The Electronic Intifada Podcast 9 June 2025
Mokhiber is a human rights lawyer and a member of the Gaza Tribunal, a people’s tribunal that recently held its opening public session in Sarajevo.
The prosecutions against Israel in international courts are moving slowly and may not have a ruling for another two years. But “just on the law and the facts alone it is guaranteed, effectively, that the International Court of Justice will come down with a finding of genocide” by Israel against Palestinians, Mohkiber predicted.
“The law has repeatedly come down on the side of Palestine,” Mokhiber noted. “What has failed is enforcement.”
Throughout the interview, recorded on 4 June, Mokhiber emphasized the need for people power to pressure institutions like the ICJ, create change and for our own well-being.“The only way that we can save our mental health when we have a front row seat to a genocide is to be active,” said Mokhiber.
He cited the Gaza Freedom Flotilla with Greta Thunberg and other activists who in recent weeks have been sailing across the Mediterranean with the goal of breaking the siege on Gaza.
Early Monday morning, Israeli commandos seized the Madleen and abducted Thunberg and the other activists, prompting organizers to call on people around the world to pressure the activists’ governments to intervene.
Activists from around the world are also traveling across North Africa and next weekend thousands plan to gather in Cairo for the Global March to Gaza, an effort to break the siege by land. Mokhiber also pointed to protests by students at graduation ceremonies and escalating boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns.Also during the livestream, contributing editor Jon Elmer shared a rare glimpse into Hamas tunnels and associate editor Asa Winstanley led a discussion on Israel’s admission that it is working with anti-Hamas gangs in Gaza.
Executive director Ali Abunimah talked about Israel’s sinking poll numbers around the world and editors discussed ex-Biden official Matthew Miller’s recent interview in which he admits to covering up Israeli war crimes.
Associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman reported on how Israel is using “aid” centers as slaughter zones.
You can watch the entire show in the video at the top of this article.
The Gaza Tribunal
The Gaza Tribunal is “ global civil society action to respond to the horrors and to the impunity and to the complicity” of so many governmental and legal institutions around the world, Mokhiber said.
The tribunal released the Sarajevo Declaration declaring that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians.
“ We also reject the destructive ideology of Zionism as the official state ideology of the Israeli regime,” the declaration states, tackling head on an issue that is often avoided in international forums.
Read the full declaration or hear it on YouTube.
Since the Oslo accords of the early 1990s, according to Mokhiber, there has been a “ disingenuous political process that said to the Palestinians: You must negotiate for your rights with your oppressor.”
He made clear the Gaza Tribunal rejects this and “does not recognize the Israel exception to international law.”
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “concentration camps”
As for the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, it is “a hodgepodge of Israeli and US intelligence operatives, sketchy finance firms in the US, mercenaries and private military contractors posing as humanitarians,” Mokhiber said. “It is the “final phase of the genocide.”
The supposed aid centers are all in southern Gaza and aim to lure people into a small area – “concentration camps” as Mokhiber put it – in preparation for “easy departure or death.”
During her news brief Nora Barrows-Friedman highlighted how the so-called aid centers have turned into slaughter zones.Since 27 May, when the private US and Israeli-backed firm began its lethal and humiliating operations, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 500 injured while seeking meager portions of food aid, Barrows-Friedman reported.
Two brothers witnessed their mother, Reem Zeidan, being murdered while trying to get an aid parcel on 3 June. ”Don’t go,” said the child Ahmed Mohammed Zeidan in a video. “For a coupon that’s not even worth 50 shekels [$14], it’s not worth it to sacrifice our lives.”
Israeli forces have massacred more than 400 Palestinians and injured more than 2,000 throughout just the previous week, Barrows-Friedman reported.Israeli airstrikes flattened a home in Gaza City, pinning a baby and his 5-year-old brother beneath the rubble.
A clip filmed by Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al Sharif and posted on 3 June shows the moment the two children were rescued by Palestinian first responders.
Tunnels operations by the resistance
Over the last week, resistance fighters in Gaza carried out several tunnel operations, as contributing editor Jon Elmer reported.
In one operation, unexploded US-supplied anti-tank blast mines were used to construct explosive devices placed in a house where Israeli forces were based, that resistance fighters accessed via tunnels.
The video of the operation offered a rare glimpse into the tunnels that have been critically important during this war.
“The alleys of Shujaiya have vexed the Israelis for generations,” said Elmer in his analysis of another operation.A resistance fighter shot two Israeli soldiers, killing at least one of them, and escaped safely.
This “occurred in an area where the [Israeli military] had been operating for a relatively long time. Therefore they believed that there was nobody in this area,” Elmer said, explaining that the tunnels and alleys allow resistance fighters to access areas where the Israelis believe they are safe,
Ex-Biden officials cash on lying about genocide
The Sky News interview on 2 June with former Biden State Department spokesperson,Matthew Miller has received a lot of attention for his comment that Israel “without a doubt” committed war crimes in Gaza.
For the first 16 months of the genocide, Miller stood at the State Department podium adamantly denying evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity which he now admits openly the Biden administration knew about.
Executive director Ali Abunimah shared that and other clips from the interview that have received less attention.Miller also told Sky News that Biden administration officials did “debate whether and when to cut off weapons to Israel.”
He points out that they did stop sending 2,000 lbs bombs “because we did not believe they would use those in a way that was appropriate in Gaza.”
But Biden ultimately did not cut off all weapons because that action combined with protests against Israel on college campuses and efforts by European governments to recognize Palestine would send the wrong message to Hamas.
“All of those things together were leading the leadership of Hamas to conclude that they didn’t need to agree to a ceasefire.”
Abunimah offered this paraphrase in response: “ We had to keep going with the genocide because we can’t reward protests against genocide by stopping genocide.”
Miller was also continuing the lie that Hamas refused to accept a ceasefire deal, according to Abunimah.
While admitting that Israel committed war crimes, Miller continues to deny that it is perpetrating genocide, claiming only that the war crimes may have been done by individual soldiers, not as Israeli government policy.
But, “We heard him [Miller] say that they had delayed the shipment of the 2,000-pound bombs because they didn’t think Israel was going to use them appropriately in Gaza,” said Abunimah.
That is an admission that “ it was the policy of the Israeli government to commit war crimes by using 2,000-pound bombs to attack civilians.”
Miller’s excuse for covering up the war crimes he knew Israel was committing was that, “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion.”
In response, Abunimah said, “ Basically, ‘I was just following orders.’”
This is known as the Nuremberg defense – the claim used by many Nazis on trial after WWII.
The Nuremberg Principles established by those trials now form the basis for much of international law, including the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netantyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Perhaps the best known of these principles states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to the order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
According to this principle, Abunimah said Matthew Miller and other US officials who aided and abetted Israel could be investigated as accessories to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
But far from facing accountability – at least for now – Miller has been rewarded with a lucrative position at Vianovo, a Washington lobby group.
Miller’s former colleague at the State Department, spokesperson Vedant Patel, is also cashing in on his time covering up for Israel’s crimes.Patel has just been hired by SKDK, another Washington lobby group that is on the payroll of the Israeli government.
Israel’s Gangs in Gaza
Editors discussed how this week Israel admitted what many have known for months: Israel is supporting anti-Hamas gangs in Gaza who have been accused of stealing food off of aid trucks.
Former Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman made the public accusation that Netanyahu is arming ISIS-linked criminal gangs. Associate editor Asa Winstanley said this is “ a strategy as old as colonialism itself.”
Lieberman is a political rival to Netanyahu currently. Abunimah noted, “ Often we get information, real information, that reveals hidden truths from Israelis attacking each other.”
Israel is losing popularity worldwide
At the end of the show, Abunimah shared new polling from Pew Research Center in 24 countries around the world which shows that Israel is viewed more negatively than ever.
A majority of Americans now view Israel negatively. Even among Republicans the number viewing Israel negatively has surged from 27 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2025.
Notably, people surveyed in the Netherlands and Germany both had negative views of Israel: 78 percent and 64 percent, respectively. Abunimah noted this is in stark contrast to how both of those governments strongly support Israel.
But Abunimah said, “That explains why there’s so much violent repression in Germany: If the population were on board with the pro-Israel pro-genocide policy, you wouldn’t need” so much censorship and violent suppression.
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.
Ali Abunimah contributed reporting to this article.
Add new comment