Israel’s Use of Mass Starvation as a Weapon of War

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The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After six months of a sustained U.S.-backed Israeli war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza, President Joe Biden says he now has a “red line.” Asked about Israel’s threatened full-scale invasion of Rafah, Biden said, “You can't have another 30,000 Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after [Hamas],” Biden told MSNBC. “There are other ways to deal with Hamas.”

The White House has taken no action to halt the transfer of arms and other support to Israel’s war and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly said that he, not Biden, will decide whether to occupy Gaza. As the Ramadan holiday begins, the humanitarian reality of the people in Gaza has descended into horror. Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign is intensifying the already indescribable suffering wrought by constant bombing and ground operations. The decimation of the health infrastructure and the attacks against hospitals have resulted in the collapse of basic health services.

This week on Intercepted, Yara Asi, author of “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health,” joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain for a discussion on the health impacts of the war, the dehumanizing narratives Israel has deployed to justify its mass-killing operations, and the U.S. plans for building a port off the Gaza coast. Asi is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and co-director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The This is intercepted. Welcome to Intercepted, I'm Jeremy Skahill.
0:37.0	And I'm Mataza Hussein.
0:38.6	Mazars, as always, a lot to talk about today regarding the situation in Gaza, some of the latest news
0:44.4	that we're hearing out of the Biden administration after months of saying
0:47.9	leaking stories to the press and messaging that Biden is losing
0:52.4	patients with Netanyahu and that the
0:54.4	the administration is losing patients with Netanyahu and that the administration is concerned
0:56.0	about the mounting death toll and suffering of Palestinians. The latest news now
1:01.6	is that Biden is talking about something along the lines of a red line
1:07.4	if Netanyahu decides to do a full scale invasion of Rafa. And I'm just wondering your thoughts, Maas on that those developments.
1:16.2	You know I'm very skeptical of the Biden administration's very lately professed reservations about the Israeli operation. very But Biden made a very notable comment when he made this red line comment saying that 30,000 more
1:36.2	Palestinians can't die, which is such a bizarre framing to discuss what could happen going forward.
1:41.9	I take his recent comments about Israel and Netanyahu and
1:46.8	expressing some sort of reservation more as being sort of an effort to portray himself as an opponent of his own policies or an
1:55.8	opponent of his own enabling of the Israeli government to carry out this
2:00.5	operation. Obviously the operation is very divisive inside the United States
2:04.8	including the Democratic Party. Biden has to think about an election year. He'd love to be
2:09.7	passed this conflict many, many months before the election comes but he can't seem to let go of
2:16.5	Israel in this situation and even when he's saying there's going to be a red line he's
2:19.9	not backing down on funding the iron Dome and other defensive capabilities Israel has, which are very, very
2:25.6	important to enable its offensive capabilities because it needs to be able to deter people who
2:29.7	would retaliate against it for invading Gaza. So when he says red lines he doesn't get specifics, I really
	...

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