Watch: Day 20 roundup of Israel’s attacks on Gaza

Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada Podcast 27 October 2023

“We are experiencing this mixture of horror, unprecedented horror, wherever you go,” Refaat Alareer, a Gaza-based writer, educator and contributor to The Electronic Intifada, told us on Thursday’s livestream.

“I moved to three places in Gaza City, and not one is a tiny bit safer than the other. Not one of them. There is no place in Gaza, wherever you go, that is safe at all,” he said.

His whole family has been displaced after Israel bombed their home.

“When our home was bombed, it was only a miracle, a godly miracle, that saved more than 25 civilians, mostly children, without a warning – without anything. Of course, Israel and Israelis will always lie, ‘we warned them. We want them to leave their homes, we send warnings, we told them to go to the south.’ … The majority of the massacres in the past 10 days took place in the south.”

The UK charity Oxfam warned on Wednesday that “starvation is being used as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians” as Israel hinders the delivery of aid and maintains its total siege on the territory.

Alareer said that he has been repeating a phrase to his frightened children: “Eat less, drink less. And every time I feel that this is going to be my last word, my last sentence to my children, to my kids.”

Meanwhile, students at SOAS in London have been suspended for organizing and attending a rally against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We spoke with a SOAS student and an alum about the UK government’s repression of speech in support of Palestinian rights.

“SOAS students, and to be honest, all students across UK universities are facing punishments, our voices are being silenced,” says Maryam Ofkir of the SOAS Palestine Society.

“This is a critical point for academics and teachers to stand up,” added Rida Jawad, a SOAS alum and writer.

“And we want to emphasize the hypocrisy of SOAS who, for weeks, if not years, decades, have chosen to remain publicly neutral, silent, as they have watched the Palestinian people suffer and be publicly dehumanized in every conceivable way.”

“We will not be silenced, because what’s going on in Gaza is a genocide,” Ofkir added. “Palestinians have a right to live, and no matter what they do, we will not be silenced and we will continue to show our support for the Palestinians.”

Abdaljawad Omar, a writer and lecturer at Birzeit University near Ramallah, explained to us later in the broadcast that Israel is trying to “change the rules of engagement” in the occupied West Bank.

This comes as an Israeli military drone fired a missile near a cemetery in the Jenin refugee camp overnight on Wednesday in the third aerial attack in the West Bank this week. The attack killed three Palestinian children.

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since 7 October.

“One of the elements to that as the airstrike that we saw in Jenin is that it’s willing to use airpower also in the West Bank. And if you want the horror of Gaza to happen in the West Bank, then resistance in the West Bank will only bring that form of horror,” Omar said, explaining what he believes Israel’s thinking to be.

Omar also talks about the role of the Palestinian Authority as the “internal enemy” of the Palestinian people.

And our contributing editor Jon Elmer dissected Israel’s military strategy and stated plans for a ground invasion of Gaza.

“The Israelis said that they’re delaying the ground invasion in order to get American advanced air defense systems in place,” he said.

“Yesterday, Israel bombed four parts of countries: Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, from the air. The Americans are sending over urban warfare, Special Forces advisers who have fought in Mosul and Raqqa and the battles of Fallujah,” he added.

“I think the Israelis are delaying because they’re not ready for what awaits them in the Gaza Strip; they weren’t ready for it on October 7, clearly, and it’s the same systems, it’s the same soldiers, it’s the same command and control.”

The Electronic Intifada’s executive director, Ali Abunimah, asked Elmer about an article in Middle East Eye that claims that Israel plans to flood the Gaza tunnels with nerve gas in order to kill Hamas fighters and rescue Israeli captives.

“At this point, it’s very theoretical,” Elmer explained.

“The Israelis themselves say that their tunnel study is theoretical, because they actually don’t have any operational experience in the tunnels – their soldiers are prohibited from entering the tunnels unless it’s been closed at one end.”

Watch the entire broadcast above, or listen via Soundcloud below.

Audio icon breaking_news_and_analysis_on_day_20_of_gaza_s_al-aqsa_flood_the_electronic_intifada_podcast.mp3

Tags

Comments

picture

Sara Williams replied on

I as a britsh atheistic jew am horrified but not surprised by the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. There is no justification for what is going on in the occupied territories. It can never be okay
to deliberately murder Palestinian men women and children who are all innocent of any wrong doing.
I am so angry and bereft i do not have any words for what is being done.
Long live a free Palestine.

picture

suzanne weiss replied on

Thank you for the closed captions! Thank you for the in person reports from Gaza, the West Bank. John Elmer's analysis are superbly helpful. Suzanne

Nora Barrows-Friedman

Nora Barrows-Friedman's picture

Nora Barrows-Friedman is a staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and is the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014).