Israel’s Use of Mass Starvation as a Weapon of War

After six months of a sustained U.S.-backed Israeli war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza, President Joe Biden says he now has a “red line.” Asked about Israel’s threatened full-scale invasion of Rafah, Biden said, “You can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after [Hamas],” Biden told MSNBC. “There are other ways to deal with Hamas.”

The White House has taken no action to halt the transfer of arms and other support to Israel’s war and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly said that he, not Biden, will decide whether to occupy Gaza. As the Ramadan holiday begins, the humanitarian reality of the people in Gaza has descended into horror. Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign is intensifying the already indescribable suffering wrought by constant bombing and ground operations. The decimation of the health infrastructure and the attacks against hospitals have resulted in the collapse of basic health services.

This week on Intercepted, Yara Asi, author of “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health,” joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain for a discussion on the health impacts of the war, the dehumanizing narratives Israel has deployed to justify its mass-killing operations, and the U.S. plans for building a port off the Gaza coast. Asi is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and co-director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

[Intercepted theme music.]

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

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain. 

JS: Maz, there’s, as always, a lot to talk about today regarding the situation in Gaza. Some of the latest news that we’re hearing out of the Biden administration, after months of leaking stories to the press, and messaging that Biden is losing patience with Netanyahu, and that the administration is concerned about the mounting death toll and suffering of Palestinians, the latest news now is that Biden is talking about something along the lines of a red line, if Netanyahu decides to do a full-scale invasion of Rafah. And I’m just wondering your thoughts, Maz, on those developments.

MH: I’m very skeptical of the Biden administration’s very lately-professed reservations about the Israeli operation. So many people have died by this point — which is obviously a tragedy, and it’s taken as a given — but Biden made a very notable comment when he made this red line comment, saying that 30,000 more Palestinians can’t die, which is such a bizarre framing to discuss what could happen going forward.

I take his recent comments about Israel and Netanyahu and expressing some sort of reservation more as being sort of an effort to portray himself as an opponent of his own policies, or an opponent of his own enabling of the Israeli government to carry out this operation. Obviously, the operation is very divisive inside the United States, including in the Democratic Party. Biden has to think about an election year. He’d love to be passed this conflict, many, many months before the election comes, but he can’t seem to let go of Israel in this situation. And even when he’s saying there’s going to be a red line, he’s not backing down on funding the Iron Dome and other defensive capabilities Israel has, which are very, very important to enable its offensive capabilities, because it needs to be able to deter people who would retaliate against it for invading Gaza.

So, when he says red lines, he doesn’t get into specifics. I really don’t take this as a very sincere or genuine sort of opposition or restraint on Israel. I think it’s more an attempt to restrain people in the United States by making them think that somehow he is not endorsing the very policies that he’s implementing.

JS: Let’s remember, too, that Joe Biden and Netanyahu, by Biden’s own account, have been very good friends for some 40 years. So, this isn’t like Biden was a young politician who ascended to the presidency and is just dealing with Netanyahu for the first time. In fact, when Biden was vice president under Obama, he often ran what amounted to defense for Netanyahu, because of the reported hostility between Obama and Netanyahu.

But the other layer of this, Maz, somehow this line reminds me a bit of how the Democrats explained away their votes in favor of the invasion of Iraq, and their promotion of the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Both Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, and Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war in Iraq, asserted that the Bush administration had misled them, given them inaccurate information, and that, actually, it’s their fault that they voted— it was Bush’s fault that they voted for the war in Iraq.

And, in a similar way, the emerging line from the Democrats is that this was all Netanyahu’s fault, and that this isn’t actually about the Israeli state’s actions. This isn’t actually about the entire intellectual, cultural, political, military apparatus in Israel supporting this. It’s actually about this one bad actor, Netanyahu.

It’s not just about the U.S. election, but it’s also about the power of narratives. And I think that what we’re seeing now is what the Biden team sees as their offramp, which is to load all of the badness of this onto Netanyahu, and try to separate Netanyahu from the broader Israeli state, which is completely morally, ethically, and intellectually dishonest.

MH: It’s funny, we think about Biden’s own personal perspective; whenever he’s asked about Israel, he brings up how he knew Golda Meir personally, which shows how different his worldview is from average younger people, younger generations in the United States or elsewhere. I’m surprised he didn’t say he knew Herzl personally, or the Maccabees personally. But he’s basically signaling, he’s coming from a very, very older perspective of Israel. He doesn’t see the Palestinians even as a factor in decision-making. You can see, at a very human level, he disregards their own suffering, while feeling very intense sympathy for Israeli suffering.

I think that it’s not going to work, the strategy of offloading everything on Netanyahu, because even the political opposition in Israel opposes the two-state solution, opposes many of the things that the U.S. says it would like to happen. They brought Benny Gantz into the U.S. recently to talk to him. He echoed many of the same views as Netanyahu. And there are people in the Israeli political establishment who speak differently, but they don’t have the majority popular support to implement those policies that the U.S. says it would like to see going forward.

So, I don’t think the strategy of using Netanyahu as a sacrificial lamb, so to speak, is going to work. And I think that the Biden administration is simply trying to kick the can down the road, and hope people forget about this period, but I think they’re going to be mistaken about that. I think this is going to be a very decisive and definitive moment in history. People will not forget what stance the Biden administration took, irrespective of its attempts now to, as I said, portray itself as an opponent to what it’s doing.

JS: Yeah. And, of course, Ramadan, Maz, has just gotten underway, and it comes at an incredibly dire moment for the Palestinians of Gaza. And today we’re going to be focusing on the health consequences of Israel’s U.S.-backed scorched-earth campaign — what very clearly is an intended starvation campaign. And it’s not just that Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of starvation; there is starvation, and there already are deaths that have been attributed, straight up, to starvation.

And we’re joined now by Dr. Yara Asi. She is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management. She’s also the co-director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. And she has a new book out called “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health.”

Dr. Yara Asi, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Dr. Yara Asi: Thank you for having me.

JS: Let’s begin with the big-picture situation of what the U.S. is currently doing. On the one hand, the Biden administration is not retreating from its full support in arming Israel, providing political defense for the scorched-earth war against the Palestinians of Gaza. And, on the other hand, you see President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris increasingly trying to talk about the suffering of Palestinians, and Biden has put a lot of political weight on the notion that the U.S. is now directly trying to get so-called aid to the Palestinians of Gaza, initially in the form of airdrops of food and other supplies. And now, this construction of a port off the coast of Gaza that Biden himself said will be “protected,” quote-unquote, by Israeli forces.

Your reaction to this U.S. policy of simultaneously giving American weaponry to Israel and now saying, oh, we’re going to facilitate the direct delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians of Gaza.

YA: So, there is a long scholarship and critique of humanitarianism across contexts, but it is kind of hard to imagine a more potent example of the failures of humanitarianism than what we’ve seen in Gaza, really, since the beginning, but especially four or five months in at this point.

The president, the vice president, we’re really starting to see a shift in their language, simply because I think, at this point, the level, the scope of suffering is completely unavoidable. They can no longer pretend that this is just targeting Hamas, that this is just affecting Hamas, that this is just affecting people who didn’t flee the north.

Israel has made quite clear that they plan on invading the parts of Gaza Strip in Rafah, where people had fled to, people who cannot leave. When they announced this airdrop plan — and I am deeply ingrained in the humanitarian discussion — there was not a humanitarian agency or actor in the world who thought this was a good idea.

The reality is, Gaza has multiple land entry points aside from Rafah, which is what we’re all continuing to talk about. But many across the strip — the Gaza strip — aside from the Mediterranean, is essentially completely enveloped by Israel, with that little tiny bit of Egypt in the south. And so, if humanitarianism, if getting aid in — especially in the North, where it’s most needed — was a concern, the U.S. could push these land openings. The U.S. could force Israel to stop blocking aid, the U.S. could force Israel to do something about these Israeli citizens who are sitting at the Rafah border proudly, bringing their families to block aid trucks.

Airdrops are seen as kind of a— Not even a last resort. Something that, really, in 2024, should not be done, should not be needed. There are videos that showed the pallets dropping into the sea. So now you have this visual of these starving, traumatized, displaced people, including children, running into the Mediterranean Sea.

And then, of course, there was this story, just in early March, about some of these airdrops falling on people in Gaza. People who had survived this so far — including children — who have had airdrops fall on them, and have killed them. Then this was followed up with this announcement of this port. 

It’s interesting that the administration does not bring up why Gaza does not already have a seaport. Gaza is a city on the Mediterranean, in a very traditionally-trafficked route by traders, historically. Gaza had a seaport, Gaza has always wanted a sustainable seaport. Israel has prevented them from building that. Why does Gaza not have an airport? Israel bombed the airport that they built several decades ago and has prevented building of a new one.

So, now, trying to come in and patch these significant gaps of need with what are really, essentially, very performative efforts that, if you really consider the humanitarian need, you would recognize immediately. This port idea is going to take weeks if not months to build. We have people starving today, dying today. It’s going to require U.S. military involvement. And then, as you noted, this idea that, still, even though this is a port built to circumvent Israel blocking aid from coming in the land borders, Israel is still going to be able to inspect and control, and quote-unquote “secure” this port. It’s really farcical.

I think many Western actors who have seen that the stance that they took in October and maintained is no longer sustainable, and they’re trying to scramble at this point to look like they genuinely care about Palestinian life here, but I can’t see that that’s the reality, when we know that there is so much more that can and should be done; number one, starting with a permanent ceasefire. But even just looking at getting aid in, there are much better and more effective ways to do that that already exist, and pressure can and should be applied on Israel to facilitate that, and the fact that it’s not shows that this is not truly a concern for Palestinian life.

MH: Yara, the context which you’re describing, too, is a deliberate strategy by the Israeli government to use starvation, and deprivation of food and other necessities of life, as a weapon of war, which is a very medieval sort of tactic of siege, which the U.S. claims to eschew in the 21st century, yet, we’re seeing it happen in real time.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about — and I’m sure that, as an expert in public health, you have as well, too — are the implications of deprivation of food and water and medicine to a civilian population for a long period of time, including short and long term health implications of that. I’m curious what you’ve been thinking watching this, and the implications it’s having for the Palestinian population that we’re aware of, and what may be happening that we’re not aware of, but is likely, given the circumstances.

YA: Yeah, this is a great question. So, I think it’s really important to start with the pre-October 7th context of the Gaza Strip, which was already a site of blockade, occupation, and significant deprivation, which manifested in multiple outcomes: high poverty, high food insecurity, high rate of waterborne illness, death in children.

So, Gaza was already in a substandard state, what political economist Sara Roy has referred to as de-development. It’s not just under development — they don’t have enough resources, they don’t have enough food — it’s artificially de-developed by the conditions of occupation and blockade.

And so, when you layer that with the multiple forms of attack on life we’ve seen in the past five months, from the siege starting on day one, we started to hear reports of hunger and thirst and medicine deprivation almost immediately. We have reports now of at least two dozen, perhaps, people who have starved to death. Undoubtedly, that number is much higher, just underreported, because many people are displaced, the situation is so fragile.

Right now, we are to the point in the Gaza Strip where a permanent ceasefire, this second, would not stop the majority of suffering for most people. Most people have no homes to go back to, and most hospitals and health facilities, if not destroyed, are heavily damaged. I think the World Health Organization has recently said, less than ten hospitals in the Gaza Strip remain functional and in some capacity. Most of them have been reduced to offering trauma care.

So, let’s say you’re a cancer patient. Let’s say you require dialysis, or even just an asthma inhaler. You’re not getting any of that, none of those people are getting care. The only cancer hospital in the Gaza Strip that could offer chemotherapy services shut down in early November because of lack of fuel. So, if you have cancer — and we see the pleas from people on Twitter, my grandmother, my mother, I need to get out of Gaza to get my chemotherapy — you are getting no treatment whatsoever. Let alone if you have cardiovascular disease, any other number of health ailments.

Even prior to October 7th, many of these conditions required an application for a medical permit issued by Israel to leave the Gaza Strip, to either enter Israel to receive the care that you needed, or even to go to the West Bank or East Jerusalem, which are also Palestinian territories. You’re required [to obtain] an Israeli permit for this.

Israel had consistently delayed and denied permits before. Now, the World Health Organization has said this entire system has been shut down. People are not able to leave for medical reasons consistently, whether it’s because of trauma, or because they have a high-risk pregnancy or, again, insert any other health ailment here. The consequences long-term are immeasurable, especially because, as we have this conversation, this is ongoing.

Just looking at starvation, especially in children, this can cause stunted growth that can never be recovered, even if these children survive this, and are able to get back to normal caloric intake and nutritional needs. Much of the aid that’s distributed in terms of food aid is not nutritionally sound. It’s a lot of flour and rice, it’s not a lot of protein, fresh fruits and vegetables. The scale and scope of this starvation has astounded even scholars of mass starvation and famine.

And so, while we can kind of extrapolate from past settings of siege and starvation as a weapon of war, which has unfortunately been a consistent feature of our humanity, we don’t know what this will look like for all these people in the Gaza Strip, half of whom are children, most of whom have nowhere to return to, and will probably remain in some displaced state for weeks, months, years. We don’t know.

These shelters that they’re in or these tent cities that they’re living in, very underserved, as you can imagine. Very crowded, very prone to spread of infectious disease, low access to clean water, clean food. Sometimes it’s hundreds of people sharing one bathroom. So, these conditions are just absolutely horrific, completely inhumane.

And so, I think what we’re seeing now, as horrific as it is, will pale in comparison to when we’re finally able to look back at this comprehensively, retrospectively. The tales that will come out, I think, will haunt us for a very long time.

JS: Let us not forget that Israel has systematically attacked hospitals, health clinics, has killed many scores of health workers. They’ve abducted some doctors and tortured them to try to get them to confess that their hospital was in fact housing or masking what amounted to a Hamas Pentagon underground. And so many of the charges that Israel has leveled against Gaza’s hospitals have then later been proven false or wild exaggerations.

Of course, many people are familiar with al-Shifa Hospital, but this was replicated to the point where of the three dozen or so actual hospitals that existed in Gaza, almost none of them are fully functional right now, and there’s only a few of them that are able to do any sort of servicing of a large population. 

We’ve had doctors that have been on the ground in Gaza, including American doctors and Canadian doctors, who have described some of the scenes that they’ve witnessed, including a doctor who, some weeks ago, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles times describing how he saw a number of small children that he asserted appeared to have been killed by single bullets fired by a sniper weapon.

And you have a lot of people who are suffering from gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, having been under the rubble, who are being treated without any sort of anesthesia or pain management or painkillers. Not to mention what happens after, if there is a successful surgical procedure.

But I wanted to ask you, also, in this context, about the specific cases of how this war, and Israel siege, and the destruction of the medical infrastructure, is impacting pregnant women. I read a testimony over the weekend from a Gaza resident who said that when the food started to run out, they started using animal feed to make bread. And I also have read not just reports from aid organizations and medical organizations about how this is impacting new mothers who are trying to breastfeed, but also testimony from women who say, I essentially have to make a choice between drinking salt water or poisoned water — dirty water.

There’s a shortage of formula. Women are not able to breastfeed because of the health consequences to their bodies. And then you have the issue of inadequate menstruation products and other things. But this has particularly affected women and, in an extremely acute way, pregnant women, or new mothers and their children.

YA: Yeah, absolutely. And, ironically, we’re having this conversation just a few days after International Women’s Day. And so, the silence on the suffering of Gaza’s women and girls by much of the West has been particularly appalling. 

In an ideal circumstance, a pregnant woman has multiple prenatal visits. She has a skilled medical professional at the birth, she has a clean, private space to give birth, and she has opportunities for postnatal care, for having help with breastfeeding, women need special diets. None of that is possible. We’re hearing from pregnant women giving birth in shelters surrounded by hundreds of people, no physician around, there have been physicians who have been giving c-sections with no anesthesia.

In some ways, this is seen by some as not just an attack on Gaza today, but an attack on Gaza’s future. Gaza is a very young population. Tens of thousands of women were pregnant before this; there was an estimated 180 women giving birth per day at a certain point. Infant mortality has increased, rate of miscarriage and stillbirth has increased. Not just because of the physical stress, trauma, lack of food on the women, but also the shock.

We’ve seen some women who were able to successfully give birth, potentially to a premature baby, but because of the sound of bombings, the baby is unable to even latch to nurse. So, even if the woman is trying, we’re seeing babies that have starved and will starve. All babies that are being born that have been born in this are not receiving vaccinations. It’s really horrific.

This is not due to lack of technology or lack of advancement — Gaza has health professionals that are willing and able — this is purposeful human made policy to ensure that everyone from the most vulnerable pregnant women, infants, and everyone else, is suffering just as much for inexplicable reasons. And this is a place where we should be at least seeing some urgency. Going back to the earlier question, if we’re really concerned here about humanitarianism and helping people survive, this is a no-brainer, supporting pregnant women and their newborn babies and children. And yet, we are seeing them having to experience the same conditions, seeing them having to flee for their lives on foot.

There was the story very early on in this about the premature babies at al-Shifa and other hospitals who were left behind by medical staff with assurances that they would be evacuated and, instead, they were abandoned in the hospital. And when workers returned, they frankly found their decomposing bodies. This was months ago, and this did not spark any sense of urgency or need of intervention.

So, coupled with the health needs of this specific population, the lack of response shows, I think, the depravity of this situation, and the willingness of much of the world to really let Israel do whatever it wants to whoever it wants in the Gaza Strip.

MH: Yara, at the start of the war, there were a series of many greatly disturbing statements made by current/former Israeli government and military officials about what they expected to have happen in Gaza and what they hoped to engineer there. And, very notably, there were some statements specifically saying that the Israeli government should pursue a strategy aimed at spreading disease epidemics in Gaza.

There’s one statement in particular I was thinking of at the start of the war, former Major General Giora Eiland said, “The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring us closer to victory.”  And this statement was actually endorsed by Bezalel Smotrich, who’s currently one part of the Israeli government at a very senior level.

Can you speak a bit about what Israel has done since the war started that would likely generate these disease epidemics, and how that ties into a strategy that they have identified of, “thinning out the population,” potentially, by means short of direct use of violence, and bombs, and shooting, and so forth.

YA: Again, just to set some context, it’s important to note that placing quote-unquote “pressure” on the population has been Israel’s strategy since the beginning of the blockade in 2007. Ensuring deprivation, ensuring a dependency, ensuring that people cannot attain their full physical and mental health and capacity in education, or in work, or in any other sector.

This has been the policy, this whole idea of mowing the grass that we heard in past wars, or calculating the calories. And that’s why I think these statements were such potent evidence in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Because here we have Israeli government ministers — including the national minister, the foreign minister — basically saying, yes, that is the strategy. Make this population suffer. ensure their surrender and, for some of them, ensure that they can never return to this land, so that we can have it and build our settlements on the beach.

And this is why in the genocide case, this destruction of the health system played such a potent role, because the argument was, yes, the bombings, and the snipers, and the tanks, pose one form of threat to life, and threat to forced displacement, etc., but we cannot assume that these secondary consequences — starvation, I think, being most prevalent right now, but also the spread of infectious disease — is not part and parcel of Israel’s approach to induce surrender, to force displacement, to weaken the population, just as much as the other aspects of it.

Alex de Waal, who is a very well known mass starvation and famine expert said in an interview several weeks ago: you can bomb a population by accident, you cannot starve a population by accident. And I would take that further and say, you cannot induce this level of infectious disease spread by accident.

This is epidemiology 101. You have a weakened, malnourished population, sheltered in overcrowded conditions, lack of access to the most basic of medical supplies, health needs, masks, antiseptics, cleaning supplies, little access to bathrooms. Obviously, there’s no trash disposal, so people are just kind of disposing of trash in big piles in the middle of camps, sometimes close to where water is being stored. The likelihood of contamination is, of course, very high. None of this is new information. We have studied this exact phenomenon over and over again.

So, when you force a population into those conditions— Again, reminding your audience that people in Gaza cannot leave right now without paying actors in Egypt at the Egyptian border thousands and, increasingly, tens of thousands of dollars to do so. They are not choosing to stay in these conditions, most of them. Many of them wish to leave. And, while some have stayed in the North because they cannot flee, because they choose not to flee, whatever their reasons may be, forcing people into this tiny little space in the southern part of the Gaza Strip in these conditions, of course we’re going to see an increase in infectious disease. This was predictable on October 7th itself.

Basically, nothing is being done about the infectious disease angle, and the World Health Organization, with the data that it’s been able to collect, surprise, surprise, is seeing significantly increased rates of diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, skin diseases, respiratory infections, flu, COVID. It’s winter time, or it was just winter time when these diseases spread. Diseases that are especially dangerous for young children, like diarrhea. Again, children that are unvaccinated, we saw outbreaks of polio in Syria in very rural, unvaccinated communities. We’re very fearful that we’ll start to see even those kinds of outbreaks among the population in Gaza.

So yes, I mean, this is a recipe for disease outbreaks. We saw some actual soldiers, Israeli soldiers who had been deployed in Gaza, having to be sent back because they themselves had some sort of gastrointestinal infection or something. So, just imagine what it is like in these conditions.

There was a period when everyone I knew from Gaza was reporting coughing and feeling flu-like symptoms, with no ability to be diagnosed, no ability to get any medication, no ability to even rest and hydrate, which is kind of the basic thing you’re supposed to do in these circumstances. It is causing unnecessary 100 percent preventable death and disability. And this is very well known by Israel because it was already partially the case before October 7th. And, again, this is the fifth major round of military campaign in the Gaza Strip, and so, this is no surprise.

And so, I think it does us no service to act surprised that this happens. It’s, really, these bad faith efforts, I think, by many Western leaders, who are suddenly now expressing shock at what health and humanitarians were warning about five months ago, is really just hard to stomach.

JS: Yara, I wanted to ask you about some of the dehumanization narratives that Israel has employed as it seeks to justify the unjustifiable scorched-earth attack against the people of Gaza.

We’ve done a lot of reporting on this at The Intercept. Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has a new film out this week looking at Israel’s targeted campaign of misinformation and disinformation. Just to remind people that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, you had a very swiftly assembled propaganda operation put into place, and various actors from Israeli society were deployed in this effort, primarily people from the private so-called rescue operations that are ultra-orthodox, like Zaka. They offered testimonies to the world about what they claimed to have witnessed as they operated in the kibbutzim and other areas where Hamas and other groups launched their attacks on the morning of October 7th. They promoted the completely false assertion that there were beheaded babies, at times saying there were 40 beheaded babies.

Eli Beer, who is the head of another Orthodox rescue organization claimed that Hamas had placed an infant in an oven, and baked the infant, and that they personally witnessed and took out this child later. This didn’t happen. They claimed that they saw a pregnant woman who had a fetus cut out of her body, and the fetus was stabbed, and then the mother was killed.

No pregnant women have been documented to have died on October 7th, the Israeli government is not validating that a pregnant woman was killed on October 7th. There was a pregnant woman who was an Arab that was shot as she was en route to the hospital. Doctors were unable to save her baby, but she lived. These stories then became part of the official narrative.

And then you had Joe Biden, on multiple occasions, repeating the beheaded baby story, but also claiming he had seen confirmed images of Hamas operatives beheading the babies. The White House had to walk that back, and Biden continued to say it, nonetheless. Anthony Blinken testified before the Senate, told a very gruesome story about Hamas militants coming in and chopping body parts off of a family, and then sitting down at the table and eating their breakfast. This also has been thoroughly debunked.

And, in November, you had this intense campaign being run by the Israeli government with the direct participation of health officials in Israel to allege that Hamas had come in with a premeditated plan to commit and weaponize sexual violence, and to do so in a widespread manner, targeting Jewish women and children on October 7th.

And you had the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights Israel put a report out in November, claiming that there was ample evidence to suggest that there had been widespread rape and sexual violence. And then the Netanyahu government, with assistance from the White House, starts promoting this notion that feminist organizations had been silent in the face of this overwhelming evidence, that there had been widespread sexual violence deployed on October 7th.

You then had The New York Times at the end of December publishing its piece, “Screams Without Words,” that claimed to be providing new details that there was a weaponization of sexual violence from Hamas. And, in recent weeks, a number of independent news outlets, users on social media, have pointed out information about the authors of that New York Times piece, including a filmmaker who had no reporting or investigative reporting experience, someone who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces in an intelligence unit, who was essentially put in as the lead researcher investigating these claims.

And then, all of this culminates with the Israeli government denying access to an independent U.N. investigative body who wanted to go to Israel to investigate these allegations. Israel implied that its members were antisemitic and anti-Israel. And so, then, instead, they got Pramila Patten, who is an envoy of the Secretary General who has no actual investigative mandate, to come in. And then she, some days ago, released a 24-page report, and that report has been promoted in the media as the United Nations has uncovered evidence that there was widespread sexual violence in Israel committed by Hamas and other groups. But, if you actually read the report, which I did, the word evidence is mentioned a handful of times, but exclusively it is mentioned to explain that they weren’t dealing in evidence, they were dealing in information. And that, in fact, they were relying almost entirely on information provided to this U.N. group by the Israeli government itself.

Within this report, the U.N. looked at some of the cases that have received widespread attention and said that they didn’t find grounds to be able to declare that these were valid assertions. And no one is denying that there should be, there should be a very thorough investigation. And I know, as a former war reporter, a lot of sexual violence takes place in war, I wouldn’t be shocked if it did. But these are serious charges, particularly if you’re saying it was a premeditated program.

But my read of it — and I’m following this very closely — is that the overwhelming majority of the so-called evidence that is being presented is coming from nonscientific experts, people with no forensic or relevant medical credentials, people who are not legally qualified to determine rape. And, most importantly, people who have repeatedly promoted assertions about atrocities that later were proven to be false.

Your thoughts on this whole tapestry of this campaign, that is a very deliberate one, that Israel has now found a way to get the United Nations to launder — or at least allow it to be vague enough — that media outlets and lazy individuals online can now declare, a-ha! The U.N. has come in and said it, everyone who questioned this is a rape denier.

YA: There is a lot there, so let me try to start at this core question of dehumanization of Palestinians and what purpose does that serve, right? 

So, if you’re Israel, and your claim is, “we don’t kill all of them, we only kill terrorists, it just so happens that almost all of them are terrorists,” then you can justify a lot, and you can get the world on your side for a very long time.

Again, looking prior to October 7th, this has been the playbook. Palestinians are inherently dangerous, whether they’re a child or an elderly person. They are all deserving of this collective punishment, this over-securitization, [the] West Bank checkpoints, this blockade of a full civilian territory. All of these inhumane practices that agencies like the U.N. have been tracking, and arguing about, and, increasingly, the conversation has come to this question of, well, what is the purpose of this for Israel? And, for many, the answer is: they want Palestinians off the land, and they want the land.

Now, we have seen this take many different forms over the past century. And I think this kind of goes to this question of who is worthy of speaking and being believed, and who is questioned, and who is not trusted to narrate their own lived experience.

You mentioned Joe Biden earlier and, very early on, one of the first indications aside from the full-throated support that he was going to go fully along with this was when he questioned the Palestinian death toll, because it had been captured by the Palestinian ministry of health. And, of course, they can’t be trusted, right?

However, all of these various Israeli actors, good faith is the assumption, right? You start with good faith, and then maybe after a while of investigation, we can say, well, there are questions. Oh, we can walk back statements. They even walked back or tried to quell the death toll thing. But once something is said and it’s out there, especially by the president, the secretary of state, somebody like this, you can’t put that back in a box. So, this recent U.N. statement, the caveats were, just to put it mildly, were so remarkable, that it was really shocking that it was released in this form. 

Now, I completely agree with you. Let’s do a full investigation of all parties, right? Justice must be served. But for this U.N. report, with only kind of hearsay evidence, to suddenly be the foundational report for what happened on October 7th at the same time that dozens, if not hundreds, of U.N. reports tracking Israeli apartheid, referencing Israeli settler colonial aspirations, tracking Israel’s stealing of Palestinian water, it’s rationing Palestinian electricity; I mean, I could spend the rest of this time just referencing violations that the U.N. and other actors have documented.

JS: Sexual assault against Palestinian women, including prisoners.

YA: Yes, sexual assault against Palestinian women and prisoners. And, in one case of a child, this was a case that was referred to Defense for Children International Palestine. They documented the testimony of this child. And none of that bore anything, any fruit. If you brought it up to any official, it was, you know, we don’t want to presuppose anything that will come in the way of a two-state solution. And we really think unilateral moves and overtly criticizing Israel is not helpful.

We’re constantly hearing that that’s not helpful, but the reports that indict, that accuse, that confirm this narrative that Palestinians are dangerous, and that is why it’s OK to do these things to them. Even the children, because they’re children now, but they’re going to grow up to be adult Palestinians, and they’re dangerous. So, you know, do the math.

It’s so disheartening now. As a Palestinian, this kind of dehumanization, it’s baked into your existence, to your experience. But to see it be leveraged in this way, in what the ICJ has called, at this point, a plausible genocide, which has required South Africa to just last week go back to the ICJ and say, those provisional measures you asked Israel to do, they’re not doing any of them. In fact, they’re doing less than you ask them to do, things are exponentially worse. We require immediate intervention. I don’t even remember that really being significantly covered in Western media, while this, again, this U.N. report that you referenced was kind of seen as, we closed the book on this is what happened.

So, to me, this is about narrative, and who can be trusted, and who is taken in good faith. Why is it always that what Israel does is credible and in good faith? And yes, they make mistakes, but they are a democracy and they’re worth defending. And yet, any accusation against Palestinians is seen as, well, yes, that’s what they do, that’s how they act. Of course, that child that was killed in the street had a knife. Of course, this prisoner who was killed in his jail cell was killed for purposeful reasons. Of course, this Palestinian American journalist who was reporting from a refugee camp was killed in the crossfire. Initially, if we remember, by Palestinian militants. That was the story. Weeks later, that story unraveled, and then the IDF was like, well, actually, it was us, but we didn’t mean to.

JS: You’re referring to Shireen Abu Akleh, who is a dual Palestinian and U.S. citizen, and the Biden administration has actively tried to thwart an FBI investigation to determine who killed her. And Al Jazeera and others have documented quite clearly that it was almost certainly an Israeli sniper that killed her.

YA: That’s right, yes. But the initial story and what ran for a long time was that she was caught in the crossfire between Palestinian militants. Which, from the get-go, made no sense.

So, every time there is a situation where Israel is accused of wrongdoing, they are permitted to investigate themselves, and they are permitted to find themselves not guilty of anything. They have, consistently, for decades, disallowed international investigators, U.N. investigators, from entering the Gaza Strip, from entering the West Bank to conduct independent investigations.

I could sit here and just list countless times when there was an incident, Israel’s initial narrative was one way, and then a new— Even sometimes a New York Times investigation, or a Washington Post investigation, or CNN forensic investigations have shown that Israel’s narrative was incorrect. But, by then, the narrative is out there. So, even when the investigation comes later, it’s never as loud, it’s never as loudly received. This was, I think, just the most kind of potent and largest example of this.

And, again, with the caveat that full investigations on what happened on October 7th need to be made of all parties. But to use these accusations to justify what appears to be the attempt of mass extermination of a civilian population, with no pushback, no questioning, even if you ask for evidence or ask questions, you are called antisemitic, you are called a Hamas supporter, any of these things. It’s something we don’t see in any other context in the world.

MH: Yara, just briefly to your point about selective attention and outrage: On February 19th — I know me and you have discussed this in the past — but on February 19th, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights issued a press release which was very, very notable for its claims that there’d been significant sexual assaults against Palestinian women in detention, including two reported rapes of Palestinian women, threats of rapes, other humiliation in the form degradation, and reported uploading of photos of Palestinian women in degrading circumstances by the Israeli military online. I’ve seen very little to no follow-up from powerful institutions with the ability to press the U.N. on these accusations, attention, or interest, and so forth. The stark contrast could not be more glaring, and it really highlights your point about this selectivity and moral selectivity when we look through the subject.

I wanted to ask you one last question, just to conclude. Obviously, you write as a public health expert, and as an expert on the impact of conflict on civilian populations. But, as you mentioned, you’re also a Palestinian American. And, obviously, you’re invested in the subject. Your tax dollars, like mine and Jeremy’s, also contribute to what’s happening in Gaza today.

I was curious of your own view of the Biden administration, especially heading into election year as a Palestinian American, and how its conduct, its rhetoric, and its policies on the subject have impacted your view of this administration, and the Democratic Party and what it stands for, in this context.

YA: For someone who was elected as this “empathizer-in-chief,” quote-unquote, the many ways in which this administration has demonstrated how cheap Palestinian life is, is really something I’m still processing.

As a Palestinian growing up in the U.S. you recognize very quickly that the U.S. is and probably always will be on Israel’s side, right? We have never had this kind of benefit of having Western power in our corner. We’ve always had grassroots power, we’ve always had support of other liberation movements and other oppressed peoples; they have always got it.

But, in terms of the U.S. government — which, let’s remember, Israel is the number one recipient of U.S. foreign aid, by far — you kind of find, at least I did, kind of find a way to make peace with that. In that, yes, Israel is a bad actor in many ways, and the U.S. is supporting this. And I will use my perch here to speak out against this, and I will find ways to push policy, push legislation, etc.

I think this past half-year has shaken many of us. We can literally post pictures of our starving babies, of their decomposing bodies. I mean, the number of horrific stories that have come out of this, just individual stories.  Set aside the aggregate numbers, which are terrible.

Just yesterday I read about this deaf man in Gaza who had been told by Israeli soldiers to do something. He’s deaf, he didn’t hear them, he was besieged in his home. They shot him and killed him. I was just, like, what were his last moments like? Fear. This was an elderly man. He was perhaps even displaced in ’48, who knows? He has lived this lifetime of dispossession and trauma. And to have nothing. Nothing for that, you know? Nothing.

When Palestinian suffering is discussed, the suffering is unbearable. It’s very abstract. It’s just suffering, broadly speaking, you know? And then, I remember when the hundred-day statement was released by the White House, and it completely focused just on the plight of the hostages, the Israeli hostages. Did not mention how many Palestinians had been killed, it did not mention the thousands of Palestinians illegally detained by Israel. It did not mention the settler pogroms that have occurred in the West Bank, that the West Bank right now is essentially closed. We’re not even talking about the West Bank, because what’s happening in Gaza is so bad.

And what does Biden do about the West Bank? He puts some sanctions on a few individual settlers. Let alone the fact that they are being cheered on very loudly by the national security minister of the country himself.

In 2021, when Biden was president and Israel started bombing Gaza, reporting indicated that it ended because Biden had kind of told Netanyahu that we’re out of runway here, this has to stop. And it did. So that leads me to think, if this is still happening, this is with the implicit and explicit approval and support of the United States, and we are bending over backwards to justify this.

When you see the State Department’s spokespeople, or the White House press secretary, or John Kirby, or any of these people speaking, the verbal gymnastics that they go through to avoid overtly empathizing with Palestinians, or acknowledging their suffering, or overtly criticizing Israel and saying, yes, this was wrong. It’s always, we’re talking to our Israeli partners, and we’ll get back to you on that, or we’re conducting investigations. It’s never just, we saw this video, it was wrong.

We’ve seen videos of Israeli soldiers looting Palestinian homes, you know? Posing with children’s toys and women’s lingerie. There was one of a man — an Israeli soldier in his full garb — pretending to take a nap in a child’s playpen. Disgusting, vile behavior. We’re all seeing this on social media. And if I’m seeing it, I’m pretty sure the United States government is able to see it. I think that’s how it works.

The fact that none of this is worthy of comment, none of this is worthy of attention. None of this is worthy of saying, drop everything, this has to stop. Even if you support Israel, even if, as Biden himself has said, is a Zionist. At what point do you say this has to stop?

I think many Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and our allies, because I think one thing the Biden administration has done wrong is to pretend that this is just an issue that matters to Palestinians or Muslims. That they’re doing just outreach to Palestinian Americans or Muslim groups, or whatever. And I have heard from many people who have no skin in this game, who are absolutely disgusted and appalled that they live in a country where there is a famine happening, imposed by a U.S. ally that receives billions of dollars in military aid, unprecedented diplomatic cover at the U.N. Security Council and any other number of international bodies. And the best that we’re told is, we don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

I don’t think that people are accepting this narrative anymore. And I think it’s causing many people to question, not just Joe Biden and his administration, because you can go back into his history. He has been a long-term supporter of Israel, and has seemed to demonstrate some pretty apparent anti-Arab racism.

But if this country cannot intervene, and the Democratic Party is just a smattering of voices just calling for a ceasefire — we’re not having serious conversations about stopping military aid — I’m feeling very disillusioned in general. Very disappointed with even the so-called progressives in this country, very few of whom, I think, have spoken very loudly about this. I think these are positions that will age very, very poorly, and I think that the Biden administration ignores these pleas for intervention at their own peril. 

And we saw this with the huge uncommitted vote in many states over the past couple of weeks. We’ve heard indications that they are assuming that, by election time, especially if Trump is on the ballot, people will forget. I have seen and heard things I will never forget, can never forget. And it has really— I will never see the United States, the West, any of it, in the same way again. And I know I’m not the only one.

JS: Yara, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for all of your work. We encourage people also to pick up your book and read it. It couldn’t be unfortunately more relevant than this moment. Thank you very much for being with us here on Intercepted.

YA: Thank you so much for having me.

MH: That’s Dr. Yara Asi, author of “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health.” And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

JS: Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Sean Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted and Deconstructed. Also leave us a rating and review wherever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

JS: If you want to give us additional feedback, you can email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.