The Electronic Intifada Podcast 19 August 2025
“ This is just a start,” the group’s chair Dyab Abou Jahjah” told The Electronic Intifada Livestream for 14 August. “We’ll go after them, always, in all possible jurisdictions.”
Millions of people around the world relied on Al-Sharif’s during the genocide.Israel assassinated the Al Jazeera correspondent along with five other broadcast reporters and photojournalists and one other civilian.
Associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman shared a moving tribute at the start of the Livestream and in her latest article.
Al-Sharif also won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a Reuters team in the category of Breaking News Photography for coverage of the genocide in 2024.
Reuters reported on Al-Sharif’s death without fact-checking Israel’s baseless claim that he was a Hamas militant.
Abou Jahjah described how the Hind Rajab Foundation is analyzing Israeli air force drone units and has determined with high confidence that Israel’s Black Snake Squadron or Fire Birds Squadron murdered the journalists.Abou Jahjah also asserted that the Israeli military’s cyberwarfare division, Unit 8200, “ communicates directly with the drone squadrons and is actively participating in the assassinations.”
He explained that having work experience with Unit 8200 can bring prestige for people seeking employment in the US or Europe.
“These are all segments of this genocide that … are being normalized as if it is something to be proud of,” he said.
Working jointly with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed an ICC complaint naming the commanders of these units along with top officers including the army chief of staff.
The Hind Rajab Foundation also helped bring about the arrest in July of two Israeli soldiers visiting Belgium for the Tomorrowland Music Festival.
Belgian authorities released the soldiers but they also referred the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) while asserting that Belgium still has jurisdiction.
This is nonetheless a significant precedent which could lead to more countries exercising their universal jurisdiction and arresting visiting Israeli soldiers.
“This is the first time on record that Israelis were arrested, were put in handcuffs for crimes committed against Palestinians,” said Abou Jahjah.
Don’t normalize genocide
Also on the Livestream, academic and writer Shahd Abusalama, spoke about her experience as a Palestinian born and raised in Jabaliya refugee camp, now living in Spain.
Many of her family and friends have been killed in Israel’s genocide and she talked about how she’s trying to bring some to safety.
”I’m refusing to allow anyone to tell me that, no, there’s no hope for your family but to die or starve and this is the reality. And we just have to normalize it and accept it. We cannot normalize it,” she said.
And when it comes to refugees in Spain she has noticed a hierarchy: Palestinian refugees are treated worse than Ukrainian refugees.”The level of apathy towards our lives is unbearable and outrageous…and it should be called out,” she said.
Abusalama emphasized the need to acknowledge the trauma Palestinians have experienced and provide support for them to heal.
Operation Gideon’s Chariot was a failure, Israelis admit
Israel has “withdrawn into defensive positions in all of their spots,” after they ended Operation Gideon’s Chariots – an effort to secure control over Gaza – explained contributing editor Jon Elmer during his resistance report.
Elmer predicts in the coming weeks that resistance fighters will focus on launching rockets because Israeli troops won’t be in areas where they can fight them from up close.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been on a media blitz talking about his new plan to invade and occupy Gaza City.
But on 7 August, he held a meeting with his security cabinet where his own army chief General Eyal Zamir said the military was against the plan because it is exhausted and short on soldiers.
Some 20,000 Israeli soldiers have been taken off the battlefield due to injuries. And some soldiers are refusing to return to battle.
Some Israeli teenagers are refusing to participate in the genocide in the first place and burning their conscription papers.
Nevertheless, members of Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government argued for the invasion. And Netanyahu complained that Zamir failed to achieve the goals of the Gideon’s Chariots operation.“Everybody is very consistent in Israel: in the security establishment, in the political establishment and across Israel that the operation has been a failure - a genocide, but a military failure,” explained Elmer.
In the end, the cabinet did approve Netanyahu’s plan to occupy Gaza City despite the strong objections from members of the cabinet.Elmer also detailed the mechanisms that have allowed Israeli soldiers and mercenaries to kill 1,900 people at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites.
The sites require traveling for over a kilometer through Israel’s declared evacuation/shoot-to-kill zones.
UN gives Israel a pass for raping Palestinians
Executive director Ali Abunimah led a discussion about the UN adding Hamas to a blacklist of groups suspected of committing patterned rape or other forms of sexual violence in armed conflicts.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres took this action based on a 2024 report from Pramila Patten, his special representative on sexual violence in armed conflict.
Abunimah and associate editor, Asa Winstanley, have analyzed this report multiple times, most recently on 10 July, demonstrating that it provides no evidence of even a single rape by Palestinians on 7 October 2023.
UN experts reviewed thousands of photos and videos and could see no tangible evidence of rape in any of them. They also saw no forensic evidence and met with no victims and to date, not one has been identified.By contrast, according to Haaretz, the UN has verified 12 cases of sexual violence by Israeli forces against seven Palestinian men, including rapes, attempted rapes and sexual torture.
Human rights groups have documented many more testimonies of sexual abuse, humiliation and torture of Palestinians by Israeli forces.
And yet Israel has not been added to the same blacklist. It has only been warned that it may be added in 2026.
Abunimah noted that in 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres failed to add Israel to the “list of shame” which names grave abusers of children’s rights during armed conflict.
That is despite how Israel was named by the UN as one of the “countries that recorded the highest numbers of grave violations in 2022,” according to Virginia Gamba, the UN special representative for children and armed conflict.
“ That’s to give you the context in which to evaluate the UN’s decision,” said Abunimah. “Absolutely disgusting and corrupt.”
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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