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Professor Ilan Pappé: Israel Has Chosen to be a "Racist Apartheid State" with U.S. Support
As the Palestinian death toll tops 1,000 in Gaza, we are joined from Haifa by Israeli professor and historian Ilan Pappé. "I think Israel in 2014 made a decision that it prefers to be a racist apartheid state and not a democracy," Pappé says. "It still hopes that the United States will license this decision and provide it with the immunity to continue, with the necessary implication of such a policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians wherever they are." A professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, Pappé is the author of several books, including most recently, "The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our coverage of the crisis in Gaza, we go to Haifa, Israel, to speak with Ilan Pappé, a professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in Britain. He’s the author of a number of books, including, most recently, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Haifa.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Pappé. At this point, over a thousand Palestinians have been killed, as well, I believe the number is 45 Israeli soldiers, and three civilians have been killed in Israel. Can you talk about the latest negotiations over a ceasefire and what you think needs to happen?
ILAN PAPPÉ: It’s good to be on your show, Amy. There is no sign for a ceasefire on the ground itself. And there are sort of two competing initiatives still going on: The Egyptian-Israeli initiative that actually wants to dictate to the Hamas a return to the status quo and sort of marginalize and disregard everything that Hamas was fighting for, and there is a more serious effort that the secretary of state was trying to push forward, John Kerry, with the help of the Qataris and the Turks, to try and address at least some of the issues that are at the heart of this present wave of violence. But so far, none of the two has affected the reality on the ground, apart from a certain lull in the last few hours compared to the last 20 days.
AMY GOODMAN: There were protests in Tel Aviv. How many people came out at those protests, as well as Haifa this weekend? Were you there at the protest in Haifa, Professor Pappé?
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, yes, I was. Haifa, there were about 700 people. In Tel Aviv, there were 3,000. I should say that, of course, a large number of the protesters are Palestinian citizens of Israel. So the number of Israeli Jews who are courageous enough to come out and demonstrate is even smaller than these numbers indicate. And they were met by a very vicious reaction both from right-wing demonstrators and very harsh—and were harshly treated by the police.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think it’s most important for people to understand about the conflict?
ILAN PAPPÉ: I think the most important thing is the historical context. When you listen to mainstream media coverage of the situation in Gaza, you get the impression that it all starts with an unreasonable launching of rockets into Israel by the Hamas. And two very basic historical kind of backgrounds are being missed. The very immediate one goes back to June this year, when Israel decided, by force, to try and demolish the Hamas politically in the West Bank and foil the attempts of the unity government of Palestine to push forward an international campaign to bring Israel to justice on the basis of the agenda of human rights and civil rights.
And the deeper historical context is the fact that ever since 2005, the Gaza Strip is being—or people in the Gaza Strip are being incarcerated as criminals, and their only crime is that they are Palestinians in a geopolitical location that Israel doesn’t know how to deal with. And when they elected democratically someone who was vowed to struggle against this ghettoizing or this siege, Israel reacted with all its force. So, this sort of wider historical context, that would explain to people that it is a desperate attempt to get out of the situation that your previous interviewee was talking about, is at the heart of the issue, and therefore it is soluble. One can solve this situation by lifting the siege, by allowing the people of Gaza to be connected with their brothers and sisters in the West Bank, and by allowing them to be connected to the world and not to live under circumstances that no one else in the world seems to experience at this moment in time.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pappé, over the weekend, BBC correspondent Jon Donnison reported on what was called an Israeli admission that Hamas was not responsible for the killing of the three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June. On Twitter, Donnison said Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld told him the suspects who killed the three teenagers were a lone cell affiliated with Hamas but not operating under its leadership. What is the significance of this?
ILAN PAPPÉ: It’s very significant, because this was, of course, known to the Israelis the moment they heard about this abduction and the killing of the three young settlers. It was very clear that Israel was looking for a pretext to try and launch both a military operation in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip in order to try and bring back the situation in Palestine to what it was during the failed peace process, with a sort of good domicile, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in a way that they could forget about it and continue with the colonization of the West Bank without the need to change anything in their attitude or policies. And the depression in the West Bank, the frustration, the anger, especially in May 2014, of the killing of five young Palestinians by the Israeli army, burst out in this local action, this local initiative, that had nothing to do with the strategy of the Hamas, that was willing to try and give Abu Mazen leeway to create a unity government and to try the new initiative—going to the United Nations, going to international bodies, in order to make Israel accountable for more than 46 years of colonization and occupation. So it really highlights the connection between a pretext and a policy and a strategy which has wreaked such carnage in Gaza today.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Pappé, you worked in Israel for years as a professor. You left Israel and now teach at the University of Exeter in Britain. You’ve returned to Haifa. Do you see a change in your country?
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, unfortunately, a change for the worse. I think the Israel is at a crossroad, but it has already made its decision which way it is going from this junction. It was in a junction where it had to decide finally whether it wants to be a democracy or to be a racist and apartheid state, given the realities on the ground. I think Israel, in 2014, made a decision that it prefers to be a racist apartheid state and not a democracy, and it still hopes that the United States would license this decision and provide it with the immunity to continue with the necessary implication of such a policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, wherever they are.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the U.S. should do?
ILAN PAPPÉ: Well, the U.S. should apply the basic definitions of democracy to Israel and recognize that it is giving, it’s providing an unconditional support for a regime that systematically abuses the human rights and the civil rights of anyone who is not a Jew between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. If America wants clearly to support such regimes—it had done it in the past—that’s OK. But if it feels that it wants to send a different message to the Middle East, then it really has a different agenda of human rights—
AMY GOODMAN: We have two seconds.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yeah, human rights and civil rights in Palestine.
What Do Gazans Endure? A Palestinian Student Who Lost 2 Brothers, 4 Cousins Tells His Story
Five years ago Palestinian student Amer Shurrab lost his two brothers in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Last week, Shurrab learned four of his cousins in Gaza had been killed in Israel’s latest offensive. In January 2009, Amer’s father and brothers were fleeing their village when the vehicle they were driving in came under Israeli fire. Twenty-eight-year-old Kassab died in a hail of bullets trying to flee the vehicle. Amer’s other brother, 18-year-old Ibrahim, survived the initial attack, but Israeli troops refused to allow an ambulance to reach him until 20 hours later. By then, it was too late. Ibrahim had bled to death in front of his father. A graduate student at Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, Amer Shurrab has been recounting the story of his brothers and other Palestinians at college campuses and community gatherings across the United States. "Israel is deliberately targeting civilians from the day one of this attack," he says. "They have been bombing houses, wiping entire families to try to scare people into submission."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Amer Shurrab, a Palestinian graduate student from Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. He’s studying at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. He has just learned that four of his cousins have died in Khan Younis. We last spoke to him five years ago. It was shortly after he lost his two brothers during Israel’s assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. In 2009, January, his dad and two brothers were fleeing their village when their vehicle came under Israeli fire. His brother, 28-year-old Kassab, died in a hail of bullets trying to flee the vehicle. His other brother, Ibrahim, 18 years old, survived the initial attack, but Israeli troops refused to allow an ambulance to reach him and his father until 20 hours later. By then, it was too late. Ibrahim had bled to death in front of his father. Amer Shurrab has been recounting the story of his brothers and other Palestinians at college campuses and community gatherings across the United States. And it was just recently that he learned about his cousins in Khan Younis.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, I’m sorry under such sad circumstances. My condolences to you and your family, Amer. Can you talk about what you’ve just learned?
AMER SHURRAB: Thank you, Amy, for having me again, and I wish next time we meet will be under better circumstances. So, last week, actually, last Tuesday, I got news from Gaza via a friend that my cousin, Mohammed Tayseer, was killed. He was targeted by one of those drones that Sharif was talking about. He was visiting some friends. He left their house at 1:00 a.m., started walking home, and on the walk home he was directly targeted by a drone. A couple hours later, actually, the house of the friends that he was visiting was bombed by the Israeli Air Force, and it killed two and injured several other people. His dad—because those friends are their neighbors, his dad went to visit—ran to the house of the neighbors, the friends, to help evacuate the wounded, in fear of the house being bombed again. And the dad was looking for Mohammed, his eldest son, his 22-year-old eldest son, and was looking for him to help. A couple hours later, once light started coming out, people saw a body on the street that they realized was Mohammed’s.
AMY GOODMAN: How old was Mohammed?
AMER SHURRAB: Twenty-two.
AMY GOODMAN: How old was Tayseer?
AMER SHURRAB: Tayseer is in his fifties, 55 now.
AMY GOODMAN: And you had two other cousins.
AMER SHURRAB: Three cousins, three brothers, three second cousins, they—was Wednesday—their house in the Sheikh Nasser region in Khan Younis was bombed by the Israeli Air Forces. A four-story house was flattened to the ground. Initial news that there were three people killed and several wounded. Then we got news later that no one was hurt. And then, the next morning, Thursday morning, they extracted the body of Iyad. And then, the next morning, during the 12-hour ceasefire, they had more time to dig through the rubble and found two more bodies of his brothers, two of his brothers. And they were all recently married. They, all three of them, got married either last year or the year before.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, we last talked in 2009. You had just graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont.
AMER SHURRAB: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: This was the period of Operation Cast Lead, as the Israeli military called, when more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed. Describe what happened to your brothers and your dad.
AMER SHURRAB: Well, Amy, my dad and brothers were in our farm in the Fukhari region, and they were driving home during the ceasefire, the humanitarian lull that Israel announced, and they waited ’til the middle of that ceasefire. They were driving home. They drove for about half a kilometer or kilometer. They faced a tank on the side of the road. They were waved through by the tank. And then, once they drove a couple hundred meters past it, Israeli soldiers stationed in a civilian house—they occupied a civilian house and took at least 11 residents as hostages in that house—they opened fire on them indisriminately.
AMY GOODMAN: On your father and two brothers, the car.
AMER SHURRAB: On the—yes. My dad was hit while driving. They hit a wall. The car came to a halt. They ordered them to get out of the car. Kassab was in the passenger seat, got out. He was shot. Later, we realized he had 18 bullets across his chest, his stomach and his arms. My dad got out, and he ducked by the car. My brother Ibrahim, who was in the back seat, got out, and he was also shot in his left leg. And then he—initially, they wouldn’t allow my dad or Ibrahim to call an ambulance or even to check on Kassab’s body. They had no idea what happened to him. That was around 1:00 p.m.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it was just feet away.
AMER SHURRAB: Yeah, few feet away. Yeah, few feet, like on the other side of the car, basically. And they wouldn’t let him check on them. My dad only confirmed Kassab’s death about five hours later, after sunset, when he saw cats nibbling on his body. He challenged the soldiers’ orders not to move, challenged the rounds they fired around him, checked on Kassab, realized he was dead and covered his face with his jacket and crawled back next to Ibrahim. They were pinned next to the car for over—about 24 hours. Ibrahim passed away. Shooting happened around 1:00 p.m. Ibrahim passed away around midnight. Ambulances were not allowed through, until—
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?
AMER SHURRAB: My dad wrote an account of that ordeal, of that whole story, from his hospital bed. He wrote it the day after, and over two days, because he wanted to remember it, he wanted it memorized. When I first reached him over his cellphone, once he got to the hospital, he told me, "Tell people what happened to us. Tell them what happened to us. Your brothers don’t deserve this. Everyone needs to know about this."
AMY GOODMAN: Your uncle had tried to get an ambulance?
AMER SHURRAB: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How did he know anything was going on?
AMER SHURRAB: Later, they allowed my dad to use his cellphone, and he called my uncle. And my uncle reached the area with an ambulance. They would not allow them through. And it’s not only my uncle. My dad was on phone calls throughout the night to local press, to international media, to local, international human rights organizations, to Israeli human rights organizations. He was talking with everyone—and in vain. Throughout that night, once I got the news, we were talking everyone. We reached members of the Israeli Knesset. We tried to contact the Obama transition team. We contacted everyone. People in all five continents were making calls trying to reach people to get them help. But it was in vain. It wasn’t until 7:00 a.m. the next day, the 17th—they were shot on the 16th. On 7:00 a.m.—
AMY GOODMAN: This was January.
AMER SHURRAB: Yes, 2009—7:00 a.m., we got a word through a member of the Knesset, a Palestinian member of the Knesset that we reached, that the Israeli army would allow an ambulance to go in, but only at noon, when the humanitarian ceasefire would start for the next day. And the soldiers were watching them all that time. They refused to give them a band-aid. They refused to give them anything to stop the bleeding. They refused to give them a sip of water, a blanket. Nothing. My brother Ibrahim was shivering next to my dad, and they wouldn’t do anything other than curse at them, laugh at them and watch them suffer. Later on, we found that they left graffiti on the wall of the house that said, "Kahane was right."
AMY GOODMAN: Referring to?
AMER SHURRAB: Meir Kahane, the extremist Israeli rabbi who called for the killing or transfer of all Arabs and Palestinians from Palestine and Israel to other nations, to make Israel a purely Jewish state.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last week, saying that Hamas is intentionally endangering Palestinian civilians in hopes that the gruesome images will turn the international community against Israel.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: All civilian casualties are unintended by us, but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said they use—I mean, it’s gruesome. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want—the more dead, the better.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Your response to this, Amer?
AMER SHURRAB: Well, first of all, I want to jump on that phrase "telegenically dead." I hear that phrase, and I really want to throw up. This is just despicable description of dead children, women. That’s what you call them? Instead of saying "condolences," instead of saying "we are sorry," you say "telegenically dead"? This is extremely offensive, to start with.
And then, to Prime Minister Netanyahu—Prime Minister Netanyahu and all the Israeli spokespersons, in Arabic, in English, in Hebrew, in every language, they say they use precision bombs. They say they use smart weapons, and they pinpoint their attacks. And several Israeli spokespeople said every attack has hit its intended target. And now we know what are the intended targets. It’s children. It’s families. It’s women. An Israeli reserve general said, "We are going to kill their families so they learn not to come back again." An Israeli professor at Bar-Ilan University said, "Kill them, kill their kids, rape their women, kill their children, so that they learn." An Israeli member of the Knesset, who is a member of the ruling coalition, has wrote a posting on Facebook, that received several thousand likes, calling for the extermination of Palestinians, killing all their kids, killing the mothers who give birth to those "snakes."
So, what Israel says—we know that Israel uses—repeatedly has used the claim that Palestinians use human shields. That claim has been discredited over and over and over again, by the Goldstone Report, by the U.N., by all respectable human rights organizations. On the contrary, there is plenty of proof, plenty of evidence, that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields, as I know it personally in the case of my family and my brothers, where they were occupying a house, holding the local residents as human shields. UNICEF, about three months ago, issued a report documenting Israel’s use of children as human shields. That was corroborated recently by a report for, I believe, the U.N. initiative for children, that also documented Israel’s use of human shields. So, Israel is deliberately targeting civilians. It’s from the day one of this attack. They have been bombing houses, wiping entire families, to try to scare people into submission.
AMY GOODMAN: The Knesset member that you referred to, Ayelet Shaked—
AMER SHURRAB: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —with the Jewish Home party, who wrote that on her Facebook page, saying that the killings should include the mothers of the martyrs, saying that they should go, as should the physical homes in which they raise the snakes, saying because they give birth to the little snakes. Here you are in the United States. How are you dealing with all of what has happened in not only the last few weeks, but, of course, because your two brothers were killed in 2009? You went to Middlebury College. We saw you just after that, at Operation Cast Lead. Now you’re in California at Monterey, a graduate student.
AMER SHURRAB: Well, there are two facets to it. On one side, the U.S. government is a full partner in the murder of Palestinians, including my brothers. The United States provides over $3 billion of direct military aid to Israel annually. The Congress has just approved or in the process of approving an additional $600 million in military aid to Israel. They tagged onto the bill, the immigration bill for dealing with undocumented children—they tagged on about $225 million in additional aid for the Iron Dome in Israel. And the U.S. provides blank backing to Israel in the U.N., in the Security Council, everywhere, although we know sometimes it goes against the U.S.’s stances. Israel, just today, rejected the American initiative for ceasefire, and Secretary Kerry retracted and said, "Oh, we never offered them an initiative." Secretary Kerry, have some courage. Have some integrity. You had a hot-mic moment that showed what you really felt about it. How about you show it and say it in a scheduled meeting as opposed to a hot-mic moment?
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean, for those who aren’t familiar with that moment in the Fox studio.
AMER SHURRAB: Secretary Kerry, when he was appearing—I believe last Sunday, when he was appearing on the different Sunday shows, he was on Fox preparing to appear their Sunday morning show—
AMY GOODMAN: Actually, we have a clip of that, so this was one of the comments he made on this round of the network talk shows to publicly defend Israel’s assault on Gaza, but in a private phone call that was caught on camera in between commercial breaks, Kerry appeared to speak sarcastically about the massive civilian toll in the attacks. He was speaking to an aide on his speaker phone on his cellphone.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation. It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.
AIDE: Right, it’s escalating significantly, and it just underscores the need for a ceasefire.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: We’ve got to get over there.
AIDE: Yup, yup.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Thank you, John. I think, John, we ought to go tonight. I think it’s crazy to be sitting around.
AMY GOODMAN: That was John Kerry in Fox’s studio. That’s not on the air, although they recorded it and then played it for him on Fox to respond to.
AMER SHURRAB: And then he tried to backtrack the comment, and then he went to Israel and repeated the same talking points about Israel having the right to defend itself. Yes, Israel does have the right to defend itself, as does every nation and every people, including the Palestinian people, who have been under occupation since 1967. And we, in Gaza, have been living under a terrible siege since 2007, but we don’t hear Secretary Kerry talk about this, at least not in public.
AMY GOODMAN: What does that siege mean to you in daily life?
AMER SHURRAB: That siege and blockade of Gaza that has been implemented by Israel against Gaza Strip since 2007, that has been at its strictest form, but Gaza has been suffering from one degree or another of siege since the occupation in 1967. But that siege, what it means, it shuts down all of Gaza’s borders and crossings, most of them with Israel, with only one with Egypt that’s also shut down by the Egyptian authorities; Israeli warships and boats in the sea, and airplanes and drones in the sky. That means they ration everything that comes in and out, from food to medicine, to pens and papers and pencils, construction material, gas, natural gas, potato chips, cardamom, chocolate. And it’s all for security concerns. I know people who have died because the chemotherapy they required for their cancer treatment was not allowed in, people who have died because spare parts for a dialysis machine they required for their kidney condition were not allowed in. I know people who have lost very lucrative and full scholarships in some top universities because they were not allowed out. I know people—ambulances that couldn’t come to retrieve victims because they didn’t have gas.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you respond to the Israeli military saying they’re moving into Gaza to destroy the maze of tunnels because they’re used to smuggle in weapons?
AMER SHURRAB: The tunnels have been used, until recently, until they have been practically fully destroyed by the Egyptian authorities—they have been used primarily as a commercial avenue. It has been used as a venue for trade, getting goods in and out of Gaza, or primarily into Gaza, and allowing people to get in and out of Gaza. My brother—for instance, my brother’s in-laws managed—two years ago, they managed to go to Gaza for the first time in over 30 years through one of the tunnels. That’s the only way, if all the official crossings are closed, if the Israeli government wants to put the Palestinians on a diet. An Israeli government official said, "We are going to put the Palestinians on a diet." They were allowing—Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, revealed that. And they were calculating, cynically calculating, 2,000 calories per day per person of food to be allowed in, so people do not starve but just barely survive. The tunnels came and helped change some of that. The tunnels were primarily used, as I said, to let people in and out and to get everything in, from cars to gas, to construction materials. After the so-called Operation Cast Lead, tens of thousands of houses were destroyed.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think—do you believe that the Israeli military is bombing Gaza because of Hamas and the other groups firing thousands of rockets into Israel?
AMER SHURRAB: Well, Amy, over the past two years, there have been virtually no rockets coming out of Gaza, and Israel continued to siege Gaza and blockade Gaza. And that siege is a form of slow death. People are saying we can either die quickly now, or we die slowly through the siege and the blockade. If I’m a father and I cannot get a life-saving medicine for my kid because of that siege, how am I going to feel? What am I going to do? There were no rockets before 2001; Israel continued to occupy Gaza. There were no rockets in the ’90s and the ’80s; Israel continued to occupy Gaza and kill Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: Amer, we’re going to have to leave it there. We are going to turn in a moment to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, speaking to us from Haifa. My condolences again to you and your family. And I want to thank you very much for being with us, I’m so sorry under these circumstances.
AMER SHURRAB: Thank you so much, Amy, for the wonderful work you do every day.
AMY GOODMAN: Amer Shurrab is a graduate student at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California. He graduated from Middlebury College. He is from Khan Younis in Gaza. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a moment.
During Brief Lull, Gazans Return to Neighborhoods Destroyed and Bodies Beneath the Rubble
The U.N. Security Council has issued a presidential statement calling for an "immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza as the Palestinian toll tops 1,000. The weekend saw a series of ceasefire announcements by both Israel and Hamas. On Saturday, more than 130 bodies were pulled from Gaza’s rubble during a 12-hour truce. Just before the truce took effect, an Israeli strike on a house in Khan Younis killed 20 people, including 12 members of the same family. After initially rejecting a ceasefire, Hamas on Sunday called for a 24-hour truce to mark the Muslim holiday ending Ramadan. Overall, the Palestinian death toll has now reached 1,031, mostly civilians, including at least 226 children. Israel says 43 of its soldiers have died, along with three civilians inside Israel. The United Nations says more than 180,000 Palestinians have been displaced and are now living in U.N. shelters. Speaking from Gaza City, Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports on the displaced residents who tried to return home only to find their neighborhoods reduced to rubble. "People are trying to salvage anything they could from their homes. Many couldn’t even get anything out. They had fled under bombardment with only the clothes on their backs," Kouddous says. "It’s a very uneasy ceasefire. … People are waiting to see if the bombs will start falling again."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: In an emergency midnight meeting, the United Nations Security Council called for an "immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza early this morning as the Palestinian toll topped 1,000 since the Israeli offensive began 21 days ago. U.N. Security Council President Eugène Gasana of Rwanda made the announcement.
EUGÈNE-RICHARD GASANA: The Security Council expresses strong support for the call by international partners and the secretary-general of the United Nations for an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire, allowing for delivery of urgently needed assistance. And they urged all parties to accept and fully implement a humanitarian ceasefire into the Eid period and beyond.
AMY GOODMAN: The weekend saw a series of ceasefire announcements by both Israel and Hamas. On Saturday, more than 130 bodies were pulled from the rubble in Gaza during a 12-hour truce. Just before the truce took effect, an Israeli strike on a house in Khan Younis killed 20 people. According to the Los Angeles Times, the dead included 12 members of a family sheltering there from fighting in the nearby village of Khuzaa. On Sunday, Hamas called for a 24-hour truce to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
Overall, the Palestinian death toll has now reached 1,035, mostly civilians, including at least 226 children. Israel says 43 of its soldiers have died along with two Israeli civilians and one Thai farmworker. According to the United Nations, more than 180,000 Palestinians have been displaced and are now living in U.N. shelters. Last week, 16 Palestinians died at a U.N. shelter when it came under fire. On Sunday, Israel acknowledged for the first time its troops had fired a mortar shell that hit the courtyard of the U.N. shelter, but it still denies carrying out the deadly attack.
For more on Gaza, we go to Gaza City, where we’re joined by Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.
Sharif, can you talk about what is happening right now in Gaza?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, Amy, as we talk of an ongoing ceasefire, there is some shelling that’s continuing, not the brutal bombardment that has been happening for almost three weeks now, but shelling really restricted to some areas in the north, as well as in the east and in the south. Four people have been killed today, including a child. They’ve also pulled at least seven bodies out of Khuzaa in the south, so—an area that has been unreachable by even the Red Cross and ambulances until today.
You know, this comes after a weekend in which, as you mentioned, a 12-hour humanitarian truce was first agreed on Saturday, and this allowed thousands of people to return to their homes for the first time in the areas like Shejaiya and Beit Hanoun. And we went to both on Saturday. And in Beit Hanoun, a town in the northeast of the Gaza Strip close to the Israeli border, the destruction was total. No building was left untouched by Israel’s bombardment. There was just mounds of rubble where buildings once stood. There was dead horses lying on the street, stiff with rigor mortis. Even color had been erased, and everything was covered in a grey cement dust, and it was like a monochromatic wasteland. People were walking around not even recognizing where their homes once were, you know, really just mounds of rubble, twisted rebar and concrete where there was a five-story building. People were trying to salvage anything they could from their homes. Many couldn’t even get anything out. They had fled under bombardment with only their clothes on their backs, and they couldn’t retrieve anything.
And there was evidence in Beit Hanoun of the Israeli invasion everywhere. You could see the tank treads of the Israeli tanks and where the road had been ripped up by the heavy armor that had rolled into Beit Hanoun. In one house, a 20-year-old resident named Mustafa al-Masri showed us his house, which was still standing but had been raided and ransacked by Israeli soldiers. We saw mattresses on the floor. We saw bullets, bullet casings all over the roof, two shoulder-mounted rocket launchers on the roof, where they had presumably engaged in some kind of battle with militants. And there was, you know, other things like bottled water and mosquito spray with Hebrew writing on it.
They also arrested people from their homes. One resident told me that Israeli soldiers raided his home, separated the men and the women, then blindfolded and arrested him, his uncle and three cousins, took them across the border into Israel and interrogated them for two days about what he called the resistance. And then, he said, he was dumped back on the Erez crossing. He couldn’t get back to his home in Beit Hanoun, which was under heavy shelling for three days, and didn’t know where the rest of his family was—both his grandparents, his two younger brothers, age 12 and 13, his sister and his niece. And he had gone back to his house and found—what he said was five floors had become one. There was a smell of death that was coming out of the house. He was hoping that they weren’t—that wasn’t their bodies that he was smelling. He was trying to find them. So this was the kind of scene, the kind of bombardment that Israel had left behind.
In Shejaiya, the neighborhood east of Gaza City, we witnessed similar scenes of devastation. People had gone there to try and, again, salvage what they could from their homes. And you saw, just by midday—the truce started at 8:00 a.m., and by midday there was just residents pouring, again, out of Shejaiya, carrying the little that they could get from their homes. You saw mattresses piled atop cars and people carrying clothes on donkey carts. And a bystander told me, "This looks like the second Nakba." That’s the Arabic for "catastrophe," the term that Palestinians use to describe the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands during the forming of Israel in 1948. So, really difficult scenes and people using bulldozers and other heavy equipment to dig bodies out of the rubble. And people are still missing. Now, I just came back from, as I said, Khuzaa, where seven bodies had been pulled out. And it’s a very uneasy truce, an uneasy ceasefire. And people are waiting to see if the bombs will start falling again.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, over the weekend, CBS’s Charlie Rose interviewed Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who called for an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza.
KHALED MESHAAL: [translated] This is not a prerequisite. Life is not a prerequisite. Life is a right for our people in Palestine. Since 2006, when the world refused the outcomes of the elections, our people actually lived under the siege of eight years. This is a collective punishment. We need to lift the siege. We have to have a port. We have to have an airport. This is the first message.
The second message: In order to stop the bloodletting, we need to look at the underlying causes. We need to look at the occupation. We need to stop the occupation. Netanyahu doesn’t take heed of our rights. And Mr. Kerry, months ago, tried to find a window through the negotiations in order to meet our target: to live without occupation, to reach our state. Netanyahu has killed our hope or killed our dream, and he killed the American initiative.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, that was Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Can you respond to what he’s saying? What about these truces and the calls for the ceasefire?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, Amy, I also spoke to several Hamas officials over the weekend about the ceasefire. It seems what Israel is trying to do, or what is doing, is trying to call truce after truce and kind of wind down the conflict without addressing any of the key Palestinian conditions, any of the key Palestinian demands, which include, first and foremost, a lifting of the blockade that has strangled the Gaza Strip and is, in effect, causing these repeated conflicts, three of which we’ve had in the last six years alone, so essentially bringing back the whole situation to square one. And when you speak to people, you speak to Hamas officials, but also just Palestinians in Gaza, they say that after all this death, after all this destruction, after all this displacement, that they’re going to go back to the same situation they had before this latest conflict, which was extremely dire.
We have to remember Israel has put—and Egypt, as well, has put—a blockade on Gaza since 2007. There was tunnels going into Egypt, where many goods were being brought in—basic goods, construction materials—that both Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi, the second Egyptian president, really turned a blind eye to. And the Rafah border was closed, the crossing, but it was somewhat open. But ever since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the current president of Egypt, who really did a very harsh clampdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and paints Hamas as a terrorist group, that is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, people say that things here have become unbearable. Nearly all of the tunnels were destroyed. The Rafah crossing was almost completely sealed. And life became extremely difficult for Palestinians here. And this is partly a result of that. And so, for people to go back, after this conflict, to that same situation, I think, is unacceptable, both for Palestinian people, but also for Hamas as a political movement, which is really fighting for its life, if it comes out with nothing from this conflict.
AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of violating its own offer of a 24-hour humanitarian truce in Gaza. He was speaking to David Gregory on Meet the Press.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: You know, we’ve accepted five ceasefires, acted upon them. Hamas has rejected every single one of them, violated them, including two humanitarian ceasefires, which we accepted and implemented in the last 24 hours. Now Hamas is suggesting a ceasefire and, believe it or not, David, they’ve even violated their own ceasefire. So they continue to fire at us.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharif, can you respond?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, Israel is shelling today. I can hear it right now in different parts. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, they killed four people today, including a boy, who was just buried. And when we talk about ceasefire, we’re also talking about conditions where Israeli tanks and troops are still on the ground inside Gaza, still continuing with their declared objective, which is to find and destroy tunnels. So, when you speak to many people about the ceasefire, they say it’s not a ceasefire; Israeli troops are in Gaza and continuing with their ground offensive and their ground operations.
And there was kind of a game almost played with calling for a ceasefire, where Israel and Hamas agreed initially to this 12-hour ceasefire, and then Israel extended by four hours and then by another 24, Hamas rejected that, and then Hamas called its own 24-hour ceasefire, because I think Hamas wants to seem as if Israel is not the only one that can call the shots, that it can’t start the wars and end them whenever it feels like it. So, it wants to feel like a player in the process also.
Right now, this latest ceasefire was supposed to expire at 2:00 p.m. It’s now 3:00. We hear shelling. Israel has said that it won’t accept a ceasefire, but it will respond to any fire from Hamas. So, it’s a very uneasy situation right now. As I’m speaking to you, I can hear heavier booms in the distance that we haven’t heard for the past couple of days, so things may be coming apart. Hopefully we won’t return to the brutal bombardment that Gaza has been under that has killed over a thousand people, mostly civilians, as you mentioned, over 200 children.
And just to describe the massive, massive displacement, only—about 10 percent of Gaza is displaced. When you walk around Gaza City, you just see people in parks, you see them in unfinished buildings. Shifa Hospital is a refugee camp. Most of them are from Shejaiya.
Today is the first day of Eid, which is a Muslim holiday. It’s supposed to be a time of celebration. It’s now really a time of mourning. People are trying to bury their dead. They don’t have the money to buy the clothes that they usually do for their children on Eid. And so, it’s a very difficult time for Palestinians in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: And Sharif, the buzzing that we’re hearing behind you, in addition to the explosions, do you know what that is?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, the buzzing is an ever-present sound in Gaza. It’s the sound of the drones overhead, surveillance drones—some of them are attack drones—that are always there. Even when the shelling stops and the bombardment stops, you always hear the drones. And it’s really part of the—it’s very hard psychologically, because it’s an ever-present noise, and you kind of feel that you’re being watched all the time. And also, today, our driver and journalists working with us, Palestinians, said they received robo-calls, automated calls, today with threats from the Israeli military, one of them saying, you know, "You terrorist, you hear that plane overhead? You’re the target," and another one at a house that said, "Oh, terrorist, you hear the sound of this tank," and then the sound of a loud boom. So there’s also an element of psychological warfare that is being played on Palestinians in Gaza that is ongoing.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, I want to thank you for being with us. Stay safe. Democracy Now! correspondent in Gaza City. We will link to your stories at TheNation.com.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we speak to a Palestinian graduate student here in the United States. He just got word that four of his cousins—one first cousin, three second cousins—have been killed in Khan Younis. We last talked to him in 2009, when his father and two brothers were in a car fleeing from their village in Operation Cast Lead, as Israel call it. His two brothers were killed. His father was seriously injured. We’ll be back in a minute.
Headlines:
•Palestinian Toll Tops 1,000 as Truce Unearths Dozens of Buried Bodies
The U.N. Security Council has issued a presidential statement calling for an "immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza as the Palestinian toll tops 1,000. The weekend saw a series of ceasefire announcements by both Israel and Hamas. On Saturday, more than 130 bodies were pulled from Gaza’s rubble during a 12-hour truce. Many displaced residents tried to return home only to find their neighborhoods reduced to rubble. One Gaza resident said the area of Beit Hanoun had been totally destroyed.
Ibrahim Abuodah: "The human beings are dead, the houses are damaged, the trees are dead, and the livestock is dead, as well. So they destroyed the land, the trees and everything. They totally destroyed it."
Just before the truce took effect, an Israeli strike on a house in Khan Younis killed 20 people, including 12 members of the same family. After initially rejecting a ceasefire, Hamas on Sunday called for a 24-hour truce to mark the Muslim holiday ending Ramadan. Overall, the Palestinian death toll has now reached 1,031, mostly civilians, including at least 226 children. Israel says 43 of its soldiers have died, along with three civilians inside Israel. The United Nations says more than 180,000 Palestinians have been displaced and are now living in U.N. shelters. In the West Bank, nine Palestinians were also killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers over the weekend.
•Kerry Denies Israeli Rejection of Ceasefire Offer
Secretary of State John Kerry has been intensively involved in an effort to reach a ceasefire. On Friday, the Israeli Cabinet rejected Kerry’s latest proposal, with Israeli sources calling it too skewed toward Hamas demands, including lifting the seven-year blockade of Gaza. The Israeli rejection was issued in private so as not to strain U.S. ties. But at a news conference, Kerry denied that Israel had rejected his ceasefire plan, claiming it was never formally proposed.
Secretary of State John Kerry: "There was no formal proposal or final proposal or proposal ready for a vote submitted to Israel. Let’s make that absolutely crystal clear. And Prime Minister Netenyahu called me a few minutes before this to make it clear that that is an error, inaccurate, and he’s putting out a statement to that effect. They may have rejected some language or proposal within a framework of some kind of suggestion at some point in time, but there was no formal proposal submitted from me on which there should have been a vote or which a vote was ripe."
•Hundreds in NYC, 3,000+ in Tel Aviv Protest Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Protests against the Israeli invasion of Gaza continue around the world. On Friday, hundreds rallied in New York City’s Times Square.
Protester 1: "Make sure that you’re sending a message to the U.S. government that you will not allow your taxpayer dollars to kill children in Gaza."
Protester 2: "[Gazans] want us to know that Gaza is not a territory, it is not a prison, it is not a concentration camp. It is where resistance and liberation is born."
On Saturday, some 3,000 people gathered for an antiwar demonstration in Tel Aviv, the largest such protest in Israel so far.
•Spiking Violence in Libya Prompts U.S. Embassy Evacuation
Libya is facing its worst period of violence since the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi three years ago. More than 150 people have died in Tripoli and Benghazi during two weeks of fighting, including 50 over the weekend. The United States, the United Nations and Turkey have removed their diplomats, with the United States evacuating its embassy and moving officials to neighboring Tunisia.
•Violence in Eastern Ukraine Keeps Investigators from Crash Site
Escalating violence in eastern Ukraine is hampering efforts to reach the crash site of downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. More residents fled to bomb shelters on Sunday as government forces clashed with rebel separatists in two major towns. At least eight civilians were killed. International monitors had reached a deal to visit the crash site in rebel-held territory, but the fighting has kept them away. Alexander Hug of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission said the fighting has sowed confusion.
Alexander Hug: "The situation has rapidly changed, and that’s normal in this conflict. The front lines were not very clear. It was a very blurred picture."
•U.N.: Plane Downing Likely a War Crime; Over 1,100 Killed in Eastern Ukraine Since April
Ukraine has seen intensified violence in recent months as the U.S.-backed Kiev government steps up attacks on rebel-held areas. Earlier today, the United Nations’ top human rights official, Navi Pillay, said at least 1,129 people have been killed and more than 3,400 wounded since mid-April. Some 200,000 have also been displaced. A spokesperson for Pillay said the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 may amount to a war crime, and warned of increasing abuses in rebel-held areas.
Gianni Magazzeni: "The high commissioner has indicated this may amount to a war crime. … There has been a serious deterioration of the situation in the areas of the east controlled still by these armed groups. These include abductions, detentions, torture, executions, which are used to intimidate the population, which is often held as hostage or trapped in this pocket of territories in the Donetsk and Luhansk region."
•U.S. Accuses Russia of Cross-Border Fire; EU Approves New Sanctions
The Ukrainian and U.S. governments say the plane was shot down with Russian missiles supplied to the rebels, a claim Russia and the rebels have denied. The State Department has released satellite imagery it says proves Russia has fired into eastern Ukraine and moved heavy artillery across the border. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said Russia is escalating military aid to the rebels.
Marie Harf: "We have new evidence that the Russians intend to deliver heavier and more powerful multiple-rocket launchers to the separatist forces in Ukraine and have evidence that Russia is firing artillery from within Russia to attack Ukrainian military positions."
On Friday, the European Union joined the United States in imposing economic sanctions on Russia, as well as travel bans and assets freezes targeting Russian officials.
•Obama Hosts Central American Leaders on Migrant Crisis
President Obama hosted Central American leaders at the White House on Friday to discuss the influx of migrant children on the U.S.-Mexico border. Obama met with the presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the three home countries for the bulk of migrants fleeing violence and poverty. Obama said he warned that those children without valid claims will be deported.
President Obama: "We have to deter a continuing influx of children putting themselves at great risk, and families who are putting their children at great risk. And so I emphasize that within a legal framework and a humanitarian framework and proper due process, children who do not have proper claims, and families with children who do not have proper claims, at some point, will be subject to repatriation to their home countries."
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández says he asked Obama for U.S. help in taking on the root causes of the migrant crisis, including the massive U.S. demand that fuels the Central American drug trade. President Obama has asked Republicans for $3.7 billion to address the migrant crisis, but Republicans have introduced a plan to allocate less than $1 billion. A group of immigrant rights advocates, meanwhile, has announced a picket line at the White House today "unless and until undocumented people are represented at the negotiating table."
•Argentina Faces Looming Deadline to Avoid Default; Protests Back Refusal to Pay Vultures
Argentina is facing a potential default on its sovereign debt if it fails to meet a Thursday deadline. A recent Supreme Court ruling sided with U.S. hedge funds who purchased Argentina’s debt for bargain prices after its financial crisis and then refused to cut the value of their holdings, as most other creditors did. A lower court judge then barred Argentina from repaying the majority of its creditors without also repaying the so-called "vulture funds," led by billionaire Paul Singer’s NML Capital. The Argentine government says it is impossible to fully repay the vulture funds, risking the country’s second default in 13 years. At a protest in Buenos Aires, demonstrators backed the government’s refusal to pay the vulture funds.
Protester: "We don’t propose to go into default. We decided that it’s a sovereign decision not to pay. We’ve paid the IMF. We’ve paid the vulture funds. We’ve paid the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. We paid the Paris Club. And on top of this, they will declare a default. This is why we decided not to pay."
•Former Venezuelan General Avoids U.S. Extradition Following Aruba Arrest
A former Venezuelan general has avoided extradition to the United States. Hugo Carvajal was detained in Aruba last week at the request of the United States, which sought to try him on drug charges. But the Venezuelan government won Carvajal’s freedom after citing his diplomatic immunity. A U.S. indictment accused Carvajal of helping drug traffickers. The Venezuelan government says the warrant was politically motivated.
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