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AMY GOODMAN: Israel has announced it will reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt in the next few days as part of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire. According to the World Health Organization, at least 16,500 sick and wounded people need to leave Gaza for medical care. However, the border will only open in one direction: for Palestinians to exit.
Since the ceasefire began, at least 347 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 889 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In one recent incident, two children were killed by an Israeli drone for crossing the so-called yellow line, which isn’t always well marked. The children were brothers Fadi and Juma Abu Assi, the older of whom was 10 years old. They were gathering firewood for their disabled father. The Israeli military acknowledged the strike, saying, quote, “The Air Force eliminated the suspects in order to remove the threat,” unquote. Palestinians report Israeli forces continue to cross the yellow line on a near-daily basis.
This week, a coalition of 12 Israeli human rights groups concluded in a new report that 2025 is already the deadliest and most destructive year for Palestinians since 1967. On Monday, Israeli forces killed two teenagers in the West Bank in separate attacks as they carried out raids across the territory. In Hebron, soldiers fatally shot 17-year-old Muhannad Tariq Muhammad al-Zughair, whom they accused of carrying out a car-ramming attack that injured an Israeli soldier. Elsewhere, 18-year-old Muhammad Raslan Mahmoud Asmar was shot during a raid on his village northwest of Ramallah. Witnesses say the teen was left to bleed out as Israeli forces barred Red Crescent medics from approaching. The soldiers then seized his lifeless body. Last week, the U.N. reported more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023.
This is Jeremy Laurence, spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
JEREMY LAURENCE: Killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank have been surging, without any accountability, even in the rare case when investigations are announced. … Our office has verified that since the 7th of October, 2023, and up until the 27th of November of this year, Israeli forces and settlers killed 1,030 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Among these victims were 223 children.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, by Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer, former program director at Human Rights Watch. Her piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Gaza: The Threat of Partition.” She co-founded Gisha, the leading Israeli human rights group promoting the right to freedom of movement for Palestinians in Gaza.
Sari, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with the latest breaking news, that Israel in the next few days will open the Rafah border crossing, but only for Palestinians to go one way: out. What is your response?
SARI BASHI: So, obviously, people need to leave. You mentioned the numbers, in thousands, of patients waiting to leave. There are also students who have been accepted to universities abroad. This is after all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed. So, it’s half good news.
But the bad news is that the Israeli announcement that it will not allow people to return to Gaza validates the fears that many have, that the ceasefire plan, the American plan and the Israeli plan, is essentially to continue the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So, in Trump’s ceasefire plan, he committed to allowing Palestinians to return to Gaza, but that’s not what’s happening on the ground. There has been no construction authorized in the half of Gaza where Palestinians actually live. There has been no ability for people to come back home, and there are people who want to come back home.
And life in Gaza is nearly impossible for people because of very, very bad conditions. Eighty-one percent of buildings have been destroyed. People are living in tents that are now flooding in the rains. And it is very difficult to get construction and other materials approved by the Israeli authorities.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sari, there have also been reports of secret evacuation flights from Gaza. Who is running these flights, and who determines who goes on those flights?
SARI BASHI: I mean, that’s part of the problem. Early in the war, the Israeli government created what it calls the voluntary immigration administration, which is a secret, nontransparent government body that is supposed to encourage people from Gaza to leave, and make it possible for them to do so. There has been almost no transparency about what that organization is doing. There has been deliberate disinformation by Israeli ministers trying to amplify, artificially amplify, the number of people leaving Gaza to make people afraid. And there have been persistent reports about people paying large sums of money in order to leave, and that is after they have reportedly been asked to sign commitments not to return.
On the other hand, there is a very clear statement in the Trump peace plan, which was incorporated into a U.N. Security Council resolution, that people in Gaza are to be allowed to return home. And it’s perhaps not surprising that following the Israeli announcement this morning that Rafah crossing would be opened for exit only, the Egyptian government reportedly issued an objection and said no. It reminded us that the U.S. had promised that people in Gaza would be allowed to come home, as well.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk some about the situation in the West Bank, as we’ve reported these constant attacks by settlers and the military? What’s been the position of the Israeli government on this, and what role have the military played in these attacks?
SARI BASHI: I mean, the concern is that the violence in Gaza, the violence in the West Bank, it’s not random. It’s directed toward ethnic cleansing. It’s directed toward getting Palestinians to leave. Certainly, that’s the case in Gaza, and the devastation and violence there are at a much higher scale than in the West Bank. But in the West Bank, too, just this year, we’ve had 2,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes through a combination of demolitions as well as settler violence. Every single day, Palestinians are injured or their property is damaged by settler attacks.
And to be clear, settlers are Israeli civilians who have been unlawfully transferred to the occupied West Bank by the Israeli government and have been taking over land that belongs to Palestinians. In the last two years, they have become increasingly emboldened in attacking Palestinians, taking over their olive groves, their flocks, stealing, throwing fire bombs into their homes, to the point where, according to the U.N., in 2025, a thousand Palestinians have been injured by settler attacks.
This is decentralized violence, but it is also state-sponsored violence. It is the government who put those settlers in the West Bank unlawfully, and quite often this violence takes place when Israeli soldiers either stand nearby and do nothing or even participate. The very ultranationalistic, messianic ideology has been infiltrated into the Israeli military, where you have soldiers whose job it is to protect everybody, including Palestinians, who are also settlers. And on the weekends, they come out in civilian clothing and attack and sometimes even kill Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the Jewish and Israeli Jewish activists who stand alongside Palestinians to prevent the olive harvest from being destroyed, to prevent people from being attacked, the response of the Israeli military and the settlers?
SARI BASHI: You know, it’s an indication of just how badly things have gotten, how many red lines have been crossed, because it used to be that Jewish settlers would be reluctant to attack Jews, because their ideology is racialized. They believe that they are acting in the name of the Jewish people. But recently, they have attacked Israeli Jews, as well, when Israeli Jews have come to accompany and be in solidarity with Palestinians.
So, we just finished the olive harvest season. It’s a very important cultural and also economic event for Palestinians. And this year it was particularly violent, with Israeli settlers coming, attacking people as they try to harvest, cutting down and burning down trees, intimidating people. And there have been cases even where Israeli Jewish activists came to be a protective force by accompanying Palestinian harvesters, and they, too, were attacked and even taken to the hospital with injuries. It is much more dangerous to be a Palestinian than to be an Israeli Jew in the West Bank, but the fact that settlers are also attacking Jews is an indication of just how violent, messianic and ultranationalistic this movement has become.
AMY GOODMAN: The death toll from Israel’s more than two-year assault on Gaza has been reported as 70,000. A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany said the death toll likely exceeds 100,000. Our next guest, Ralph Nader, has talked about The Lancet report saying it’s probably hundreds of thousands. Life expectancy, says the Max Planck Institute, in Gaza fell by 44% in 2023, 47% in 2024. If you can talk about this? And also, what is going to happen in Gaza now, where the truce stands?
SARI BASHI: I mean, the violence against people in Gaza has been unprecedented. It’s been genocidal. And, you know, we have confirmed 70,000 people whose names and ID numbers have been reported by their families to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. There are thousands more people believed to be buried under the rubble, and thousands or tens of thousands of people who died from indirect causes. So, these are people who, because of a deliberate policy of starvation, died of malnutrition, died of communicable diseases, died of want. And I don’t know that we will ever know how many people died indirectly. This is for a very small population. It’s a population of 2 million people.
In Gaza right now, life has remained nearly impossible. The ceasefire promised reconstruction. It promised the crossings to be open. But the U.S. government introduced a number of caveats, and it actually, unfortunately, got those caveats approved by the U.N. Security Council. And an important caveat was that the reconstruction elements of the ceasefire would be limited to areas where Hamas had disarmed. And if the Israeli military was not able to disarm Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in two years of war, it’s not clear how they’re going to be disarmed now. So, conditioning reconstruction on Hamas disarmament is basically saying reconstruction will be impossible.
The only place where the U.S. has said it will allow reconstruction is in the more than 50% of Gaza that is directly occupied by Israel, that is off-limits to Palestinians on penalty of death. So, that doesn’t leave people in Gaza with any options. Six hundred thousand schoolchildren have no schools. The hospitals are barely functioning. There’s nowhere to live. A million-and-a-half people are in need of emergency shelter supplies. The concern is that the way the ceasefire is being implemented is only going to contribute to ethnic cleansing, because anybody who can leave Gaza will leave, because it’s very clear that there’s not a future being allowed there.
And the United States has an opportunity to make good on its promise in two ways. First of all, it can make it clear that reconstruction has to be authorized in the part of Gaza where Palestinians live, not in the half of Gaza that’s off-limits to them. And second of all, it should demand, as per the ceasefire agreement, that Rafah be open in both directions, also to allow people to come home.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you how the Israeli media is reporting both the breaches in the cease — the constant breaches in the ceasefire agreement, as well as the constant attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. And what’s been the impact on public opinion since the ceasefire came into effect, Israeli public opinion?
SARI BASHI: You know, I’m very sorry to say that there’s been a long-term trend of the Israeli media becoming more nationalistic and less critical. And that’s been matched by a number of government moves to coopt and take over both public and private media. So, particularly since October 7th, 2023, the Israeli media, with a few notable exceptions, has been reporting government propaganda uncritically. So, what you will hear in the Israeli media is that suspects were shot in Gaza for crossing the yellow line or approaching troops. You won’t hear that those suspects were 10- and 12-year-old boys who were collecting firewood, and that under international law, you can’t shoot children because they cross an invisible line. In the West Bank, you will hear that terrorists were taken out, when you mean ordinary civilians who were trying to harvest their olive trees. Haaretz and a few other media outlets have been offering a different view of what’s happening, a more realistic view. But right now many Israelis choose not to — not to see what’s happening either in the West Bank or Gaza. And interest in what’s happening in Gaza has gone way down since the majority of Israeli hostages have been freed.
AMY GOODMAN: Sari Bashi, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Israeli American human rights lawyer, former program director at Human Rights Watch. We’ll link to your New York Review of Books article, “Gaza: The Threat of Partition.”
When we come back, a group of eight senators, led by Bernie Sanders, form a “Fight Club” to challenge Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s handling of Trump. We’ll speak with Ralph Nader, who’s been taking on the Democratic Party for decades. Sixty years ago, he published his landmark book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Ishhad Ya ’Alam,” “Bear Witness, O World,” performed by the Palestinian Youth Choir on the B train here in New York. The choir is debuting at Widdi Hall in Brooklyn this evening.
