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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced he’ll be coming to the U.S. next week to meet with President Trump and other officials in the administration. He says the meetings will discuss how to, quote, “capitalize on the success” of the attack on Iran by Israel and the United States.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] I am expected to travel next week to the United States for meetings with the president of the United States, Donald Trump, with Vice President Vance, with the secretary of state and the national security adviser, Marco Rubio, with the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, with the president’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and with the secretary of commerce. We have a few matters to finalize beforehand in order to reach a trade agreement, in addition to other issues. There will also be meetings with congressional and Senate leaders and security meetings, which I will not elaborate on here. These matters follow the great victory we achieved in Operation Am Kalavi. Capitalizing on success is no less important than achieving it.
AMY GOODMAN: Will Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, be talking also about Gaza?
We’re joined now by Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Thanks so much for being with us, Muhammad. Many have said that Israel’s attack on Iran, that part of it was to distract from what’s happening in Gaza, the intensification of the violence. Can you talk about what’s happening there on the West Bank?
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Thanks so much, Amy, for having me.
Yes, precisely, I was in Brussels right before the Israeli attack on Iran, and Gaza became a very prominent headline there. There was so much momentum that European leaders couldn’t escape away from it. They had to save face. And as soon as the attack on Iran happened, you can see them immediately having a giant moment of relief. They were delighted that Gaza would disappear from headlines, and they’re very keen to keep it this way.
Right now the situation there, you basically have Israel having lined up the entire population like ducks in less than a fifth of Gaza’s area. They issued over 50 evacuation orders since March 18th. The latest evacuation orders were issued to the most populated areas in Gaza City itself, the areas where there was some ability to maintain organized human life. And basically, Israel is asking them to evacuate to the very areas that have been evacuated already, to an area that is already under an evacuation order, Deir al-Balah and Zawayda.
And basically, recently an Israeli officer called an elderly Gazan, and he said, “You have to evacuate now. We’re issuing mass evacuation orders for your area.” The old man responded with tears in his eyes, and he said, “Go ahead. Bomb us. We have nowhere to go. We don’t even have physical energy to run away.” And he started to beg the Israeli officer, literally. He started to beg him to bomb them. He said, “Just let us rest. Bomb us now.” And then, when the argument escalated, he started begging the officer for food. He said, “If you’re going to send planes here anyways, just let them drop any food on us so that we can get any energy to move from this area.” And he started to plead with the officer and saying that “I was a worker in Israel. A lot of the people here around me used to work in your country. We built your country from scratch.” And none of this worked. The conversation ended without having any sort of humane reaction from the Israeli officer, other than leave the area.
The evacuation orders are there only as a pretext to allow Israel to carpet bomb, to indiscriminately bomb a whole area nonstop. So, my colleagues on the ground have been saying that since last week, the intensity of the Israeli bombardment is the largest they’ve ever seen in months. There’s basically an airstrike every other minute. There’s nonstop artillery fire, gunfire, machine gunfire, as well as Israeli quadcopter drones that are swarming Gaza and shooting people at random, in addition to what you see now with the rampant starvation.
A single bag of wheat flour costs about 50 U.S. dollars. A single pound of sugar costs about $35. And Israel allows a maximum of what would be the equivalent — in the GHF sites, it’s 20 trucks per day, which is the equivalent of four ounces of food, 125 grams of food per person per day, as the only thing. In any concentration camp in human history, people got more food than they do right now in Gaza.
So, that’s the picture you have, with the death trap being the cherry on top, Israel basically laying a mousetrap with fake cheese to Gazans to go to GHF distribution sites to only get shot. It’s now basically etched in the minds of everyone I know in Gaza that trying to find food is synonymous to death, especially for kids. They associate it immediately with the killing or the death of loved ones. So, my close friend Ibrahim in Gaza City right now, he told me that whenever he tries to leave home to go look for food, his son starts to scream and kick and cry, because he understands that leaving to try to find food is a death sentence, and he would rather that they starve than finding his own family being killed.
But nonetheless, and that’s the most depraved part of it, Amy, is that my friends and family on the ground tell me that once the starvation gets too severe, it dulls your senses. It sort of shuts down your brain. An empty stomach means an empty mind. And your basic survival instinct forces you to walk, to march like a zombie towards these distribution centers, only to get shot on the way. The chances of survival, they are very slim. So, the overall picture is just a genocide.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Muhammad Shehada, this carnage, this genocide, is occurring while here in the United States the Trump administration yesterday approved $510 million in additional arms sales to Israel. Your response to this continued U.S. financing of this killing?
MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, basically, at this rate, anyone that wants to know knows what’s going on. You have a record number of Israeli experts, human rights experts, that are saying this is a genocide unfolding in Gaza.
And Trump’s only response has been twofold, to keep showering Israel with gifts, with weaponry, and at the same time to pretend that there is sort of, quote, “a breakthrough,” an imminent breakthrough, in the ceasefire negotiations. Let me be clear: There is none. There are no negotiations to begin with. Qatar yesterday announced there are no — there’s no progress. There are no negotiations. Hamas, as well, said there is no one — nobody is reaching out to us to ask for negotiating a ceasefire or the release of Israeli captives. There is just the mirage, the facade of negotiations that Netanyahu and Trump keep reviving every time Gaza jumps back to the headlines, as to numb, to suppress any coverage of Gaza, to create some false hope that there is a breakthrough, to sort of circumvent or suppress any room for pressure on Israel.
And the picture is not any better in Europe. Like, if you look at European sort of escalating rhetoric towards Israel, it was also an empty maneuver to just circumvent pressure to act. So, for example, European governments, like Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Australia and Norway — Western governments, they basically recently imposed sanctions on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. The sanctions were very well choreographed, articulated in a way as to evade holding the Israeli government accountable. They only penalize the two ministers for statements, not actions, and for statements on the West Bank, not Gaza, because if they had looked into actions or statements on Gaza, it would have incriminated the entire Israeli government. So, what we see is basically just mere headline-grabbing gestures that are there to buy time, while at the same time continuing to funnel unrestricted, unconstrained support for the very genocide that those countries are claiming to be concerned about.
AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, we want to thank you for joining us from Copenhagen, writer and analyst from Gaza, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
This news from Al Jazeera: Britain’s High Court has ruled the government’s decision to allow the export of Lockheed Martin F-35 jet parts to Israel is lawful, despite accepting that they could be used in breach of international humanitarian law.
Next up, we go to Geneva to speak with U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. He says Israel is committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Back in 20 seconds.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Tomorrow Is Going to Be a Better Day.” That’s Billy Bragg singing in our Democracy Now! studio.
