The Electronic Intifada Podcast 8 February 2025
“Asem, please, I want to feel comfortable, I want to find Refaat, I want to move him,” Alnabih, speaking on The Electronic Intifada Livestream this week, recalled Umm Hani telling him.
“It became my goal and my daily routine,” Alnabih said.
What Umm Hani had asked her son’s former student and lifelong friend to do was take on the extraordinarily difficult task of finding the makeshift grave where Refaat had been buried, alongside his brother Salah, his sister Asma and several of her children, after Israel murdered them on 6 December 2023.
In addition to hearing the painful story of how he found his dear friend’s remains, we spoke to Alnabih – an engineer and the spokesperson for the Gaza City Municipality – about the enormous task of recovery and reconstruction.
Alnabih is also a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada.
We discussed US President Donald Trump’s shocking assertion that he plans to seize Gaza for the United States, ethnically cleanse its entire population and turn it into a “riviera” – a playground for the rich.
In her news report, associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman touched on all the latest developments in Gaza and across the occupied West Bank, where Israel is waging escalating attacks in and around Jenin.
And contributing editor Jon Elmer reported on the demonstration of strength by the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, when it released more Israeli detainees last week.
You can watch the whole program in the video above.
The task Umm Hami assigned him was particularly poignant, Alnabih explained, because he is the last living person known to have seen Refaat alive.
In the early months of the genocide, what turned out to be the final weeks of Refaat’s life, the two spent hours every day, walking the streets of Gaza City, searching for means of sustenance, helping people and looking for internet connections.
If anyone might be able to identify Refaat’s remains, perhaps from a piece of clothing, it would be Alnabih.
Alnabih described his daily search, looking at notes scribbled on pieces of card over makeshift graves – the kind now found all over Gaza – for Refaat’s name. He spoke to countless people, hoping to find someone who had witnessed Refaat’s burial.
“After a lot of searching, we found a guy who participated on that day,” Alnabih recounted.
“He showed us where exactly he believed that Refaat and his brother and his sister Asma and another four nephews” had been buried, alongside others.
Alnabih described the traumatic experience of exhuming the graves.
“I was literally afraid of that day,” Alnabih said. “I brought the body bags, I brought the gloves.”
“There are a lot of details. I’m not sure that people would be able to listen to the details,” Alnabih said. “I’m shaking now.”
“Refaat was a professor, he is a respected man in Gaza, a professor at the university, a genius man, research, writer, author,” Alnabih said. “He deserved better than that.”
As difficult as it was, Alnabih gave Refaat and six of his family members whose remains were located some dignity, bringing them home to Gaza’s city’s Shujaiya neighborhood, where their loved ones could mourn them.
Refaat’s father gave a graveside eulogy.
Alnabih has also written about the search for Refaat for The Electronic Intifada.
After the reburial, on 4 February, Alnabih shared photos of the new grave site on social media. He told the livestream that he is now working on making a permanent headstone engraved with the words of Refaat’s best-known poem, “If I Must Die.”
He also plans to bring together many of Refaat’s former students, friends and colleagues to remember his life together, something that was impossible while Israel’s bombs fell on Gaza.
Umm Hani, who has lost four of her children and several grandchildren to Israel’s violence, called Alnabih again in recent days. “Now I can sleep well, Asem,” he recalled her telling him.Alnabih said he too feels “a bit comfortable” knowing that Refaat has been brought home to his beloved Shujaiya, but added, “I shouldn’t you know, because there are thousands of people still under the rubble,” and many thousands more looking for their loved ones.
Refaat’s story is only one of them.
Palestinians can rebuild Gaza
“People here, they don’t care, they are busy finding water, struggling with their daily tasks,” Alnabih said when asked how people in Gaza were responding to Trump’s plan to expel them from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt.
“He is not the first one who tried this plan,” Alnabih said, recalling how in the 1970s there were only a few hundred thousands people in Gaza, and Israel encouraged emigration.
“And look at us now. We are 2.3 million people and even more.”
“I think Mr. President Trump knows … as everyone knows that there is only one solution to this complex situation,” Alnabih said. “Just give us our rights. Give us our self-determination.”
Alnabih is confident that Palestinians have the skills, abilities and workforce to rebuild Gaza, they just need to be allowed to do it.He spoke of the joy displaced Palestinians felt returning to Gaza City when the coastal road re-opened late last month as part of the ceasefire deal – scenes Alnabih witnessed himself, calling it “a day of hugs and tears.”
“You need to put yourself in the Gazans’ shoes to understand what Gaza City means to them. It’s not only the buildings, it’s not only the roads, it’s not only the ancient places,” Alnabih said.“It’s the smell of Gaza City. It’s the feelings there, it’s something complicated. We can’t really explain to people why we love Gaza to the max.”
But Alnabih is sober about the reality. The Gaza Municipality did its best throughout the genocide and since the ceasefire, its employees working without rest or pay to open roads and restore basic sanitation and water services and clear away waste.
They are hampered, he said, by the destruction of 85 percent of the municipality’s heavy vehicles.
Equipment and parts to repair infrastructure, generators and tents to provide temporary shelter are still not coming, despite promises from international agencies.
Alnabih said there has to be continued pressure to speed things up so a devastated Gaza can start to recover.“We just wait,” he said, “and people are still suffering.”
Alnabih is confident that despite massive destruction and grievous human losses, Gaza can be rebuilt by Palestinians into a beautiful home.
“Help us rebuild Gaza again, to be a good city, to be a nice city, a developed city,” Alnabih urged, asking people around the world to pressure their governments to support that goal.
“I dream about my kids living in that city and a peaceful environment,” he said.
Trump wants to “own” Gaza
Trump stunned the world last Tuesday when he announced plans for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip of its entire population and then turning the coastal territory into a luxury playground for the rich.
Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was sitting right next to Trump when the president made the comments at a joint press conference in the White House on Tuesday, have reacted with glee.
That includes so-called opposition leader Benny Gantz, and far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said he would return to Netanyahu’s coalition government only when he saw Palestinians starting to leave Gaza.
But within hours, Trump administration officials were walking the president’s comments back amid a huge international uproar.
Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia flatly rejected Trump’s comments. Saudi Arabia said its insistence on a Palestinian state before any normalization of relations with Israel was “non-negotiable.”
It quickly emerged that the idea came from Trump without any previous planning within the US government or even coordination with Israel.
Notwithstanding the sheer illegality and depraved immorality of ethnic cleansing, no thought had gone into how the United States would occupy and “own” Gaza, as Trump put it, or how it would defeat and remove the Palestinian resistance that had humiliated the Israeli army for 15 months and forced it to retreat
But that doesn’t mean that the plan came out of nowhere.As this writer pointed out on the livestream, almost a year ago, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who served as the architect of the so-called Abraham Accords in the first Trump administration, spun a similar fantasy.
“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,” Kushner said in an interview last March. Kushner added, “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
It is being reported that Kushner played a key role in crafting Trump’s remarks..
And in the first days of genocide, a document leaked from Israel’s intelligence ministry set out a plan to force the population of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
At the time, Netanyahu’s office downplayed the plan as merely “an initial document of the kind that can be found in dozens of iterations at all levels of the government and the security services.”
But in May of 2024, Netanyahu’s office published a PowerPoint presentation for its so-called “Gaza 2035” plan where Gaza would supposedly be turned into a high-tech free-trade zone ruled by Arab collaborators under Israeli control and all financed by Gulf money.
According to The Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu’s “plan also says that if such an intervention is successful in Gaza, it can be repeated in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.”
And of course there was the so-called Generals’ Plan, an unofficial scheme Israeli apparently attempted to implement to completely and permanently depopulate northern Gaza.
In further comments on Friday, Trump appeared to double down, while at the same time backing off his plan. He called his Gaza vision a “real-estate transaction,” but said there was “no rush” to implement it.
We had a wide-ranging discussion about how serious a threat Trump’s comments represent, with one hopeful point being that for now, at least, the United States still appears to be committed to holding Israel to the ceasefire deal.But there is no doubt that Israel is eager to delay or scuttle negotiations over the next phases.
Resistance report
In his report this week, contributing editor Jon Elmer analyzed the symbolism Hamas displayed during its latest releases of Israeli prisoners from Gaza intended to show that its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, still retain all their military capabilities.
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 Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada Livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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