This is intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Mertazo Hussein. The past weeks have seen an intensification of the crisis in the Gaza Strip as the Israeli military has proceeded with the early phases of a ground invasion into the territory.

According to estimates, as many as 9,000 Palestinians may already be confirmed dead in the assault, the majority of them civilians.

Despite pronouncements from the Israeli government that the goal of the operation is to eliminate Hamas following its deadly October 7 attack that killed 1400 Israelis, there's little sense of how this goal can be achieved, nor what price Israel is ultimately willing to pay to pursue it.

Joining us now to discuss the possible future course of this conflict is Khaled El-Gindi, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute, and the author of the book Blind Spot.

America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump. Khaled, welcome to Intercepted. Thanks for having me.

So Khaled, we're speaking on Monday, and over the past week we've seen major demonstrations around the world calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, following a very, very harrowing few weeks in which Israeli ground forces have begun an invasion into the Strip, including bombardment from the air and drones and sea and so forth that may have killed about 8,000 people today.

Can you talk briefly about what is going on in the Strip at the moment and also what we've heard from Israeli officials about what their plans are to continue with this offensive?

Well, obviously it's hard to know exactly what the situation is on the ground having, you know, not being there, but by all accounts it's quite horrific.

The bombing campaign has not stopped in 23 days, and on top of that obviously I think people know that Israel has cut off all food, medicine, water, and fuel to the entire population of Gaza, 2.3 million.

And up until now, in the past 23 or 24 days, a total of 94 trucks of humanitarian supplies have entered, which the basic subsistence needs of the Gaza population are at least 100 trucks per day.

So if you imagine in 23 days only a tiny fraction of what's needed has entered. Hospitals are completely overstretched, running out of fuel, and there's really no safe place for civilians in Gaza.

The North, for the most part, has been depopulated. 1.4 million people have been displaced to the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

So there's an enormous strain on healthcare workers, but just immense trauma, the scale of destruction I think is impossible to overstate entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, entire families have been wiped out.

It's quite horrible in almost every imaginable way.

One of the things which has been most alarming about this offensive, including before it actually began, were some of the statements by Israeli officials about what their intentions and their goals are for this invasion.

And you know, we've seen Benjamin Netanyahu and many, many other current and former Israeli military and political officials talking very stark terms, very extreme terms about what they hope to see happen in Gaza.

He tells a bit about what the statements and expressed intentions of Israeli officials have been to date.

Yeah, I mean, as you said, the Israeli political and military leadership is speaking in extremely stark terms in really annihilationist terms.

They talk about eradicating, annihilating, eliminating Hamas in its entirety as both a political and a military movement.

I think they have not climbed down from from that place. You can the rage mindset is still very much in place inside the Israeli leadership.

But I don't know anyone who thinks that that's actually an achievable goal.

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