Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Adam Howard.

Our host, David Remnick, recently returned from an extended reporting trip in Israel.

He spoke with Brooke Gladstone from WNYC's On the Media about his experiences in the region

and the piece he wrote about it for the New Yorker magazine, called The Cities of Killing.

So here's Brooke Gladstone talking with David Remnick.

It's been nearly a month since the surprise attack by Hamas into southern Israel,

killing 1,400 Israelis and prompting a response, 9,000 Gazans dead and counting, that Hamas, given past experience, surely would

have foreseen.

Planes streaming overhead, streaking overhead, dropping bombs, and now the Gaza Strip is cut off

from the world.

Now they can't call ambulances, they can't communicate among themselves,

and they can't communicate with the world. My family lives not far from here. I don't know what's

going on with them. I don't know if they're still alive, we're dead. The Israeli military saying the number

of hostages held in Gaza has risen to 240. An explosion at a refugee camp in Gaza.

The images are pretty difficult to watch.

They're showing the entire neighborhood flattened, completely reduced to rubble.

Despite more than two-thirds of the UN General Assembly voting in favor of a ceasefire,

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will not agree to one.

Meanwhile, the battle of irreconcilable world views continues apace in world capitals, small outposts,

and everywhere else the news or some stunted variant of it can reach.

Recently, New Yorker editor David Remnick went to Israel, he couldn't get into Gaza,

and returned with a 10,000-word piece called In the Cities of Killing,

...