Episode 32: Hunger and the Gaza war
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There is now hunger in Gaza, widespread and dangerous. It's less dire than Western media claims, but could reach those proportions if it isn't reversed through an aid surge.
How did we get to this point? What were Israeli officials thinking?
And what does the current crisis tell us about the state of the war?
This episode was sponsored by an anonymous sponsor who dedicated it to the bravery of our friend Shaked Haran, whose story is told in episode 5 of this podcast. On October 7, Shaked's father, uncle and aunt were killed in the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be'eri, and seven members of her family, including her mother and two cousins aged 3 and 7 were taken hostage, launching a long and grueling fight for their liberation that Shaked helped lead for the family.
Please join me on Patreon to support this project: www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything.
If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [email protected].
Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. |
| 0:06.0 | Welcome to one of the more frustrating episodes of Ask Aviv Anything. |
| 0:11.6 | It actually took me a few days to turn this around. |
| 0:15.4 | I wrote and thought and read and threw it all out and thought again and read again and rethought it again. |
| 0:23.6 | What the heck is happening in Gaza? What's happening in the Israeli leadership? |
| 0:27.6 | What can we learn from the last two weeks in the hunger crisis in Gaza about the strategy in this war, |
| 0:36.6 | about the management of this war, about the next steps, the future of this war, about whether Israelis understand at a strategic level, the nature of the enemy. |
| 0:47.3 | I'm going to argue that Israeli officials have still failed to understand Hamas. |
| 0:53.3 | I'm going to try and present what I think Israeli officials were thinking |
| 0:58.0 | as we barreled into this situation. |
| 1:02.0 | Everybody has already talked a great deal about the morality of the hunger crisis in Gaza right now, |
| 1:07.0 | and there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. Not everywhere. There's also a upper |
| 1:11.3 | middle class that is eating well, but in a great many places, especially among the poor, |
| 1:16.4 | and most of Gaza is working class poor. At the same time, there isn't starvation, |
| 1:24.6 | with the exception of small pockets having to do with specific problems of distribution, |
| 1:29.4 | which have to be solved urgently. |
| 1:32.3 | But there isn't mass starvation in Gaza, as many of the news reports around the world are saying. |
| 1:36.9 | But there could be. |
| 1:39.1 | Israel is now surging aid, but it's doing it in ways that teach us a great deal about what it was thinking |
| 1:44.9 | before, about the mistakes that were made coming to this point, and also about how the war is |
| 1:50.1 | being run and whether or not we have a strategy. No Israeli official has been able to really |
| 1:55.6 | counter the international discussion about this, because Israel has no information war strategy of any kind, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Haviv Rettig Gur, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Haviv Rettig Gur and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.