The Electronic Intifada Podcast 9 September 2025
“These countries have been accomplices to the genocide in Gaza.”
Abed is a journalist from Gaza – and longtime contributor to The Electronic Intifada – who was evacuated to Ireland on a student scholarship in April. Since then, he’s been speaking out tirelessly, at rallies, conferences, interviews and social media.
He recently visited the UK to address the Gaza Tribunal, co-chaired by former Labour Party leader and independent lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn to examine the UK’s complicity in the genocide – and the role of independent media, including The Electronic Intifada.
On a related note, later in the program executive director Ali Abunimah discussed two recent announcements from the Irish and Turkish governments that sounded like they were taking strong actions against Israel’s genocide but were not what they appeared.Abed said he speaks to his family back in Gaza on a daily basis. His mother is suffocating from cooking over a wood fire. His niece asks for him to bring eggs, snacks, and chocolate back to them in Gaza.
“ Whenever her mother says that she and I can’t do anything, she starts crying,” Abed explained.
Abed also spoke about his two recent articles for The Electronic Intifada: UK university sorry for email hinting at ban on Palestinian students and BBC “guidelines” endanger and offend Gaza interviewees.Both stories benefited from how Abed follows and stays in touch with Palestinians in Gaza. He also shared a moving tribute to his friend and cameraman Rasmi Salem, who was murdered in an Israeli air attack in Gaza City on 2 September.
“All that he dreamt of is that he and his family would survive this holocaust and they would be together again and they would rebuild their house, but then Israel killed him,” said Abed.
Both associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman and contributing editor Jon Elmer focused on Gaza City in their news roundup and resistance report, respectively.Israel is destroying approximately 300 residential units per day using explosives-laden robots in Gaza City according to a report by Euro-Med Monitor. At that rate Gaza City could be completely destroyed within 60 days. Learn more by watching Barrows-Friedman’s news report or reading her article.
Editors also discussed a scheme circulating in the Trump White House: the GREAT ( Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation) Plan envisions the “voluntary” relocation of the entire population of Gaza according to The Washington Post.The plan itself outlines a dystopian vision and AI-generated images that originated from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
You can watch the whole program in the video above.
Is Israel prepared to invade Gaza City?
Netanyahu plans to invade Gaza City soon despite concerns about draft dodgers and opposition from top Israeli military officials who instead want to pursue a ceasefire deal.
And Israeli media reports that 30 to 40 percent of militarized bulldozers are unfit for combat.One million people live in Gaza City. The vast majority of the Gaza Strip is a shoot-to-kill zone. The few areas that are so-called “safe zones” are already overcrowded. Where will people flee when Israel issues an evacuation order and then invades Gaza City?
Elmer questioned this while also emphasizing that a shoot-to-kill zone does not mean Israel has operational control over the area. It means Israel forces shoot from a distance at anything they see moving.
The military often claims operational control over an area but its forces are immediately met by resistance operations. Israel said it had control over Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza in late 2023 but the resistance battalion there just released a compilation of operations it has carried out there this year.
“There’s a number of pockets in Khan Younis, particularly eastern Khan Younis, that the Israelis never took over,” Elmer added as another example.That last point was confirmed by a military report recently leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 deeming the army’s “Gideon’s Chariots” offensive launched in May a massive failure.
Israel “made every mistake possible” during the operation in Gaza according to the report.The document was reportedly distributed within the military for training purposes – although a spokesperson later told Israeli media this was done without proper authorization.
It says that Israel failed to achieve its objectives, squandered scarce resources and the “[Israeli military] combat methods had proved ill-suited to counter Hamas’ guerrilla tactics,” reported Elmer.
Elmer also highlighted that the booklet said the Israeli military often thought they had gained operational control but when they returned to places like Eastern Khan Younis and Abasan al-Kabira they were immediately attacked by the local battalions there.
“This is something I’ve been pointing out on the show since day one,” said Elmer.
Ireland and Turkey standing against genocide?
On 29 August, many headlines said that Turkey was closing its airspace to Israeli aircraft in general.
But in fact the ban is only on Israeli government and military planes. Israel is known to transport weapons in commercial planes.
Ireland’s central bank announced on 1 September that it will no longer act as the main institution in the EU that facilitates the sale of Israeli government bonds.
In fact, the Central Bank of Ireland will retain a key role for Israeli bonds approval.
The fact that an institution in Luxembourg is now selling Israeli bonds was described as “duplicitous off-shoring of complicity in Israel’s genocide” by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
The people of Ireland will “continue to escalate their nationwide campaign to end the Irish state’s complicity in this holocaust,” predicted Abunimah, who had returned from Ireland a day earlier and spoke at two events there where the campaign to halt the sale of the bonds was a key topic.
“The resistance on the ground are making Israel pay a price militarily. But it has to pay a price economically, diplomatically,” he added.
“GREAT” plan
Towards the end of the Livestream, editors discussed Trump’s GREAT plan for the “voluntary” departure of Palestinians in Gaza to countries or into “restricted, secured zones” within the besieged territory.Abunimah pointed out that there’s another well known term for that: concentration camps.
The plan says that Gaza will be administered by the US for 10 years and be ”transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.” And Gazans will be “ offered a digital token” that can be help them finance living in another country or return to an apartment in Gaza.
“None of this is to be taken at face value. They don’t really plan to do any of this, this is all a way to market their genocide,” said Abunimah
Editors discussed how this resembles the Nazis lies used to persuade Jews to leave their homes during the Holocaust.
In a particularly notorious episode recalled by associate editor Asa Winstanley, the Zionist leader in Hungary, Rezső Kasztner, made a deal with the Nazis: In exchange for helping the Nazis deport the Jews to their deaths, Kasztner and a handpicked group of associates would be allowed to escape to safety in Switzerland.
Kasztner and his men told the Jewish community that the Nazis were merely resettling the Jews in labor camps – even distributing fake postcards supposedly from happily resettled Jews.
In fact, the Jews who boarded the trains at Kasztner’s urging were taken to their deaths in Auschwitz.
Half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
“ I think the big difference is that Palestinians are not going to be tricked like that,” said associate editor Asa Winstanley.
Many Palestinians grew up hearing stories of their relatives fleeing during the Nakba in 1948 and expecting that they would be able to return home in a few weeks - when in fact they still can’t return over 75 years later.
But, “ Israel is systematically destroying everything in Gaza,” added Abunimah. He explained that soon people have no choice but to leave.
“ So, that’s why Israel has to be stopped from completing this genocide,” he 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 this writer contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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