The New Statesman

It was foreseen for months as Israel cut off all aid, but this month the UN declared that more than half a million people in Gaza are trapped in famine.

By the end of September, more than 640,000 people will face catastrophic levels of food insecurity,

leading to preventable deaths on a devastating scale.

For Humza Yousaf, the former First Minister of Scotland and SMP leader,

the horrors facing the people of Gaza for the past two years are deeply personal.

His wife, Nadia, has relatives in Gaza.

The family has described the experience as a living nightmare. I'm Anusha Kellyan and this is the New Statesman podcast.

I'm joined today by Hamza Yusuf. Hello. Thank you so much for joining us.

It's a great pleasure though a difficult subject. I'm pleased that the new salesmen are giving and continue

to give it, the coverage I think it deserves. Yes, and I mentioned in the intro how personal

all of this is to you. Can I begin by asking about your wife, Nadia's family, her cousin Sally,

with her husband and four children. Can you tell us what life is like for them at the moment?

I can really, because I don't have the words, it is just indescribable. So I just want to take you back a

couple of steps and I'll come to Sally in a minute. Of course. So Nadia's father is Palestinian

and her family's Palestinian.

Her mother is white Scottish from Dundee, worked as a nurse in Ninewell's retired now.

But Nadia's father, in fact I'll go back a generation before that.

Nadia's grandmother, who's still alive and is 95 years old, she was 16 at the time of what is known as the Nakba, the catastrophe in 1940.

She lived in a small town, which of course does not exist anymore. The small town called Julius. It's near what's presently called Ashkelon and she was 16 and the

fighting of course had been going on for a number of months and even years and it got to the

level where they were forcibly told to leave their home. But they were told look give it a couple

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