by a U.S. senator, this is reported in Israeli press and American press about how the fact that starving Palestinians in Gaza is giving bad PR for Israel and it'll be difficult to continue supporting them.
Then Netanyahu goes to his government allies and says, here, we're going to have to let some food in, but don't worry.
This is just a PR move.
The plan is still to drive Palestinians out of Gaza in accordance with the Trump plan.
They are open about the fact that what they're trying to do is eliminate Palestinian existence in Gaza.
And frankly, you would just have to be a moral monster at this point to defend it and whitewash it when you should know better.
And Emily, you do know better.
You live in Israel.
You're exposed to Israeli media.
You know that's how everybody is talking in Israel about eliminating Palestinians and committing a second nakba in Gaza.
No, they're not.
That is the discourse that is dominated by the United politics.
Okay, let me bring Shia in because you have an interesting perspective, I think.
Shah, welcome to Uncensored.
You initially, you're an Israeli.
You initially supported your country's right to defend itself, as indeed did I for many months.
But earlier this year, you said that you now believed it was committing a genocide.
Explain to me your changing view here.
Yeah, so I agree with a lot of what Emily is saying in theory, because after October 7th, Israel absolutely had a right and an obligation to defend itself and defend its citizens.
There's absolutely no question about that.
But as someone who has some knowledge of military strategy, it became very clear to me after a few months that Israel was not fighting this war in order to win it.
The fact that Hamas remains in control of large parts of Gaza after so long tells you a lot about the priorities of the IDF and of the government in this war.
So when I started seeing that at no point was there a day after plan to replace Hamas, that areas that are still controlled by Hamas are not being invaded by the IDF, and that the decision to stop bringing in aid or lessen the aid considerably is not hurting Hamas at all because Hamas can get the aid, but it's hurting civilians instead.
I started realizing that something else is at play here.
Took me far too long.
It took me many months to understand that.
Then I also have contacts in the IDF.
And they started telling me that the IDF is going after the clean water supply, every well, every aquifer, that they're going after every hospital, that they're trying to destroy basically the infrastructure that allows you to live in Gaza.
And they're using the same effort and the same tools that they should be using in order to defeat Hamas to do that.
So Hamas is in power, but every single house in several cities in Gaza has been destroyed.
That's where the effort is going.
And that means that there is no reasonable doubt that they're trying to win this war.
And more so, there have been offers on the table for Hamas to stop controlling Gaza.
That's been part of the hostage deals that have been offered.
And Israel has refused to do that and instead has insisted on things like the GHF continuing aid and insisted on creating a concentration camp in Rafah instead of reaching a ceasefire.
All these things indicate that the goal of the IDF and the government is very clearly to eradicate the Palestinian people and not to defeat Hamas.
Hamas is a pathetic organization, especially at this point.
Even Netanyahu said that there are people in flip-flops with Kalachnikovs that can be easily destroyed.
The fact that they haven't been destroyed so far is a completely calculated and intentional policy.
And when the goals of the war are elucidated by the government, they talk about a quote-unquote voluntary removal of the population of Gaza.
These are not things that some random person with some association to the government is saying.
This is what Benjamin Netanyahu is saying.
This is what Donald Trump is saying.
These are the stated policies.
And this goes back a very long time, the genocidal impulse of the US.
Why would a Palestinian not be allowed to leave if they wanted to leave?
Like if you're talking about volunteers...
By the way, I'm not saying I support or even oppose this.
I'm not giving you my opinion on it.
I'm saying what is wrong with someone who wants to leave being allowed to leave?
Because as far as I remember, this is a problem.
I'm not going to be for your neutrality on the state.
Yeah, it's great that you're neither for nor against.
The reason is, is because Gaza is being made to the point of view.
I'm asking about voluntary movement to make people destroy people's ability to get away from the people who are not going to be able to do that.
And I also wasn't asking what Netanyahu was talking about.
Yeah, you're just Just a semblance of honesty here about the fact that they're making Gaza unlivable and then saying it's voluntary if they want to leave.
There's nothing voluntary.
So you would rather that Palestinians suffer in squalor in Gaza than be allowed to leave.
No, I want Israel to stop destroying their lives.
That's what I want.
That's how you say Palestinians in Gaza.
Wait, I mean, I love Israel.
We're not going to stop attacking.
Nobody wants this one.
Let me jump in, please.
Emily, where do you think the Gazan population is going to live if most of Gaza has been destroyed?
I think Gaza needs to be rebuilt.
I think they need to come up with a plan.
It's one of my criticisms of the USA.
How long will that take?
They need to come up with a plan.
They need to be able to get a lot of people.
A lot more transparent about it.
It needs to have a reasonable timeline.
Minimum of months.
For the minimum.
How long?
Minimum a few months.
A few months to rebuild Gaza.
To get things going.
Starvation and Blocked Aid00:12:00
No, no, no.
Have you seen Gaza?
Have you seen the overhead shots?
Your Baba hasn't even been touched, despite the fact that we're ground off.
70% of Gaza.
The refugee camp hasn't been touched.
Exactly as Shael said.
Exactly as he said.
There are areas that haven't been touched.
Again, another criticism of the planning and forethought or lack thereof of the Gaza war.
Right.
Of course, there are areas that haven't been touched.
There is extensive damage, but there are areas that have not been touched.
And there are areas that need to be rebuilt.
Does it not give you pause for thought?
When you have an Israeli government and the IDF puts forward.
Okay, when you have an Israeli like Shael who says initially he completely supported this, in fact, in May he wrote, early in the war, I said those who accused Israel of genocide are acting in bad faith and spreading a blood libel.
I was right about some of these malevolent actors, but my conclusions were wrong.
This is a man with a completely open mind who shared your view and mine for a long while.
This was not a genocide.
But then as the facts on the ground clearly changed and we started seeing starvation with a three-month blockade, we now see starving, thousands of starving Gazans stampeding to get to a little food that is available and then being shot dead.
Right?
Apparently a thousand have been shot dead and the IDF hasn't claimed, as far as I'm aware, responsibility for any of those deaths yet.
What they keep saying is they're shooting in the general direction as a warning or they're responding to a perceived threat or they've launched an investigation or an inquiry.
What I don't see is just a bit of open honesty, which is actually, yes, we are shooting these Palestinians who are queuing up on the food because that's pretty much what everyone knows they're doing.
Well, I think that there's a few things that you have off here.
The first is that the intentional starvation is happening because of Israel.
If we look at what's happening now since May 19th, over 4,500 trucks have already been moved in.
What about the three months?
What about the blockade?
For 950.
Just a moment, 950 trucks are on the Gaza side, waiting to be delivered.
And the reason they haven't been delivered is because the U.S., or excuse me, the UN isn't distributing.
Why is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation the only one that's moving these trucks?
And in the press conference earlier today with the IDF, they said that the problem or one of the problems was that the UN had requested and the World Flu Program had requested that Hamas accompany these trucks instead of the IDF, which actually did offer.
In addition to that, the GHF offered to help them with security measures because of the situation in Gaza, because it is dire, and the UN refused.
So when we talk about starvation, I don't know how you can honestly say that there is any kind of intentional starvation.
Well, let me explain.
As I say this, 950 trucks are on Gaza side that are not being distributed.
It's not Israel.
Let me explain.
First of all, Israel, as you know, operated a three-month blockade.
That is actually, in many people's eyes, a war crime.
But aside from that, more than 100 aid agencies have now warned that mass starvation, their words, is spreading across Gaza.
They've accused Israel of not allowing food inside the strip to be distributed.
The Hamas runs no restriction.
Okay, so you're saying 100 aid agencies are lying.
Okay.
Then the Hamas run health ministry in Gaza.
When it comes to allowing the health ministry, which is Hamas run in Gaza, says that 10 people have died of malnutrition in the last 24 hours alone.
We're seeing a lot of images coming out of Gaza now of utterly emaciated children and adults, right?
There's clear starvation going on here.
And just on a human level, to deny what we're seeing with our own eyes seems to me an utterly futile exercise by anyone on the pro-Israel side.
I agree with you.
I am not denying that there's starvation in Gaza.
I'm not denying there's immense suffering.
I'm denying that it's Israel who's responsible, especially right now when we're talking about 900 trucks sitting there waiting for us to go.
I want you to respond to that.
I'm sorry.
No, no.
Look, again, you have Israeli officials, the highest-ranking ones, openly talking at the beginning of this campaign about preventing food and water from getting into Gaza.
You just heard about the targeting of water supplies within Gaza.
And then you have the physical siege of starvation.
You have every humanitarian organization.
We've had plenty of units to talk about.
Please respect other people's templates.
Please speak.
This is not here for you to filibuster and bury us with pro-Israel propaganda.
Allow other people to speak when we have something to say.
I know that you don't like hearing the truth, but you're just going to have to hear it because you have to take a turn.
Now, you have starvation that is being documented by people who are living on the ground.
You have it documented by every humanitarian organization blaming Israel for not letting that food in.
And you have Israeli politicians talking about how this is part of the strategy.
It's out in the open.
And you have Israelis who are clamoring at the border, destroying a lot of the food that is on these trucks to prevent it from going into Gaza.
This footage is available for absolutely everyone to see.
So seriously, Emily, just have minimal decency and self-respect about the fact that you just shouldn't be able to do it.
What Israelis are talking about?
The audience's intelligence.
When we see this starvation being done, we see Israeli politicians talking about it as a strategy openly.
And you see humanitarian organizations all blaming Israel for this blockade.
For you to come along and say this is not Israel's fault.
I mean, just who are you?
Who are we kidding here?
Just seriously, just deal with the reality.
I don't think this is a good PR strategy.
I know that you view this as your job to do PR for the government of Israel.
But ultimately, this is not a productive strategy to deny a reality that everybody is in.
There is no restriction on humanitarian.
I just keep repeating this.
I'm sorry.
It's absurd.
You are lying through your story.
You're incorrect.
You are lying.
Why, Emily, why Emily?
Why do hundreds of people?
I have been told that you are not.
Emily, why, Emily, if there is no issue with the distribution of food inside the strip, why are they?
There is an issue with distribution.
There's no limitation or restriction on the humanitarian aid.
Let me repeat.
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on, let me repeat.
100 agencies, more than 100, have collectively warned mass starvation is spreading and they have accused Israel, not HMAS, of not allowing food inside the strip to be distributed.
Why would over 100 aid agencies?
It is incorrect.
I had to have a multiple sources to know.
Why would they lie?
No, probably because they're looking at statistics from before when there was a blockade.
That's the only conclusion I can come to because I find it hard to get a lot of people.
So I know for 100% sure that there is not a restriction on the amount of aid that is allowed into Gaza.
There is an operational distribution problem that primarily is being right now by the United Nations.
Let me bring Shaiel shot and killed on the state.
Let me bring Shayol back in.
Shia, your response to this.
Yeah, so first of all, the idea that it is aid organizations, aid organizations that are starving Gaza intentionally is so absurd, I'm not even going to address it.
Now, as far as the with distribution.
It's an intentional problem.
What's missing in this conversation is the creation of the GHF.
The GHF was created as has been exposed in the media by Israel and the United States intentionally to serve Israel's operational goals, which as I've stated are not to defeat Hamas.
They're to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza.
And what they've done since is hand out the food in such a way that creates a choice for the people of Gaza.
Either you starve to death or you get shot to death.
These are death traps.
The amount of people who have been killed is staggering.
And the fact that the number keeps rising instead of going down shows that they're not learning from their mistakes.
They're learning how to become more lethal rather than learning how to become less lethal.
So what we're seeing here is that the list is not a problem.
Listen, in Haaretz, they had soldiers admitting that they're intentionally shooting at people coming to get food.
If soldiers are saying it, then where are you even getting this from?
There's no one really denying that.
This is not what the article said, and it was mistranslated.
As you know, as you know, it was mistranslated from Hebrew, which is not what it said in Hebrew either.
It was not.
Even if it wasn't that important.
If you have a situation where Israeli soldiers are admitting in the Israeli question that they're shooting at Palestinian.
You have it on both sides.
The serious thing is that you have Palestinians reporting that they're being shot at by Israeli soldiers and Israeli soldiers admitting that they're not going to be able to do that.
Do you just discount themselves?
You know the real problem here?
And I think, Emily, you've agreed with me about this point.
The real problem is the best way that we could determine independently and verify these things is to allow foreign media into Gaza to do their jobs.
And because they're banned, because they're banned, Israel can simply deny absolutely anything that they're accused of doing wrong, and they can blame everything on Hamas.
And Hamas, by the way, are a bunch of disgusting terrorists who blame everything on Israel.
And actually, when this happens in previous wars and conflicts, we get to a truth through courageous journalists on the ground who don't have a horse on the race and report what they find.
That is not happening because Netanyahu's government has banned foreign media from the start of this war, other than to show them what Hamas did in the kibbutzis.
They were very happy for the world's media to go and see that, but they are not happy for any of the world's media other than in strictly tightly controlled circumstances embedded with the IDF when they are pro-Israeli.
Other than that, no one's getting in.
No one can get to the truth.
No one can say whether what you're saying is right or wrong.
And it's a complete disgrace.
And actually, I do think, Emily, you've said to me that you agree the media should be allowed in.
I don't understand why they're not.
All I know is the longer it goes on, the more obvious it is that Netanyahu does not want the world's media in there because he doesn't want them to report on what they're doing.
There can be no other reason.
I think we've gone back and forth about this a few times.
I think there are very legitimate reasons why Israel wouldn't want journalists, international journalists in specific areas of a war zone.
Ukraine does the same thing.
That being said, I do think that it's something that Israel should allow.
I'm 100% with you on this.
And I think that it is something that will eventually happen.
And I'm hopeful that it does because I do think that it will get to the bottom of the street.
Well, you know what's going to happen is what the IDF needs to do.
Yeah, at the end of all this, what will happen is the world's media will get in there and they're going to uncover some terrible things.
And I think it's going to be a terrible stain, I'm afraid, for the IDF and for Israel's.
It's worse than we know.
But we will see.
We will see.
I will reserve judgment personally on whether what is going on is a genocide until we actually got in there and can see what has actually been done.
But I understand why.
Well, the only way they'll be able to actually report what's being done is if we do get Hamas out of power, because as you know, Pierce, this isn't something the journalists are even able to report on clearly when they have been allowed to go and get it.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
All right, we've run out of time, but I appreciate you all coming on very much.
Thank you very much.
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