The Night That Won’t End in Gaza

Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the official death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. These figures are likely a stark undercount of the true devastation. A recent report from the British aid organization Save the Children estimates that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. A new documentary by Fault Lines called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” follows the war’s impact on the lives of three Palestinian families in the besieged Strip.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill speaks to the film’s correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and executive producer Laila Al-Arian, the Emmy award-winning executive producer of Fault Lines, Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine.

Transcript

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Throughout the past nine months of Israel’s scorched-earth war against the people of Gaza, the world has watched as the death toll has increased by the day. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, and these statistics — the official statistics out of Gaza — are almost certainly a dramatic undercount of the dead.

In a report released this week, the British aid organization Save the Children estimated that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza. Many of them are feared dead, trapped under rubble, or killed in other conditions. Or, there are fears that they’ve been snatched by Israeli forces and are being held in detention.

These statistics can become overwhelming. But it’s very important that we remember that, behind each of these numbers, when we read the death tolls, is a human being. It was a family, a parent, a child, a sibling that are being shattered, destroyed on a constant basis.

On the program today, we’re going to hear from two journalists who have produced one of the most vital pieces of journalism of the past nine months. It’s a film that tells the story of how this war has impacted the lives of three Palestinian families in Gaza.

The documentary premiered last Friday on Al Jazeera English’s flagship U.S.-based news magazine Fault Lines. It’s called “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza.”

Joining me now is the film’s correspondent, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, an award-winning independent journalist who works frequently for Fault Lines. Sharif, welcome back to Intercepted.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

JS: And we’re also joined by the executive producer of Fault Lines, the journalist Laila Al-Arian, a winner of both Emmys and the George Polk Award. Laila, welcome to Intercepted.

Laila Al-Arian: Thank you for having me.

JS: Laila, I want to begin with you and, first, just say that this what you’ve produced here is one of the most powerful, vital, and important pieces of journalism that has been done over these past nine months of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza. And one of the aspects of this film that makes it so powerful is the incredible work of the journalists that you worked with on the ground in Gaza.

So, Laila, just to begin, talk about the process of how you came up with the concept for the film, and the team that you assembled to do this investigation.

LA: Sure. Thank you so much for your kind words, Jeremy.

So, the war on Gaza began, as we all know, in October of last year. And my show Fault Lines — which is a documentary and current affairs show on Al Jazeera English — had already commissioned all of the episodes for the fall season, so I felt really helpless just sitting back and watching as all the events were happening in Gaza, not actually being able to cover it until the new year, when our new season was beginning. So, I was following it, it was the only story that mattered, and yet our hands were tied as far as actually covering it.

So, my colleague Kavitha Chekuru and I — she’s the director of the film, as well as the writer and producer —our show focuses on the U.S., so there has to have a strong U.S. connection to every story, and it was very clear what the U.S. connection was. The U.S. is Israel’s most important, biggest ally, a supplier of weapons, military assistance and, of course, funds. And, of course, the Biden administration’s support for the war was so clear from the very beginning and persisted.

But, of course, we couldn’t go to Gaza, because Gaza is closed basically to the entire world, except for select doctors, aid workers, U.N. personnel. But no journalist working for an international media outlet has been allowed in, save for people who are going in as part of official Israeli military embeds.

So, given that our team couldn’t travel to Gaza, our team — which includes Sharif Abdel Kouddous, of course, as a correspondent — ended up working with a production company called MediaTown, based in Gaza. MediaTown has been producing films about Gaza for many, many years. They’re very experienced, very talented journalists, and we basically told them that we wanted to focus on specific cases of families who’ve been directly impacted by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. And, unfortunately, it wasn’t very difficult to find cases, given that you’d be hard pressed to find a single family out of Gaza’s 2.3 million people that hasn’t been affected by this horrific war.

So, they helped us identify some families. Also, when the case of Hind Rajab happened, the six-year-old girl who the entire world was shocked about her case — she was trapped in her car and pleading to be saved as an Israeli military tank surrounded her car — when that case happened, we also asked them to interview her mother and help us cover that case.

But these journalists worked under the most extraordinary circumstances, the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They were in the north — well, we have two crews, one in the north, one in the south — they were in the north, they were dealing with everything else that the people of Gaza are dealing with, which is repeated displacement, bombardment, aerial attacks, artillery attacks. They themselves had lost loved ones.

The production manager on the project, Hussein Jaber, on December 5, his daughter was shot by an Israeli ground troop. He was badly injured; in fact, he had to get surgery during the production. It felt like every time we were reaching out to a reporter, or a witness, or anybody on this project, they were all dealing with just unimaginable situations. We had another journalist who had most of his family killed in an airstrike. Another journalist who filmed, actually, a U.S.-made shell at the site of Hind Rajab’s killing.

By the time I messaged with him, it had been just days after his wife and son were killed, his young son. It’s just unfathomable. And he told me, I’m so sorry it took me some time — and when you say “some time,” it was, like, a couple of hours — to get back to you, because he was covering the flour massacre. So, not only was this man freshly grieving the killing of his wife and child, he was covering the flour massacre. My mind can’t comprehend the horror and the loss and the grief that these people are going through. Not to mention just the sheer will and struggle it takes just to survive.

You’re dealing, also, with a crew holding cameras, working very long hours, who are hungry, because there are starvation conditions in the north.

JS: There are so many moments in the film, too, where — just as a human being, or if you have children, as a parent — you’re listening to the human reality that’s being described by other human beings. And sometimes, a few times, I had to sort of pause when I was watching it to absorb what was being said.

You tell the story of the Al-Ghaf family from the north of Gaza, who then relocate to Khan Yunis, and they’re constantly on the move. But the father is telling a story about how his son is hungry, and is asking him to go get him biscuits and a date, and he goes to the market. And while he’s there, the place where the family was seeking refuge from the Israeli attacks is bombed and he returns.

SAK [from film]: His wife, Mariham was one of at least 11 people killed in the attack, along with Firas.

JS: You see the footage where he’s placing the little package of the snack that he had gotten for his son in the hand of his dead body. And he is saying that he lost his mind in that moment. He was having an out of body experience, and he went to get his son a snack, and he came back, and his son didn’t have a mouth anymore. And there are so many moments in this film where, on just a visceral human level, you can’t imagine it, you can’t fathom it.

Another scene where someone who survived a horrifying mass execution, it is saying, I don’t think any human being could ever forget this. The power of some of the testimony that’s provided is just, it’s at the same time sickening, but also such a powerful expose on the human experience that has been forced on the people of Gaza.

And Sharif, I was hoping we could walk through sort of an overview of the three main stories that are told here. And, for people who haven’t seen it yet, I would encourage everyone to watch it. It tells the story of three separate families, and their experience over the past nine months of loss and survival and struggle.

But let’s begin, Sharif, with the Salem family. Talk a little bit about their story, and what you discovered as you investigated what happened to them.

SAK: The Salem family, we mostly speak with the mother, Hiba Salem, and her son and other children. Their story is both horrific and common in Gaza, which says a lot. Their neighborhood in Gaza city was bombed early on in the war, and so much of this, of what we cover, is families trying to find safety, and unable to do so.

And so, they were forced to flee their home in search of safety, and they went to stay with relatives in a building that was not far from their home. And, on the morning of December 11, a massive airstrike hits their building, killing over a hundred people, nearly all of them members of their family or their extended family.

We worked with the nonprofit group Airwars, who investigated the strike for us, and documented and listed to as close of a degree as possible all the names of the people who were killed in that strike. They estimate about 50 children were killed in that attack alone.

SAK [from film]: Do you know how many children were killed in the attack?

Emilly Tripp, Airwars: So, we estimated 50, at least.

SAK: And how common was this type of attack that you investigated on December 11th?

ET: I would say this is one of so many.

SAK: This family’s case was also featured recently in an AP investigation that was published last week, that found at least 60 Palestinian families have lost 25 or more family members in Israel’s bombardment. And they actually found that the Salem family in continued attacks ended up losing an astonishing 270 members by spring in different attacks, their extended family.

So, this is a pattern of wiping out families across generations. And, actually, this pattern is a key part of the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

But what is almost unfathomable is that, after surviving this December 11 airstrike that killed over a hundred members of their extended family, Hiba and her children move to another building, and witness yet another massacre, this time at the hands of Israeli ground troops.

This is now mid-December, Israeli ground troops have encircled the north, and the family ends up trapped inside this building with other family members. Israeli tanks and troops are outside, they’re shelling and shooting the area and the building for days. There’s no one firing back.

Then, in the afternoon of December 19, Israeli troops enter the building and storm several apartments. The survivors say they separated the men from the women. They began beating severely the men and boys. They strip-searched the women, verbally abusing them and also beating them. Then, according to multiple survivors, they stripped the men down to their underwear, made them lie face down on the floor, and summarily executed them. At least 11 men were executed. The soldiers then left the building and continued attacking with what eyewitnesses describe as shelling or shooting from a quadcopter. Hiba Salem’s four-year-old daughter Nada was hit in the eye and also killed.

This is the kind of horror that we’re seeing in just one family in Gaza. And, again, this incident is also specifically cited in South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice.

JS: Of the three cases here, in each case, you can see the lengths that you guys and your team went to, to try to nail down and document each of the facts. But, in this case of the Salem family and this mass execution that they endured while seeking shelter in this building, again, having to move from place to place, you not only got WhatsApp messages where you’re seeing the reports that people are sending out to their loved ones and others, pleading for help, describing what happened, and voice memos, etc., but also video that was then filmed in the aftermath of these mass executions and the assault on this building, where one of the main eyewitnesses featured in your film can be spotted wounded, sitting on the ground in one of the shots of the video.

He’s there with dead bodies of people. He just happened to survive, and he’s describing what happened. But you actually see that he, in fact, was there in the room where the mass executions took place.

SAK: Yeah. The next day, after the soldiers withdrew from the area, people were able to enter the apartments, and civilians, neighbors took videos. We have two videos from inside, we show one of them. They’re both horrific to see. You see the corpses of several undressed men on the ground, the blood and bullet holes in the walls. And then, yes, you catch a glimpse of Yahya.

We also have another step of corroboration, which was the Al Jazeera coverage when the family was taken to the hospital for treatment. And you see Yahya himself saying the same thing as he told us in his testimony, how they came in and executed people. You see Hiba, wounded badly, with her children who are all wounded, talking about how they executed her husband. And this is the importance of having a network like Al Jazeera. A lot of the stories that we worked on and the cases that we filmed with, we have footage of the events themselves, because we have this big network on the ground that’s working day and night covering this.

And just a final note on Yahya, when we’re talking about him, myself, Laila, and others were the primary translators of a lot of the interviews we did, and I translated Yahya. And there’s a moment that is part of his testimony that’s in the film, where he finishes, like you said, he said, this was the worst day in my life, I’ll never be able to forget this. But then he kind of puts his hand up to block the camera, he can’t say anymore. He then puts his hand on his stomach as if he’s having physical pain. He doubles over, puts his hands on his knees. And, for me, when I was translating that, I was just floored. Because you can see that recounting this horrific experience of watching his family just be executed in front of him was physically causing him to just double over and almost collapse.

JS: Laila, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned Hind Rajab earlier and, of course, this case did receive a lot of attention from journalists that are actually paying attention, because it was so horrifying, and it took place over a protracted period of time. But maybe you could just take a step back and tell people that story of what happened to Hind Rajab. Her mother and her family are central characters in one of the three stories that you tell, but maybe just explain the context of what happened to this six-year-old girl.

LA: Sure. Well, Hind’s family, like most of the families in Gaza, had to flee because Israel was bombarding all over the Gaza Strip. They’re from the north, so they fled to the south. And Hind’s mom, Wissam Hamada, she gave us the most extensive interview that she’s given any journalist. She was very open, very vulnerable.

And she told us that, as she was living in the south, her mother told her, please write your name on your hands or your arms, so that if you’re killed in an airstrike, people will be able to identify you. And this is something that we’ve heard throughout the last nine months, of parents also writing their children’s names on their hands and legs, so that if, in case of an airstrike, they’ll be able to know where their children are and identify them.

And Wissam said, I don’t want that. I’d rather go back to the north, back to my home, so that if I’m killed, people will know who I am. They’ll know my face, they’ll know that I’m Wissam Hamada. So, she took this fateful decision to go back to the north, where she thought, of course, there’s no safe place in Gaza, but she thought she could find some semblance of safety for herself, for six-year-old Hind, and for four-year-old Eyad.

And, when she got to the north, it was terrifying, just as it is everywhere. And, on the night of January 28th, there were these fire belt bombings, just absolutely horrific bombardments all around them. The next day, they wanted to find somewhere else to be safe to shelter, and it was raining really, really hard. So, Wissam’s uncle Bashar told her, hey, why don’t I take your kids in my car, so that they don’t get wet? And, you know, it was cold, it was January.

So, she puts Hind and Eyad both in the car, and then Eyad just jumps out, he wanted to stay with his mom. And the uncle starts to drive, and the car comes under fire, and they hear people saying “ambulance.” And they thought they were OK because the car continued to move, and it ended up in a gas station. And the next thing you knew, Wissam was calling her family over and over again.

The next thing you know, Bashar’s 15-year-old daughter Layan picks up, and she says, we’ve been shot, everyone is dead, except for me and Hind. And then they called the Red Crescent over and over again, they try to get help.

JS: Just one point of clarification, Laila. They’re calling the Red Crescent not in Gaza, but they are calling the Red Crescent in the West Bank, to try to figure out how to respond in Gaza, because there’s a total siege, total war zone. So, they’re actually having to call an entirely different part of Palestine that is not on the ground in Gaza.

LA: That’s right. Partly because I think that the communications are so difficult in Gaza. That was one of the other challenges we had throughout, was just, literally, the phone lines, there’s no internet, or it’s very difficult to get internet.

So, in fact, at one point, a relative in Germany, a relative of Wissam Hamada had to get involved and ask for help, literally in Germany and Egypt, all over the world, because the communications are so bad in Gaza.

So, the Red Crescent then gets involved for hours trying to get help. They eventually realized that Layan also died from her injuries, and that Hind is very badly injured, and Hind is begging for help. Saying, please come get me, please come get me.

Hind Rajab [translated]: Hurry!

Omar Al-Qam: Hide. Hide. Where are you exactly, in the car?

HR: Huh?

OQ: Are you in the car?

HR: Yes.

OQ: Hide under the seats. So you can’t be seen at all.

HR: OK.

LA: They eventually get permission from the Israelis, they’re able to coordinate with the Israelis for an ambulance to be dispatched from Gaza to go get Hind. They even give them a map with an approved route to go get her. And we actually show that map for the first time, to show [that] this is real, this is not something we’re just saying.

And the ambulance goes, and you hear it, you hear a sound. And then it just stops, the communication. So, the ambulance was fired upon, and those two rescue workers were killed, and Hind died of her injuries as well.

JS: In the film, you speak to those Palestinian Red Crescent officials that were doing — I mean, it’s like many Americans have seen in the movies, it’s the equivalent of a 911 operator. And you have Palestinian Red Crescent officials talking to Hind, and we hear their interactions with her. And then they bring on a child specialist who also is trying to find a way to also deal with the severe mental trauma that this six-year-old is under, and it’s the lifeline. The only chance they might have to save her life is to keep her spirits up, her talking to them.

Nisreen Qawas: Can you imagine with me that a six-year-old is afraid, is hungry, is thirsty, smells blood around her all the time. Dark is coming on soon, and only the phone is her hope. My voice, Rana’s voice, Omar’s voice, my colleagues, was her only hope.

JS: It’s devastating.

Sharif, talk about, then, the forensic investigation that was done in this film, to determine how the vehicle was shot, how these ambulance workers that went to try to rescue this little girl as she was bleeding out. At one point, she’s describing to the rescue workers — and they have her mother patched in, too, so the mother can talk to her — while Hind herself, who had been shot and is bleeding, says in her six-year-old voice that there’s blood in her mouth, but she doesn’t want to wipe it, because she’s concerned that it’ll upset her mother, because she would be wiping it on her sleeve. And the mother says to her, it’s OK, it’s OK, just wipe your mouth. And that basically is the last time they hear Hind alive.

Sharif, describe how you then did a forensic examination of what exactly happened when that ambulance came to try to rescue her

SAK: Yeah. And just, quickly, on the Hind call, people have to realize this was a three-hour recording. They spoke to her for three hours, and we translated large segments of it. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

There’s a moment where one of the Red Crescent workers — We heard from Omar, the person who first called Layan and initially spoke to Hind, we spoke to Nisreen in the documentary, but the person who spoke to her the most, actually, was called Nisreen.* And she is so traumatized by that call that she refused to do an interview. She couldn’t talk about it without it being too difficult for her.

And there’s a moment where she is trying to provide some solace to this girl who is surrounded by her dead relatives, who’s injured, who’s somehow calm, in a way. And they read, she recites to her the opening verses of the Quran, and she does a line by line with her, and it’s really — I cannot even talk about it without tearing up.

But, to investigate what happened exactly, since we don’t have the testimony of any survivors, because everyone was killed, what we do have is the recording of the phone call between Layan and the Red Crescent, where you hear the gunshots that killed Layan. And we have footage and photos of the aftermath, when civil defense workers were finally able to get to the area, took photos and video of the car, and of the ambulance that was targeted as well.

So, we worked with Forensic Architecture and Earshot, which does audio analysis.

Nicholas Masterson: We can also see the amassing of Israeli tanks in the area, which are positioned at strategic locations, such as the intersections of roads, so they have lines of sight along the main avenues and streets in the area.

SAK: Crucial to the analysis is the short call between Omar and Layan. We hear a total of 64 gunshots fired in just six seconds.

SAK: So, what Earshot found on that call, which was a key portion of audio, is that you can hear 64 gunshots. You hear Layan screaming, and these 64 gunshots that are all similar in characteristics, they’re similar in loudness. And what they found was that the gunshots were about 74 milliseconds apart, which meant that the rounds being fired were up to 900 rounds per minute, which is far in excess of what an assault rifle like an AK-47 can fire, and is more consistent with Israeli army weaponry, such as the machine gun that’s mounted on a Merkava tank. They were also able to analyze the difference between the muzzle blast and the bullet reaching the phone, and thereby analyze or deduce how far the gun was from the phone. So, the shortest distance they found would have been 13 meters away, and the furthest distance would have been 20 meters, 23 meters away from the phone.

And then, what Forensic Architecture did then— Well, first, Forensic Architecture also mapped the car, and mapped all the bullet holes in the car. They found 335 bullet holes in the body of the car, which is really quite astonishing. That doesn’t mean there was 335 bullets, because one bullet can make multiple holes, but it was shot up an incredible amount of times. They focused on one volley of shots, and they could basically tell the direction of where the bullets are coming from.

Then, using this distance that was analyzed from the audio analysis, between 13 and 23 meters, they kind of did a statistical analysis of where the tank was most likely positioned, and you see that in the documentary. And you have to understand, a Merkava tank is one of the largest tanks in the world, and when you see this visual reconstruction of this massive tank not far away from this tiny Kia vehicle, it’s quite shocking.

And, also, it shows how the Israeli soldiers could have seen exactly who was in the car. This is not a far distance. These tanks also have visual equipment for them to be able to see a couple of kilometers away. This, to the naked eye, would have been visible. So, this, I think, analysis was very important.

We also did an analysis of, as Laila mentioned, the ambulance workers waited for three hours before getting approval from the Israeli authorities to go to the area. They provided them with a map and an approved route, which we show in the documentary, which the Red Crescent shared with us. The two ambulance workers go there, and you hear them on the call with Hind. And, on the call with them, you hear them, you hear a blast, and they’re hit. It’s very hard to tell from that blast and do an audio analysis.

But then, what we did afterwards with Forensic Architecture, they basically were able to see where the entry and exit hole of the artillery shell that hit the ambulance was, and it essentially looks like it was a direct hit. You can tell from which direction it was coming from, and it was coming from the direction of the Israeli tanks, which were past the car. And it seems to have been a direct hit that pushed the ambulance back.

And let me just end by saying, we do this level of corroboration, and verification, and journalistic sourcing and analysis to get as close to the truth as possible. Not only in this case, we do it to the execution case, and in everything we cover. The level of detail that’s needed before anything is kind of accepted by the powers that be — for something to be investigated, for something to be condemned — compared to the other way around, where just the merest accusation of something— If you look at how the Israeli military claimed that there was this Hamas command center under Shifa [Hospital], and provided this ridiculous animation. And then, all of these journalistic outlets report on it, don’t report on it critically enough. They go on embeds and give that side of the story a lot of credit. There’s just such a difference in the standard that needs to be met, that is infuriating, actually.

I was sort of angry that we had to go through and do this whole Forensic Architecture analysis and all this. Everyone knows that Israeli soldiers killed this family in cold blood. I don’t think there’s any question about this. That we have to go and prove it with such detail. There’s a part of it that’s actually, I mean— I think it’s important analysis, but there’s a part of it that’s maddening, in a way.

JS: Yeah. I mean, and from the beginning, you have Joe Biden multiple times saying that he saw photos of Hamas fighters beheading babies. Even after the White House clarified that he hadn’t seen any such photos, he continued to promote it.

And then, here you have a case where, even before you did this investigation, there was by far enough evidence available to the public that it was very clear what happened to Hind Rajab and to that ambulance but, as you say, you all went the extra mile to make it indestructible proof that this had, in fact, occurred.

And, on that issue, Laila, what kind of response did the Biden administration offer when you questioned them — or have they offered when others have questioned them — about these cases?

LA: They usually say that Israel is conducting an investigation and will follow up. I mean, they, to my knowledge, haven’t ever offered to conduct their own investigation.

Even with the killing of a U.S. citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh, it took months and months of advocacy, of the family traveling to the United States, for the U.S. to finally say they would have the FBI do their own investigation. And this is a U.S. Citizen.

We know that the U.S. investigates other crimes not involving its own citizens in other countries. But, of course, they unequivocally support Israel, no matter what Israel says or no matter what it does. And even in the case of Hind, which was so shocking and really indefensible, there’s no evidence whatsoever that there were any fighters in the area. I mean, there’s just really no excuse for killing this family in cold blood. They haven’t had a satisfactory answer.

And, in the case of this documentary, we reached out to the State Department, to the White House, for four months, trying to push for an interview, for a sit-down interview. I mean, we’re the premier current affairs show for Al Jazeera English in the United States, and they repeatedly declined. Sharif went to the White House, he went to the State Department, didn’t get called on.

So, it’s really a shame that, on an issue that overwhelmingly interests our audience, the State Department and the White House, while giving other news organizations interviews, chose not to engage with us.

JS: And Laila, while you were filming this documentary, Israel raided the facilities of Al Jazeera in occupied East Jerusalem, banned Al Jazeera from operating in Israel, and also confiscated the equipment of Al Jazeera.

So, when you were pursuing answers from the Israeli government on these specific cases — and specifically on Hind Rajab — did they speak to you? Did they offer any response? How did they approach it, given that they had raided, shut down, and banned Al Jazeera?

LA: They did not respond to either [our] interview request or a list of questions that our producer and director Kavitha Chekuru sent them. So, clearly, they have no interest in engaging.

And we should also remind your audience that, a couple of months into Israel’s bombardment in Gaza, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken was pressuring Qatar to ask Al Jazeera to tone down its coverage. So, while the U.S. talks about the importance of a free press in other countries, they’re trying to put pressure on Al Jazeera in terms of its coverage of Gaza, which is, obviously, very contradictory to their statements elsewhere.

JS: Sharif, the third story — or the one that we haven’t discussed yet of these three stories — is the Al-Ghaf family from the north of Gaza, and they took shelter or refuge in Khan Yunis. The man that is featured in your film, his wife and his son were both killed. When we meet him in your film, he’s with his two daughters in a tent the size of a closet, basically.

Talk about that family and that experience.

SAK: Again, this is unfortunately a very typical story in Gaza, whereby Palestinian civilians are forced or ordered by Israel to go mostly to the south, to so-called safe zones, only to be bombed there anyway. And that’s what happened.

So, tragically, with this family, they flee their home in the North to Khan Yunis relatively early in the Israeli onslaught. Abdullah, his wife Mariham, and four children, two girls and two boys, like so many families, they’re struggling to find food, they’re managing to survive.

On December 28, their youngest son, two-year-old for Firas asks his father for these biscuits with dates that he really liked. So, Abdullah goes to the market to try and find some for him, and that’s when the Israeli military attacks the building where they’re staying. Abdullah’s wife Mariham is killed, and so is his two-year-old son Firas. And that video that you mentioned of Abdullah coming back and putting the biscuit in that shrouded body of his dead two-year-old son, actually went viral at the time, in the way that these videos, that this genocide has been live-streamed, we’ve seen kinds of these videos.

And this one at the time kind of did have this ripple effect, because it’s such a heart wrenching and shocking and moving moment of this father, putting this biscuit in the hand of his son who’s been killed. What most people don’t know is that not only was Abdullah’s son killed, his cousin’s three-year-old son Farid was also killed that day. But, also, Abdullah’s other son eight-year-old Muhammad was badly injured.

And, of course, hospitals at the time are barely functioning because of the Israeli assault — I mean, we could do 20 documentaries just on the attack on the healthcare system in Gaza alone — but they’re barely functioning because of the assault and because of the blockade. Muhammad cannot get the medical attention that he needs. He’s suffering in pain for 25 days without proper medicine, without proper painkillers.

Finally, they get permission for him to be evacuated to Egypt to get medical care, and it’s too late. And you have this moment, Abdullah saying this tearful goodbye to his eight-year-old son, who’s asking his father to come with him. And he’s saying, I can’t come with you, but I’ll try and join you.

Muhammad Al-Ghaf [translated]: I want you to come with me.

Abdullah Al-Ghaf: What?

MG: I want you to come with me.

AG: I’m going to let you go and when I can, I’m going to come too.

MG: OK, don’t cry.

AG: OK, my love. [Kisses.]

SAK: He’s transferred to Egypt and he dies the next day of his injuries.

And, you know, Abdullah ends up then moving with his two surviving children, his two daughters, Wedad and Nagham, to a tent in Rafah. And we don’t know a hundred percent for sure, but I very much doubt they’re still in Rafah, because Israel invaded the Rafah, crossing the so-called Biden administration’s red line, and forcing a million people who had fled to Rafah to flee again. So, by some accounts, they’re back in Khan Yunis.

As we know, we spoke with Airwars and other organizations have documented this as well, that areas in the South that were designated as humanitarian zones have been repeatedly bombed and shelled and attacked by the Israeli military again and again and again. And so, it’s abundantly clear that there’s nowhere safe in Gaza, and life can be snuffed out at any moment.

JS: Laila, I wanted to ask you about one of the people that is featured in the film, Dr. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International. And, of course, one would expect an interview with a human rights organization, it would be a standard part of doing a film of this nature.

But, as someone who follows Amnesty International Human Rights Watch, their reports on Palestine very carefully, I found it striking that Dr. Callamard seemed to state that they believe that Israel was intentionally killing civilians. And, by my reading of it, I don’t know that Amnesty has gone that far before to describe that level of intentionality. Am I right about that?

LA: Yeah. She said, at best, they’re not taking the precautions they’re supposed to take. And, at worst, they’re intending to kill Palestinian men, women, and children. And I think that’s just based on the sheer numbers of people they’ve killed, and the sheer amount of destruction they’ve caused, which is unprecedented. I mean, Israel, by some counts, has bombed more heavily than Germany at the end of World War II. So, in many ways, the bombardment of Gaza, the killing of civilians in such a small place, and the proportions of the population is unprecedented.

And I think if you look at the way they’re conducting this war, in terms of carpet bombing, bombing residents where they know they’re civilians, the execution that Sharif talked about earlier. We couldn’t really get into this in the film but, at the same time that the Salem family experienced this execution of their father and husband, Ayman Salem, there were reports of two other executions in that area of Gaza City during that same period in December. So, it’s really chilling. I honestly think we only know a small fraction of the crimes that have taken place in Gaza.

When you look at what happened to Hind Rajab, Forensic Architecture concluded that the soldiers who fired could likely see the family. So, if soldiers are firing into a car while receiving no crossfire of a family that’s unarmed, that’s just trying to survive, what does that tell you about the way that they’re conducting this war?

And what we’ve heard over and over again from testimony from Gaza is that these soldiers are going into Gaza saying, you all cheered October 7, and basically that there’s no innocent person in Gaza. And, from the very beginning, when their own political leadership says we’re fighting human animals and we must act accordingly, when their military leadership says things like that, calls them “Amalek,” doesn’t differentiate between the people in Gaza, it means everybody is fair game. And that’s been made clear. There seems to be— Not seems to be, there is a wanton disregard for human life in Gaza. I truly think there’s abundant evidence of that.

And, again, I don’t know that we know even the half of it. There’s a reason that they’re obscuring, that they’re not allowing foreign media in. And the journalists of Gaza are doing an incredible job exposing the crimes every single day, but they’re simply not being picked up by Western media, and that’s its own conversation, why that’s the case.

SAK: Well, just to add to Laila’s point, the reason we know Hind’s name and that she’s become an icon is because her voice was captured in this phone call, and it was broadcast and put online. And so, we know her name.

And what Nisreen, one of the Red Crescent workers says in an interview to us says, what makes it more difficult to me, is it only Hind? Are there a thousand Hind stories? Are there 10,000 Hind stories that don’t have a name and a story that didn’t make it to TV? Even though the journalists in Gaza are doing this incredible job of shouldering all the labor of covering this brutal, brutal onslaught, there’s a lot we don’t know.

As many as 150 journalists have been killed, and that is also having a direct effect on what we know and what we understand is happening on the ground there. If we just take, for example, the destruction of Shifa Hospital in April, the largest hospital, what was once the largest hospital in Palestine — it accounted for 30 percent of all medical care in Gaza — it was basically burned to the ground. And then the Israeli forces withdraw, and there’s mass graves found outside with hundreds of bodies. Arbitrary executions, doctors arrested, medical staff tortured. We’re not getting the coverage of what’s happening there.

Firstly, because it’s not being picked up properly by Western media outlets. But, also, the problem is that Israel’s attack on journalists in Gaza, the very people who can expose and report on these atrocities, is having a direct effect. The Committee to Protect Journalists is still trying to verify the killing of four journalists at Shifa. And the reason it’s taking so long to verify the information by CPJ is because journalists are being killed, so there’s no one to report on it.

They said in a statement last month, “The decimation and displacement of Gaza’s media community, which was estimated to number at least 1,000 before the war, means that there are fewer and fewer local journalists left to provide details about the fate of their colleagues.” So you have this horrific cycle. More journalists being killed, less information coming out, and it continues going round and round.

JS: Yeah, Sharif. And, also, it has been unfortunately not shocking, but there’s been an unconscionable silence on the part of so many of our colleagues in the face of record numbers of our colleagues being killed. And not just journalists being killed, but also members of their family being killed as well. And I am so angered when I look at the journalists who will, every day or every week, tweet demanding the freedom of Evan Gershkovich, who’s being held in the prison in Moscow.

I’ve been clear, I think Evan Gershkovich should be freed. I’ve defended Fox News journalists when the Justice Department has gone after them in whistleblower cases. I believe that all journalists have an obligation to stand up and defend freedom of the press, and the institution of journalism in a society that proclaims itself a democratic society. But it’s shameful, it is utterly shameful how our colleagues overwhelmingly have reacted to the killing spree that Israel has gone on against journalists and journalism in Gaza.

And the final question I wanted to ask you, Laila, is: you and I have been in touch over these past nine months on a regular basis, and also as you and Sharif and your team were working on this film. And, in the midst of producing this film, your family learned that more than 200 of your mother’s family members in her extended family have been killed in Gaza over these past nine months.

And I wanted to ask you what that has been like for you, as a journalist, as a Palestinian, all of these dynamics. The silence of your colleagues, the personal toll that it’s taken on your family as well.

LA: I mean, honestly, I think for a lot of Palestinians, the last nine months has felt like a never-ending nightmare. Where this is the most documented genocide in history. Every single day, we wake up to a stream of one horrific video after another. Of horrific stories that, if it were happening anywhere else, it would be front page news, would merit a breaking news alert to our phones. And yet, it’s silence a lot of the time from legacy media institutions.

There’s really no words to capture the agony, the helplessness, the grief that we’ve been feeling. These 200 members of our extended family are people that, for the most part, I wasn’t even able to meet because of the siege on Gaza. Gaza has been an open-air prison for the last 17 years that has also been cut off from the rest of the world. So, actually, getting into Gaza has been very, very difficult for people, even well before October 7th. So, the function of that is that you have family that you’ve never even had a chance to meet.

But as much as I grieve my family, I also grieve people like Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was an amazing poet, professor, sort of public intellectual figure who was, I believe, targeted by the Israeli military and killed along with his sister and her children and, I believe, one of his brothers.

There are so many people that we grieve without even having met. All of the children that we see dismembered, losing their limbs, beheaded. We’ve seen the most horrifically unforgettable images in the last nine months. And it’s been really painful to see the silence, as you mentioned, of my industry.

I went to a few different events in the fall after a record number of journalists had been killed. Seventy-five percent of journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in Gaza. It is a staggering number. And yet, at these events that honored courage in journalism, that honored journalists who are pushing boundaries, there was nothing said on Gaza. I was shocked.

And it’s unforgivable, and it’s shameful. And I think it’s improving a little bit, but I believe my industry has failed in so many ways the last nine months, and this lack of solidarity is something that we definitely won’t forget.

JS: Well, Laila and Sharif, I want to thank you and the whole team that you assembled to do this incredibly powerful film. I hope every single person watches it. But we all, I think, wonder how can we take action, what can we do about this? And I think what you’ve produced offers people at least some small step that they can take. And that is to share this film with every single person that you know, especially people that have decided they don’t want to pay attention, or they think it’s too complicated. Just ask them for a commitment of one hour and 20 minutes of their time to understand what has happened over these past nine months, and what their own government, what the U.S. government is bankrolling, endorsing, providing political support for.

But, one journalist to another, deep gratitude to you, Laila Al-Arian.

LA: Thank you so much, Jeremy.

JS: And thank you very much, Sharif, for all of your great work, and what an important and powerful film you all have produced.

SAK: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” is a new Al Jazeera English documentary that premiered on the program Fault Lines. We were speaking to correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Fault Lines executive producer Laila Al-Arian. And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review was done by David Bralow, Shawn Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Thank you so much to our supporters and listeners. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and our other podcast, Deconstructed. And do leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other people to find us as well.

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Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

*Sharif meant to say Nisreen