The Electronic Intifada Podcast 9 May 2025
That was the response of Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta when asked how she is doing, as she joined The Electronic Intifada Livestream from Gaza on 8 May.
“If I must die, let me speak loud to the world until that moment comes,” Abu Sitta said. “There are no words, no headlines, no language that can describe what is happening here in Gaza.”
This week’s Livestream also featured an interview with Daniel Day, the activist who breached parliamentary security to climb London’s iconic Big Ben clock tower in March to protest Britain’s complicity in the genocide and its crackdown on those who protest it.
Day spent five weeks in prison, where he said many other detainees and even prison guards recognized him and expressed their solidarity with Palestine.
“There was so much support from all the prisoners,” Day said. “I spent many hours in the courtyard on multiple different days just educating people about Palestine.”
Day is currently out on bail and faces trial next year for trespass and being a “public nuisance.”
We were also joined by investigative journalist David Sheen to talk about his latest exposé of Israel’s 7 October lies.
Contributing editor Jon Elmer covered how resistance fighters in Gaza rewired an unexploded Israeli bomb and detonated it against Israeli armor. He also analyzed the Yemeni missile attack on Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv.
We also discussed the US bilateral truce agreement with Yemen’s ruling Ansarullah movement – which excludes Israel. And we talked about the mysterious new “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” that appears to be closely tied to a US mercenary company.
It appears to be central to US-Israeli plans to displace UN and international aid agencies from Gaza.
And associate editor Asa Winstanley talked about his most recent article on Hussein al-Sheikh, the newly appointed “vice president” in the Palestinian Authority who a senior Israeli spy has called “our man in Ramallah.”
You can watch the whole program in the video at the top of this article.
Parents try to prevent their children starving
Donya Abu Sitta spoke of people roaming the streets in desperate search for food for their families as the famine deliberately caused by Israel worsens.
What little is available on the mostly empty shelves is extremely expensive. A bag of flour that cost $5 to $10 a few months ago now might cost hundreds of dollars.
Abu Sitta described how people in the Qizan al-Najjar area of southern Gaza, where she has been living, had managed to store some food in their homes after experiencing two prolonged periods of hunger.
But when the Israeli military forced them to evacuate the area last month, many had no time to take anything with them. Now, facing starvation, many of her neighbors are returning to homes in a very dangerous area in hope of recovering some of that stored food.
“They don’t want their children to die because of hunger,” Abu Sitta said.
Dozens of people have been killed trying to return to their homes in that area, according to Abu Sitta. She says that across Gaza, most people are surviving on one meal a day, or one meal every few days.
Abu Sitta has been contributing to The Electronic Intifada throughout the genocide. Her most recent article reports on the dire situation at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis.
Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population as well as its massacre on Wednesday at one of the few working restaurants, were among the developments covered by associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman in her news brief.
Atrocity propaganda fueling genocide
Haifa-based reporter David Sheen’s latest article for The Electronic Intifada is “The Vach brothers: Israel’s first family of genocide.”
It traces how Colonel Golan Vach, the head of the Israeli army’s national rescue unit on 7 October 2023, invented some of Israel’s most poisonous atrocity propaganda, particularly the fabrication that Hamas fighters “concentrated” and burned to death eight babies at the home of Pessi Cohen, in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Sheen explained that his new article also casts light on how Vach invented atrocity tales about dozens of Israelis tied together and burned at the Supernova rave – lies that helped prime the Israeli public and world opinion for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“On the day of October 7th he gets to the killing fields of Kibbutz Be’eri and the Supernova party and his job, he will say, is to collect bodies,” Sheen explained.
But in reality, Vach’s task was to “help cover up … the fact that Israeli forces had killed large amounts of their own civilians as part of the Hannibal Directive” – the Israeli military doctrine that permits the killing of Israelis to prevent them being taken captive and used in prisoner exchanges.
Vach, as Sheen said, grew up in Kiryat Arba, a notoriously extremist settlement in the occupied West Bank, where his father, Shalom Vach, was mayor.
Golan Vach didn’t only set the stage for the genocide by inventing such lies, but he and his brothers, Brigadier General Yehuda Vach and Captain Elishav Vach, all played personal roles in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity – particularly in the so-called Netzarim corridor.
Sheen also talked about the severe crackdown on dissent by Israeli authorities, where telling the truth about 7 October is dangerous for journalists.
In January, Israel’s parliament passed a law setting a prison sentence of up to five years for anyone “who publishes statements denying the October 7 massacre with the intent of defending the Hamas terrorist organization.”
This law, according to Sheen, is intended to punish anyone if they “dare to say something that’s against the state narrative about what allegedly occurred and didn’t occur on October 7th, 2023.”
US-Israeli rift said to deepen
The Omani-brokered truce between the United States and Yemen’s Ansarullah movement has left Israeli officials surprised, alarmed and fuming.
“There appears to be a US deal with the Houthis that doesn’t cover Houthi aggression toward Israel,” lamented retired Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, who served as an Israeli military spokesman during the first phase of the genocide.
To add insult to injury, US President Donald Trump appeared to heap praise on Yemen’s Ansarullah movement – also known as the Houthis – saluting their “bravery” and ability to “withstand punishment” after weeks of heavy American bombing raids that killed more than 250 people in the Arab world’s poorest nation.
On the Livestream, this writer talked about the implications of the apparently growing rift between Israel and the Trump administration, and what the Yemen episode shows about the limits of US power.When Trump ordered the attacks on Yemen in March – to protect Israel – he vowed that Ansarullah “will be completely annihilated.”
Instead, the operation was an embarrassing failure. US attacks on some 800 targets neither prevented nor deterred Yemen’s 4 May strike on Ben Gurion airport.
That action has prompted most international carriers – many of which only recently resumed their flights to Tel Aviv – to suspend their services once again, for what is likely to be a prolonged period.
Meanwhile, the Yemenis shot down at least seven American MQ-9 Reaper drones in recent weeks, costing $30 million each, and the US Navy lost two fighter jets in incidents related to its operations against Yemen.The bottom line is that if the US is unable to significantly damage the military capabilities of Yemen, it stands little chance of striking a strategic blow against Iran.
That is giving the United States an impetus to reach an agreement in its ongoing direct nuclear negotiations with Tehran.
Israel, for its part, has been trying to goad the US into war against Iran, thus fueling the apparent rift with Trump.
“Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”
“A lot of talk going on about Gaza right now,” Trump claimed on 7 May. “You’ll be knowing probably in the next 24 hours.”
But some 48 hours later, as of this writing, what the president meant remains a mystery. The most urgent priorities, a ceasefire and a resumption of humanitarian aid which Israel has blocked since early March, have yet to materialize.
And of course the Trump administration, like Joe Biden’s before it, continues to supply Israel with the weapons it is using to exterminate Palestinians.
But there is a lot of talk about a new US-Israeli plan to bypass the UN and other aid agencies and start distributing aid to some Gaza residents through a new US-controlled mechanism, in a manner that would effectively support Israel’s planned expulsion of Palestinians.
The plan involves a newly created organization deceptively named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF.
“Months of conflict have collapsed traditional relief channels in Gaza, leaving millions of civilians without reliable access to food, water and other necessary supplies,” begins a memo from the group, obtained by The Times of Israel, disingenuously omitting that Israel has deliberately destroyed or impeded all these channels.
“GHF’s initiative is being put together in close coordination with the Israeli government, and the Trump administration has been leaning on countries and international organizations to fund and cooperate with it,” The Times of Israel reported on Thursday.
According to Swiss newspaper Le Temps, the “virtually unknown” organization was registered in Geneva earlier this year and its plan involves aid shipments “escorted by US mercenaries and directed to designated ‘hubs,’ where families would have to collect their rations.”
Individuals listed in the group’s founding documents did not respond to queries from the Swiss newspaper.
But Le Temps said that “a US consultant was hastily enlisted to handle the queries.”
That consultant said, “Over the course of several weeks and months, experienced humanitarian leaders, regional specialists, diplomats and operational experts have developed a new approach to delivering aid to Gazans, minimizing the risk of diversion by non-state actors.”
What this amounts to is another US-Israeli attempt to bypass UN and international aid mechanisms and use food as a weapon to impose political outcomes on Gaza.
One of the names mentioned as an officer in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s registration documents is Loik Samuel Henderson.
He is also mentioned in the GHF memo obtained by The Times of Israel.
Henderson appears to work as a lawyer for Protection Strategies Incorporated, a US mercenary firm led by military veterans.
According to federal databases, the mercenary firm has received government contracts over the years worth hundreds of millions of dollars including contracts for “base defense” in Iraq and “DRC military infantry training” – possibly a reference to US training of military forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Electronic Intifada has sent a request for comment to Protection Strategies Incorporated.
Other US military figures appear to be directly involved, according to the memo published by The Times of Israel, including retired Lieutenant-General Mark C. Schwartz, the former US “security coordinator” for Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
As this writer noted on the Livestream, this latest scheme is reminiscent of the Biden administration’s efforts to undermine UN aid mechanisms and replace them with ones controlled by Tel Aviv and Washington.
United Nations leaders are condemning the latest efforts to subvert their work.
The UN’s secretary-general and top emergency relief official “made clear that we will not participate in any scheme that does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.”
Amnesty International’s Swiss branch expressed concern that “the Geneva-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would be willing to pay mercenaries to ensure the distribution of aid.”
By doing so, the GHF was at risk of contributing to international crimes, Amnesty said.
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Comments
The U.S./Israel genocide of the Palestinians
Permalink Jim Thomas replied on
I will take this seriously when the U.S. cuts off all aid to Israel. I do not believe that there is anything principled about Trump's decision to halt its bombing of Yemen (for now). I think that decision is based on the fact that the Houthis humiliated the U.S. and Trump, contrary to all the hot air he blew about destroying the Houthis figured out that the Houthis had beat him - after we wasted another billion or so murdering civilians in Yemen.
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