“The Gaza I Know Is Gone”: Israel’s Rampage Continues as Survivors Struggle for Food, Water, Safety

NERMEEN SHAIKH: “The smell of death is everywhere.” Those are the words of the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, who is urging Israel to end its siege of northern Gaza. Lazzarini said, quote, “Our staff report they cannot find [food, water] or medical care. The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble. Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied. In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.” The words of UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini.

According to Palestinian health officials, Israeli forces have killed at least 115 Palestinians and injured nearly 500 just over the past two days. Israel has ordered all Palestinians to flee their homes in Beit Lahia or face a new round of attacks. One drone strike in Beit Lahia killed 15 people, including women and children.

AMY GOODMAN: Images and video have emerged from northern Gaza showing Israeli forces separating Palestinian men from their families and taking them away. Almost all aid has been cut off to the area as Israel implements what’s been described as a “surrender or starve” policy. Hospitals in northern Gaza are under siege and barely able to function. This is Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

DR. HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA: [translated] This situation means we are under what can be called a real genocide taking place against our people in the northern Gaza Strip. The health situation has completely collapsed. The world must act immediately to secure a safe humanitarian corridor to provide blood, supplies, medicines, equipment and medical staff, or the wounded will die in the coming few hours. Therefore, the world must understand what is happening now in the northern Gaza Strip: genocide, deliberate killing. Anyone who moves in the street is shot at. It’s clear that we are witnessing a real massacre against those present. …

Of course, the medical staff numbers are very low, and the volume of injuries is not at all proportional to the space available. Therefore, we had to implement the difficult triage system for cases. We had to leave some to die and some to live. Therefore, our capabilities are very limited. And so, the situation is catastrophic, my dear friend. The world must come now with pictures and words and images to see what is happening in the northern Gaza Strip: a real genocide against everyone who moves in the northern Gaza Strip.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital.

We’re joined now by Muhammad Shehada, writer and analyst from Gaza City. He’s chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. He’s joining us from Copenhagen.

Muhammad, welcome back to Democracy Now! It is so critical to have you with us. As you speak with people who are in northern Gaza, the devastating, horrific images that are coming out of there, under siege for more than two weeks, you’ve been in touch with a colleague of yours who is the mother of a 1-year-old. Can you describe what you’re hearing on the ground?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, it’s a very close colleague of mine. She wrote me, basically this morning, that last night was the most violent since the war started. There was constant bombardment and shelling arbitrarily in the northern part of Gaza from 8:00 in the evening until 7:00 in the morning nonstop. It was an airstrike or a shelling literally every other second. The amount of it, the sheer intensity of it, was insane. And it’s been driving her very, very sort of — very worried about the survival of her family, but also suicidal by the mere thought that their turn is next at any moment. So, she’s saying, “I’m having these thoughts about how do I keep my son and husband alive, how do I stay alive myself. Give me advice where to go. What should I do? How should I get food?” And I cannot find any answer to any of these questions. There’s literally, literally, literally nothing is safe, and no access to food or water anymore.

Israel is implementing now a strategy that is in northern Gaza premised on four different pillars, one of which is mass starvation, quite literally mass starvation. The other one is mass killing and producing mass casualties, wounded people on mass scale. And then, the third one is shutting down all hospitals simultaneously, so that people with these wounds are destined to die if they don’t move south. And the last pillar is the mass expulsion, where you literally see Israel ordering people every day, “Move south. Move south.” And then they literally round them up from schools and hospitals and force them to line up on a death march and move to the south. I have friends who lost family members on some of these death marches, where you have to walk for dozens of kilometers under scorching heat or in the cold without any assistance, on foot, under constant fire, fully starved, with an empty stomach. And some people collapse and die on the way. I have never seen anything like this.

But on the other hand, I’m seeing Israeli politicians and media celebrating the footage of these death marches with utmost glee and utmost joy, that they see that this is the ultimate picture of victory. They are very open and honest that what they are doing now in northern Gaza has nothing — nothing — to do with Hamas. It has everything to do with the Palestinians in there. And they say that the reason why they want to depopulate it is because Palestinians believe that displacement is a thousand times worse than the war. It’s a deliberate strategy of humiliating, terrorizing and punishing the civilian population.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Muhammad, can you explain? Why is that? Why do Gazans think that displacement is a thousand times worse than the war? And if you could elaborate on how the Israeli press, in particular — you said a little about that now — how the Israeli press is covering the devastating conditions that you’ve just described in northern Gaza?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, basically, the reason why they find it a thousand times worse is that as soon as you cross the line dividing Gaza, the Netzarim Corridor — it’s a four-kilometers-wide area that Israel has turned into a military zone dissecting Gaza in two halves — as soon as you cross it, you will never return north again. You have to kiss your home and your loved ones goodbye. You will never see your family members that are literally just a few minutes on the other side. It’s something like the Berlin Wall, but way more atrocious.

And once you cross to the southern side, what you will find there is an insanely overcrowded tent city, just tents upon tents upon tents, surrounded by mountains of garbage and pools of sewage water, heavily infested with diseases, no protection against the weather, no protection against the rain, and just left doomed to your own fate, basically surviving of handouts, humanitarian aid that is barely coming in. So, people find this as an absolute nightmare. And once you cross to the south, Israel is playing with people in the south like a ping-pong, moving them around like chess pieces all the time, moving them from Deir al-Balah to Khan Younis, and then from Khan Younis to Mawasi, and then from Mawasi to Khan Younis again, and back to Nuseirat. It’s a nonstop nightmare. And this constant instability, this constant uncertainty, is one of the worst things you can do to someone that is heavily shell-shocked and traumatized and in pure survival mode.

Israeli media has been very honest since at least August. So, Israel’s Channel 12, the most-watched Israeli television, they said in August that, quote, “The central victory in Gaza, the central victory, is the psychological warfare that is waged upon the Gazan population in northern Gaza.” Depopulating northern Gaza, for them, is the ultimate victory image. And they are very honest that amongst the people that will move out of northern Gaza are the Hamas members. They are not concerned with fighting Hamas in the north. They just want everybody to move out. Now Israel’s main liberal newspaper, Haaretz, has been warning since — for many weeks, but yesterday they came and officially said, the editorial board, they said Netanyahu’s government is now, quote, “paving the way to building settlements in Gaza,” building the path or facilitating the path to building Jewish-only settlements in northern Gaza after emptying it completely.

So, for Gaza’s population to be moved into an overcrowded, unlivable tent city, pure sand and rubble and the desert, and be shell-shocked all the time and squeezed more and more and more into tinier and tinier places, it is an absolute nightmare. And that’s the Israeli strategy. The reason why they adopt these strategies, what they themselves brag about, is that the images of these death marches count as a victory image for Israeli political parties and for the Israeli public to show that, look, the Palestinian public are being humiliated, are being terrorized, are being collectively punished, and with the sort of excuse that this pressure might at the end lead Gaza to either surrender or face complete demise.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Muhammad, you know, today, Antony Blinken, U.S. secretary of state, arrived in Israel, his 11th trip to the region since October 7th, 2023. If you could say whether you think anything might come out of this trip of his? There was talk earlier, which seems obviously to be false, that once Yahya Sinwar was killed, Israel would be more open to ceasefire negotiations.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Yeah, I’ve been told that exact same thing repeatedly by American officials, by European officials and people from Israel, and even Arab officials, who kept saying that if Israel manages to get Sinwar, the war would stop, or we would double or significantly increase the momentum to end the war. But as soon as Sinwar was killed, you see every single one of those people playing dumb and deaf, just abandoning Gaza to its fate.

These performative visits and performative declarations, that there is a breakthrough, that the negotiations are happening, are just there as a pretense to buy time. There has been a deal on the table since at least July 2nd, the deal that President Biden put himself, that Hamas accepted fully on July 2nd with slight amendments in the updated formula, and Israel, as well. The message that the Qataris got from the Israelis is that Israel, as well, accepted that formula. And nonetheless, right after that ceasefire proposal was put on the table, Netanyahu went forth and killed the top negotiator in Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, and has been unleashing one massacre after another in Gaza and putting ludicrous terms that even his own security military establishment disagreed with completely, maintaining the occupation of Gaza in the Netzarim Corridor and Philadelphi, and merely having a six-week pause after which the war goes on again. So, these pretenses, Blinken’s visit, etc., it’s there just to buy time. It’s there to soothe people and pacify them and numb their outrage at what’s happening and unfolding in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, I want to ask you about the Israeli Cabinet members and officials with the ruling Likud party calling Monday for the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza and for the ethnic cleansing of the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants. The far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke at a conference of settler groups and ultranationalists near Israel’s border with Gaza. This is what he said.

ITAMAR BEN–GVIR: [translated] We can return home to Gaza, and we can do another thing: to encourage Palestinian emigration out of Gaza, encourage emigration, encourage emigration. It’s the best and most moral solution, not by force, but by telling them, “We’re giving you the option: Leave to other countries.” The land of Israel is ours.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about the significance of this, Muhammad Shehada? He was then cheered after he said this. And also talk about whether you think that Netanyahu right now is pushing for a war with Iran that would serve the U.S. election to get Trump elected, his true ally.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Yes, absolutely. So, in terms of Iran and Netanyahu’s ambition, yesterday, Israel’s top right-wing journalist, Amit Segal, he said it openly and publicly, that we want Trump to be back, because if he is back in office, Israel will get away with annexing major parts of the Gaza Strip and will get away with as much, for instance, in Lebanon or vis-à-vis the Iranians. He is actively trying to sabotage Kamala Harris’s campaign. It’s no secret.

But in terms of the Israeli security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the U.S. — every time that point is raised to them, they try to dismiss it or downplay it by saying this is a fringe minority in Netanyahu’s government. No, it’s not. Now you have at least half of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition that are officially, openly in favor of such plan of depopulating Gaza’s half and building settlements there and taking over and annexing parts of it. But the other half, the sort of silent half in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, many of them are also in that direction, even people in the Israeli opposition.

Now you have the Israeli political map vis-à-vis Gaza is fragmented between three different preferences. Number one is the one you mentioned, Amy, about resettling the Gaza Strip, building Jewish-only settlements in Gaza. Number two is the Netanyahu preference, building an Israeli military government, a military dictatorship, to rule the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable future, and if the world is not happy with that, then a joint Arab or joint international mission to do Israel’s dirty work in Gaza, to pay for Gaza’s — sustaining life in Gaza on a humanitarian scale and do the sort of dismantling, disarmament of Hamas. And number three, the defense establishment, the moderate position and the opposition position is that Israel will rule Gaza militarily for the foreseeable future, a military occupation will stay in Gaza, but they don’t want to do anything with Gaza’s civilian aspect of governance. They want to outsource it to anybody else, so that they don’t have to pay anything for running Gaza. And you heard, for example, Israel’s former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who’s supposed to be the opposition to Netanyahu, a moderate, relatively speaking. As soon as Sinwar was killed, he said, “We will stay in Gaza for the foreseeable future.”

So, this is a very scary spectrum that you have on hand, that is setting forth the agenda for an indefinite war. And the only reason you can sort of change that, influence a change in there, is by basically pressuring Israel and cutting off the weapons supply. Without conditioning the weapons supply or cutting it off, there’s no hope of any positive alternative coming out of this.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Muhammad, before we end — we just have a minute — we would like to ask about your family. You recently saw in Egypt both your grandmother and your cousin. You say people who have even managed to get out look like ghosts of their former selves. If you could tell us what it was like, how your grandmother and your cousin appeared to you?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, it’s a thought that I have to wrestle with all the time, is that the Gaza that I know is gone. And it’s not just the loved ones that were killed. I stopped counting how many I lost. And it’s not just the homes that were bombed. But it’s the physical debilitation, the physical weakening of the people in Gaza, even the ones that came out of it.

I got a message from my mom when my grandmother came out, and she said, “By the look of it, your grandma’s not going to be here for long. You have to come immediately and see her.” I went to see her. She was — before the war, she was this healthy, beautiful woman with a lot of jewelry on her hands, and she was very proud, traditional Palestinian clothing all the time. Now she was just mere skin and bone, with her feet swollen up in a very frightening way and complications with the digestive system nonstop. And she was bedridden completely, completely incapacitated.

I saw my cousin on the street, who was also a healthy, tall, beautiful woman in Gaza with smooth skin. That was her reputation, how she’s seen in the family. I saw her in the street. I didn’t recognize her. She did. And basically, she had shrunken. Her back is arched. She was skin and bone, a shorter person than the one I’m used to, with curled-up skin, very darkened skin, very rough skin. And I couldn’t recognize her anymore.

And I fear for the same fate of everyone I know in Gaza, that they have been changed and turned into ghosts physically, but also the mental debilitation. Before this war started, you had about 90% of Gaza’s population with PTSDs and 70% with persistent depressive disorder symptoms. Now it’s way, way, way uglier than that. Now I hear suicidal thoughts from everyone I know. And Gaza is culturally religious. There is the belief that suicide is the gateway to eternity in hell. But what Israel has done in Gaza is that it’s now pushing people to believe that God’s hell, no matter what, is going to be way better than the nightmare that is inflicted on Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, we want to thank you for being with us, writer and analyst, originally from Gaza City, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, speaking to us today from Copenhagen.

When we come back, we’ll be joined by the acclaimed writer and activist Naomi Klein. She’ll discuss her new essay, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war,” as well as how conspiracy theories are impacting everything from the U.S. presidential election to hurricane relief. She writes about conspiracies in her book, now out in paperback, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Back in 20 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Rubber Bullets,” sung by The Men of No Property in Belfast, released by Paredon Records, co-founded by the late great Barbara Dane. She passed away Sunday at the age of 97.