Israel Is Now Occupying 60 Percent of the Gaza Strip

Palestinians around the world are marking Nakba Day, 78 years after their forced mass displacement led to the establishment of the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Decades later, Palestinians still face widespread oppression and violence from the Israeli state as it continues its expansionary project. “Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it. Our people are still there, resilient,” says Palestinian writer Muhammad Shehada, who was born in Gaza and now lives in Denmark. Shehada discusses the ongoing process of the Nakba, including its latest intensification after October 7, 2023. “Now this veneer of civility has fallen off. The mask was taken off. And now it’s a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians.”

Shehada also describes current conditions in Gaza — still under Israeli blockade and occupation — and what he calls the “disarmament trap” of unfairly weighted negotiations designed to strip Palestinians of political autonomy. “The ‘realistic’ proposal that Israel is putting on the table is surrender, capitulate, become fully defenseless, weaponless, and entrust the very army that carried out a genocide against you to be merciful towards you once you are an easier target than you ever were before.”

Finally, he responds to the Israeli government’s recent threat to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, after the paper published a column by longtime opinion writer Nicholas Kristof about systemic sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. “It’s the newspaper of record. It’ll be spread and disseminated widely to an American audience,” says Shehada about the allegations levied in Kristof’s piece. “So we see, basically, an Israeli panic attack in return.”

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Today, Palestinians in Gaza and around the world are commemorating what Palestinians refer to as Nakba Day. Nakba means “the catastrophe” in Arabic. It was 78 years ago that some 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced and dispossessed from hundreds of towns and villages in Palestine, thousands more killed, during the creation of the state of Israel. In Gaza, Palestinians marked the grim anniversary amidst reports that Israel dramatically increased its attacks on Gaza during April, despite a U.S-brokered ceasefire last October. In the occupied West Bank, UNICEF, the United Nations Children Fund, said Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 70 Palestinian children since early last year, amounting to around one child killed per week. Another 850 children were injured by Israeli attacks during this past year.

In 1948, Mustafa Al-Jazzar was just 5 years old when he had to flee his village of Yibna, now Yavne, in Israel. He’s now 83 and lives in a tent in Khan Younis, Gaza.

MUSTAFA AL-JAZZAR: [translated] In 1948, I was psychologically at ease in my land, in my home, with my neighbors, my siblings, my parents. Our life was comfortable, comfortable and not miserable. When we were displaced from Yibna in 1948, we entered hell, searching for water and food until the United Nations Refugee Agency set up tents and houses for us. But even then, we had some kind of stability, not like today. Today, until this very hour, is harder, much harder than our displacement in 1948, a thousand times harder.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Thursday that Israel is now occupying 60% of the Gaza Strip.

The future of Gaza and its people rests now with the international so-called Board of Peace, which was created and is chaired by President Trump and has been recognized by the U.N.. The Board of Peace lead envoy for Gaza said earlier this week that the phased ceasefire deal was stalled over Hamas not yet disarming, but that Hamas could still have a political role in Gaza.

For more, we’re joined by Muhammad Shehada, writer and analyst from Gaza, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His recent piece for +972 Magazine is headlined “Gaza’s disarmament trap.”

Muhammad, thank you so much for being with us. Can you talk about the significance of this day, and then go into what you call “Gaza’s disarmament trap”?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Thank you so much, Amy, for having me back.

So, the significance of today is twofold. Number one, Israel made a bit a gamble that what they call the old of Palestinians will die, and the young will forget. They will move on. And today marks that in Palestinian memory this day is still alive. We know our villages, exactly where are our homes that we were uprooted from, and we can locate all of it on a map. We still hold to even the keys of the homes from which we were expelled and our properties that were stolen by Israel. You see, basically, Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it. Our people are still there, resilient.

And the second thing that it marks is continuity of the Nakba. The Nakba was not a single passing event. It is a process that started in 1948, deliberately designed to ethnically cleanse the maximum amount of our historic Palestine of its Palestinian population, destroy our ability to exist as a group, and establish instead Israeli Jewish presence on our lands, villages, and even the graves of our forefathers. Every act that you saw in Gaza over the last two years, every atrocity, the mass rape, the destruction of entire cities and villages, the wiping out of everything, the systematic capturing of people as human shields and hostages, the destruction of the basic infrastructure that holds the ability for organized human existence to less than Gaza, all of it started in 1948.

The difference between then and now are two things. Israel has accelerated it 10 times as aggressively, 10 times as viciously in Gaza. The number of people they murdered is over 10 times those that were killed in 1948. And number two, Israel stopped being sort of in denial mode about it. So, in ’48 and the following years, Israel kept denying the Nakba, the existence of Palestinians as a group, as a nation. They kept saying that we fled out of our own homes out of our own will. Now it’s no longer denial. Now this veneer of civility has fallen off. The mask was taken off. And now it’s a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians. The word ”lehashmid” — annihilate, genocide — is the one that I heard most repeated by Israeli pundits, leaders, politicians, members of parliament, ministers, and even the prime minister, when he invoked Amalek, basically a biblical reference to a population that should be completely exterminated.

Now the other issue here is what you described as the disarmament trap, the headline on my article. The idea there is that for the last six months there was this Trump deal of 20 items. Only one item was ever fulfilled. That is the release of Israeli captives and hostages in Gaza. Nothing else. Even the reciprocal release of Palestinian captives, it was never fulfilled. There are still about 300 Palestinian children that are held in Israeli dungeons and close to a hundred Palestinian women that are held hostage, never released. Israel has been bombing Gaza every day. Food has been restricted. Israel was supposed to allow temporary shelters, homes, a new government into Gaza. They didn’t allow any of this.

So, basically, in the midst of the Iran war, the U.S. and Israel thought that they can impose new conditions on Palestinians and Hamas, basically asking for surrender, or else the war, the military campaign, the genocide would be resumed to full force. So, Nikolai Miladinov, the high representative of the Trump so-called Board of Peace, went to meet with Hamas’s leadership in Egypt, along with other Palestinian factions, and he proposed the following, that they need to disarm completely, unilaterally, thoroughly, unrequitedly, and after 250 days of that full disarmament of everything, down to nail clippers, down to pepper sprays, down to batons, pistols, Kalashnikovs, after all of it is gone, 250 days later, Israel would withdraw from Gaza. It’s like a pie-in-the-sky, “trust me, bro” kind of sentiment. And he told them that if you don’t accept that capitulation dictate, that Israel would be absolved of all of its obligations under the Trump deal and that they would be given a free hand to resume the military operations in Gaza.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Muhammad, could you talk about the situation in Gaza right now, where Israel is still occupying more than half of the territory and forcing 2 million people into just a sliver of land along the coast?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: So, basically, as you mentioned, Israel has occupied and retains over 60% of Gaza, that is fully depopulated. Not a single soul is allowed there. It’s way deadlier. It’s marked by what is called the yellow line, and it’s way deadlier than the Berlin Wall. Anyone even coming in close proximity or 300 meters away from that invisible line, that is not marked on the ground, is shot immediately.

There was a debate in the Israeli government about shooting children that are playing near that line, that would accidentally come close to the line. And an Israeli minister put a concrete example of children coming close to the line riding donkeys or horses or mules. And one Israeli minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said, “Shoot them. Shoot them. Shoot to kill.” And another Israeli minister, Dudi Amsalem, asked him a technical question in return. He said, “Who should we shoot first? The donkeys or the children?” That is the level of atrocity with that yellow line.

There is this famous Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister, this famous quote from 1967, in which he said, “We will tell Palestinians we have no solution. Whoever wants to live here shall live like dogs; otherwise, they should leave.” In fact, after the Israeli genocide in Gaza, people in there are treated way worse than animals, way worse than dogs. There were headlines about Germany rescuing donkeys in the middle of the genocide, instead of any medical evacuation of cancer patients or children, double-amputee children. There is the Israeli protocol that allows them to shoot to kill every single living soul in Gaza, aside from animals. If it’s a dog, you’re only allowed to shoot it if it poses a threat to your life. If it’s any other Palestinians, shoot to kill freely. That is the protocol.

The other dimension is basically the entire population squeezed in less than 40%, pushed increasingly towards the sea, the ocean, without any basic necessities for human survival. Medicine, it’s heavily restricted, tents banned. Temporary shelter is not allowed. Even the new government that’s supposed to take over from Hamas remains a government in exile in Egypt.

So, the overall result — and this is not polemic; I mean this literally. The luckiest person that I know in Gaza, my friend Anas — I hope he’s safe. His daughter is about 4 years old. Anas is living in a home in a destroyed, bombed-out building. It’s a seven-story residential building. He lives on the first floor. The apartment doesn’t have any doors or windows. Most of the walls have either fully collapsed or partially collapsed. There is a huge hole in the ceiling in the living room and in the floor. It’s from a 2,000-pound Israeli bomb they dropped on Gaza, and on that tower in specific, and it didn’t explode. The area is infested with mice, rats, scorpions, cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes. So, Anas sleeps at night with one eye open to prevent rats and mice from biting and nibbling at his daughter’s — his only daughter’s feet and hands. The disease infestation in there, the disease outbreak, is so endemic that every single person I know in Gaza has had food poisoning, intestinal diseases, diarrhea, fever almost 10 times within the last six months.

And Anas is considered the luckiest person that I know there, although that building might collapse at any second. It was bombed from the top, bombed from the bottom, bombed from both sides. It’s riddled with holes. But at least he’s living in a building that’s still standing. The entire population, over 90% of them, are living on the street in plastic wrappers. It’s not even a tent; it’s a plastic wrapper. And Israel doesn’t allow tents into Gaza, actual tents that are capable of protecting the population from the rain or the heat, because they said the tiny amount of aluminum that goes into supporting the tent structure might be recycled by Hamas and turned into weapons of mass destruction. It’s lunatic. So, it is the Moshe Dayan policy: Let them live as dogs or under creatures, worse than dogs; otherwise, they should leave.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Muhammad, I wanted to ask you: What’s been the response of Hamas and the other resistance groups to this demand of total disarmament?

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: The response was basically twofold. Number one, they said, “We cannot talk to you about phase two of the Trump plan if phase one was never fulfilled.” How do we trust that Israel would fulfill phase two if they violated every single clause of their obligations under the first phase — the humanitarian aid, the issue with seizing military operations, bombing, the issue with seizing more land, withdrawal? If Israel reneged on every single one of those commitments, what would stop them from reneging and violating other commitments that you put on the table? So, that was number one.

Number two, they said, “We are willing to engage in a process of decommissioning, decommissioning over the Northern Ireland model.” In Northern Ireland, if you might recall, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. The full disarmament of the IRA and the Ulsters was not completed until a decade later. What happened to the weapons in those 10 years is basically a strict policy of mutual cessation of hostilities. All weapons were stored in warehouses, a strict policy of no use, no production, no display of any weaponry. All of it is hidden away. And the weapons functioned as a card of leverage or an insurance card, a guarantee that the deal would be fulfilled. The bottom line of that Northern Ireland agreement was that decommissioning was not the prerequisite, the precondition to peace — it was the outcome of it.

And for Hamas and every other Palestinian faction in Cairo, they said, “We are willing to destroy all of this weaponry, throw it in the ocean, give it to Israel, give it to whoever, if we get a Palestinian state, if we get a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood.” That answer was slammed by Israel and by the U.S. as, quote, “maximalist,” “extremist,” “unrealistic,” “lunatic.” The “realistic” proposal that Israel is putting on the table is surrender, capitulate, become fully defenseless, weaponless, and entrust the very army that carried out a genocide against you to be merciful towards you once you are an easier target than you ever were before.

AMY GOODMAN: My last question to you, Muhammad, is about the Israeli government threatening to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, after the paper published a column by Nicholas Kristof headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” Kristof detailed what he described as a, quote, “pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women, and even children” carried out by soldiers, settlers, interrogators and prison guards. He also wrote about reports alleging dogs were used to sexually abuse Palestinian prisoners. Kristof interviewed Palestinian victims and cited other reports, including findings from the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed The New York Times, quote, “defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape,” unquote. The New York Times defended Kristof’s reporting and said Israel’s threat is, quote, “part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism.” I’m going to also ask the Israeli American historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, about this in our next segment. But, Muhammad Shehada, we’re going to end with you on this.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: So, basically, with the sexual assault on Palestinians, it goes back as far as 1948. You have admission on the record by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, of multiple rape incidents against Palestinians. You have Benny Morris, Israel’s top historian, that documented systematic rape of Palestinians in ’48. And ever since, incidents have been continuous.

I remember my first case documenting it, I think around 2015, of an Israeli rape, when I was working at a human rights organization, was a woman in Jerusalem called Hadeel Hashlamon. She was murdered by the IDF. They claimed that she was trying to carry out a stabbing attack, although there was no credible evidence of any knife or any weapon in the area. And they put her lifeless body in a jeep, stripped her bottom half and took pictures of it and circulated it on WhatsApp along with the caption, “She should have chosen better shavers,” with an ad for Gillette, the shavers. So, that was the first incident that I documented myself, about over a decade ago.

With the incidents that Kristof documented in the New York Times article, they were already documented in multiple reports by the United Nations, by Israel’s own top human rights watchdogs, like B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights. They were documented by other newspapers, like +972, The Guardian, Haaretz, the Israeli top newspaper. We saw it on camera, the rape incident that was documented by Israeli soldiers.

And we saw what happened after, that ministers, government leaders, members of Knesset, they stormed the military base in which five soldiers were held over raping a Palestinian on camera, and they tried to break those soldiers free. We saw then Israeli rabbis, television hosts hosting the rapists and blessing them and praising them as heroes. We saw Israeli public opinion polls that showed over 65% of Jewish Israelis expressed support for those five rapists and said they should not be criminally prosecuted.

We show all of this evidence. It’s a mountain of it. And Kristof, as soon as he put it in The New York Times, Israel became existentially threatened, because The New York Times is considered some sort of a bible for liberals, that once it’s there — it’s the newspaper of record — it’ll be spread and disseminated widely to an American audience. So we see, basically, an Israeli panic attack in return.

But the evidence, it’s beyond any doubt. It was admitted by Israeli leaders, soldiers. There was even a debate at the Knesset, in which an Israeli member of parliament, of the Israeli Knesset, that is from Netanyahu’s faction, is saying that he’s perfectly fine with raping Palestinians in prison. He brags about it. So, in the face of this consistent evidence, denying it is absolutely foolish.

The last point is about the allegation of rape by dogs. I’ve seen this insane Israeli talking point of denying the basic plausibility of such assault happening, which is, Amy, virtually and literally a denial of the Holocaust, because we know that Nazi commanders were using dogs to rape Jewish victims. We know that in Chile, they were also training dogs to rape victims, as well. So, we see Israel, that is more than willing to cast doubt on the Holocaust to whitewash its genocide in Gaza, rather than to admitting to their own mistake or promising even a sham investigation. It shows that they’re panicking absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, I want to thank you for being with us, writer and analyst from Gaza, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. We’ll link to your piece in +972 Magazine headlined “Gaza’s disarmament trap.”

Coming up, the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov. He has a new book. It’s called Israel: What Went Wrong? We’ll also speak to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Tel Aviv. Stay with us.