The Electronic Intifada Podcast 22 March 2025
In three days, Israel’s attacks by land, sea and air have killed around 600 Palestinians and injured 1,000 more.
Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the head of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City who was abducted by Israeli forces in November 2023, and detained and tortured in an Israeli prison camp for seven months, described the situation as “catastrophic,” as associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman reported in the news brief at the start of this week’s Livestream.
Abu Salmiya said that on Tuesday morning there were 50 bodies at the emergency department and another 30 at the morgue. “Operation rooms were full and many injured people have died in front of our eyes while we couldn’t treat them,” the doctor said.
In recent weeks, US and Israeli leaders have repeatedly threatened to open the “gates of hell” on Palestinians in Gaza.
In a packed program we spoke to human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber about Israel’s acceleration of the genocide and heard from journalist Eli Clifton about the role of pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson in the Trump administration’s free-speech crackdown.
Contributor Abubaker Abed joined us live from Gaza. You can watch the whole program in the video above.
We also discussed Senator Chuck Schumer, the most senior elected Democrat in the United States, still promoting lies about 7 October.
On ABC’s The View he claimed Hamas beheaded babies and in his new book he says that Israeli women were raped. Associate editor Asa Winstanley emphasized that there is not only no evidence but also no “specific named or anonymous victims” of rape by Hamas – a claim long debunked by The Electronic Intifada and other independent media.
Threat of “utter destruction”
Israeli defense minister Israel Katz released a video directly threatening the entire civilian population in Gaza with ethnic cleansing and “utter destruction and devastation.”
“That’s the sound of impunity,” said human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber on the Livestream this week.He added that Katz’s direct threat to civilians “can only be described as a Nazi-like statement.”
Mokhiber, a UN human rights official who resigned in October 2023 over the world body’s inaction in the face of Israel’s genocide, said Katz was publicly committing war crimes and could only do that with the support of the United States and other governments around the world.
Mokhiber said that while progress is slow, “ we’re chipping away at the wall of impunity.”
He noted that Israel is on trial for genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), while two of its leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.
Meanwhile, legal action is proceeding in national courts around the world amid a wealth of evidence of Israel’s crimes. Major international human rights organizations have concluded that Israel is perpetrating genocide.
Mokhiber noted that Israel did not face this kind of pressure even just two years ago. “ We have to keep at it,” he added.
And in the meantime he encouraged people to participate in boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, demonstrations, education and civil disobedience to keep up the pressure on Israel and its backers.
According to Mokhiber, only South Africa and Yemen among nations are taking “concrete steps to actively meet their obligations under international law to stop the genocide.”South Africa brought Israel to trial for genocide at the ICJ, while Yemen is enforcing a maritime blockade to prevent the resupplying of the Israeli regime.
Mokhiber pointed out that Yemen is a divided country, with the Ansarullah movement, sometimes known as the Houthis, controlling the most populous regions, including the capital Sanaa.
While he said he does not “share their politics,” Mokhiber insisted that Yemen under Ansarullah is one of the few countries taking “concrete action” to fulfil its duties under international law with regards to Gaza, including the Genocide Convention.
At least hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people turned out in support of Gaza at a recent rally in the capital. One day earlier US President Donald Trump claimed that Yemen’s ruling Ansarullah movement are “hated by the Yemeni people.”
US bombs Yemen killing civilians
The US has carried out dozens of air attacks on Yemen in the last week, claiming to be trying to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and killing dozens of people, many civilians.
On the Livestream, associate editor Jon Elmer pointed out that Ansarullah are blocking Israeli ships in response to Israel breaking the ceasefire, and that the US could restore “freedom of navigation” by fulfilling its obligation as a guarantor of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.
Trump has said attacks on Yemen will continue until it surrenders, but Elmer argued that this is unlikely. From 2015 to 2022, a US-backed coalition of Gulf states bombed Yemen thousands of times without achieving any success from their perspective.
Since Israel re-started large-scale bombing of Gaza, and the US attacks on Yemen, Ansarullah has escalated its response – re-imposing the maritime blockade and firing long-range missiles towards US warships and Israel, forcing millions of Israelis to flee to shelters.
“Cowardly massacre”
Israel’s surprise attack started at 2 am Tuesday targeting government infrastructure and included a “wave of assassinations” against civilian members of Hamas from senior government leaders to municipal officials.
People in Gaza are crowded into a small number of structures because Israel has destroyed so many already. And Israel bombed at night when people were home. This guaranteed high civilian casualties and the murder of a large number of children, according to Elmer.
”This is not some kind of intelligence coup that the Israelis pulled off. It’s a heinous massacre, a cowardly massacre, even by Israel’s standards,” Elmer said.
Israel assassinated Naji Abu Saif, known as Abu Hamza, the spokesperson for Saraya al-Quds, the military wing of Islamic Jihad.“This is a significant loss to the resistance movements in Gaza,” said Elmer.
“Corpses are everywhere, blood is everywhere”
We were also joined by journalist Abubaker Abed, live from Gaza.
He said after the Israeli bombing, “corpses are everywhere, blood is everywhere.” Israel is attacking all over Gaza including Abed’s city, Deir al-Balah, which had been spared the most intense bombing in the earlier phases of the genocide.
Abed said because of Israel’s total blockade, imposed at the beginning of March to prevent all food, fuel and other basic humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza, that people are facing severe food shortages.
What is available is often low quality.
Among the most severe of the many crises people are facing is lack of water in central Gaza because there is no fuel for the desalination plant.
And once again, people in the south and north of Gaza are cut off from each other because Israel re-occupied part of the Netzarim corridor – a strip of land bisecting the territory.
Abed emphasized the need for people in the United States to stand up and stop what Israel and the US are doing to Gaza because, “you are paying for my suffering.”
Miriam Adelson’s role in arrest of Mahmoud Khalil
“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner.”
That’s what the Columbia University graduate and student leader said in a letter dictated from the Louisiana prison where he is still being held after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him in New York on 8 March. He has not been charged with any crime.
In an article for Responsible Statecraft this week, Quincy Institute researcher Eli Clifton argues that one person has been overlooked in this story: Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American billionaire who is the largest financier of Trump’s three presidential campaigns.
Clifton joined the Livestream to talk about how Adelson funds one of the groups that demonized Khalil in the lead up to his arrest: the Maccabee Task Force.
The group has been attacking college students for supporting Palestine for a decade. It claimed to its over 300,000 followers on Facebook that Khalil came to the US to promote “chaos and destruction” and that he is a supporter of Hamas.
Clifton provides links to Facebook posts by the Maccabee Task Force making these claims in his article. But it appears the Maccabee Task Force has deleted them.
According to Clifton, the Maccabee Task Force appears to be suggesting that Khalil has provided “material support” to a terrorist group – which is a crime. Clifton reached out to the Maccabee Task Force for evidence to support these claims but they did not respond.
He said it was notable that the page is run from Israel.
The Maccabee Task Force website does not list who is the head of the organization. But tax filings examined by Clifton reveal the group’s president is Miriam Adelson herself.
Clifton said all of this is a ”potent cocktail of power and money and political influence.”
The ceasefire
What does Israel’s recent resumption of full-scale genocide mean for the prospects of returning to the ceasefire agreement?
Hamas has made clear that it is still willing to negotiate, but it is not willing to abandon the fundamental principles already agreed and signed onto by Israel and the United States in the January agreement.
Acknowledging that he is always looking for signs of hope, executive director Ali Abunimah said there are indications that the Israeli public might not be willing to support a prolonged war again.
He referred to headlines from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz – “There Is no justification at all for Israel to resume the war in Gaza” and “Israel, not Hamas, is derailing the Gaza ceasefire and preventing the hostages’ return – as examples of such opposition.
Haaretz is considered a “liberal” newspaper but the doubts and opposition are being expressed more widely than ever in Israel especially from families of Israelis still held in Gaza who have warned that continuing the war will endanger their loved ones.
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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