Hello, hello hello. I'm particularly delighted today to be joined by

Yusef Manaya, who is the head of the Palestine Israel program at Arab,

the Arab Center, Washington, D.C. and a brilliant U.S. Palestinian writer.

I've been following his work throughout the horror of the last two

and a half months now. You see, first he's a big honor for you to join us. This is horrific for anyone who cares about war crimes,

human rights, that kind of thing, but for those who have Palestinian heritage heritage this is a period of huge trauma so I always

appreciate people like yourself coming to speak about this I just want to start with some comments made by the

UN A chief Martin Griffiths in the Financial Times. He says there's terrible suffering in other places but at least those

affected can flee. He says the human catastrophe is entering a new phase. It's disease

hunger that's beginning to be the lead cause of death and deprivation. The death toll

from disease could be

multiples of that from fighting and airstrikes. That is generally what

happens in war. We're only looking often at violent deaths at the moment which have

been recorded and he points out that those violent deaths from airstrikes and bullets as well of course

are dramatically undercounted because he said we've yet to see what's under the

rubble these estimates of around 18,000 dead once you start digging under the rubble the statistics change radically in the case of February Turkish earthquake

The number of those dead doubled I just want your thoughts on that given what I would regard as quite extensive atrocity denial in which death

figures have actually been doubted extensively but they're actually likely to be

a very substantial underestimate.

Yeah, and thank you Owen very much for having me and for shining a light on this on this issue.

You know, these the point that was made there in the Financial Times article is

absolutely right I mean you know the the level of destruction that we are seeing in Gaza is unprecedented in so many ways.

...