Watch: Day 27 roundup of Israel's attacks on Gaza

“We’re living the Nakba times again, seeing the tents come up in Khan Younis. It’s surreal. It’s surreal,” said Ghaida Hamdan, who is grieving 36 members of her family. They were killed in Israeli bombings last week.

Ghaida and her mother, Ghada Ageel, joined us on Thursday’s livestream.

Ghada is a visiting professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and wrote about Israel’s murder of her family in The Guardian.

“[Israel] now discovered after 16 years of an inhuman blockade, they cannot put an end to this willingness for freedom, for dignity,” Ghada said.

“So now the plan of annihilation, of genocide, of expulsion, of continuing the unfinished the project of Nakba, this is what we see. My grandmother has been always telling me [that] whenever we have a generation, they come and kill it.”

“We say we are not numbers. But when we actually come down to it and we’re talking about numbers, how do you fathom such amounts of people gone? You don’t. You can’t, you can’t understand it,” Ghaida said.

“And not only that, now you start wondering: if I go back to Gaza, what is left? What would be left? Who would be left?” Ghaida added.

“Every single day we’re mourning a loss. But at some point, everybody in Gaza is our family. Everybody’s our bloodline, everybody’s our community,” she said.

“And you start wondering: what else needs to be said? What else needs to be shown? What else needs to be conveyed to these politicians that are sitting on seats, powerful seats?”

“This choir is enormous”

We were also joined by Roger Waters, rock icon and longtime activist for Palestinian rights.

He talked about growing the movement to stop Israel’s attacks and its settler-colonial project in Palestine.

“All we can do is go on trying to increase the size of the choir – telling the choir, we’re with you, every time you wave that flag on a demonstration,” Roger said.

“And eventually it will get through their thick heads that they cannot go against the people’s will. There are many, many, many more of us than there are of them. And they are wrong. We are right,” he added.

“And together, we all have to explain to the Israeli government that it’s over. You have failed us. You are now a terrible example of what can happen when supremacist ideologies take over our capacity to empathize with our fellow human beings.”

We also played a video message from our colleague Khalil Abu Shammala, who recorded himself speaking from Gaza.

“More than 200 of my family have been killed, including very, very close relatives,” he said.

“I think it is the responsibility of everybody to raise his voice, her voice, to say: Stop. It is enough,” he added.

“What is happening is [beyond] anybody’s, any human being’s, imagination.”

Biden’s green light to Israel

The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah commented on the fixed green light given by the US to Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza.

Ali quoted a New York Times article from Monday stating that “it became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign in Gaza.”

“Israel is modeling its attack on Gaza on the American atomic bombings of Japanese cities and the British firebombing of Dresden,” Ali explained in his opening remarks.

“Together, these horrifying and completely unjustified atrocities killed hundreds of thousands of people. Israel is likening the Palestinians in Gaza, a deeply impoverished population of 2.3 million people, most of them refugees, to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich.”

US President Joe Biden, Ali added, “is fine with all of that. By the measures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden, and with close to 10,000 Palestinians killed in the last 26 days, almost half of them children, and new massacres almost every hour, Israel is just getting started.”

"But we must remember this: Israeli and American plans for the region, and for Palestine, fail much more often than they succeed." @AliAbunimah delivers an overview of the most recent news and analysis. pic.twitter.com/ypzk3ouvr7
— Electronic Intifada (@intifada) November 3, 2023

Ali and our contributing editor Jon Elmer analyzed the ground advances by the Israeli military into Gaza and the steady resistance to the invasion by Palestinian forces.

They also discussed the detailed geography of Gaza’s tunnel system.

Watch the entire broadcast above or listen via Soundcloud below.