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Foreign Good Tuesday morning. I'm Ryan Grimm. This is the Drop site News live stream. Later in the program, I'm going to be joined by my colleague Sharif Abdel Caduce, who's going to break down an article he wrote yesterday on a new report by Forensic Architecture and Earshot and drop site about the Red Crescent massacre. That was almost, that was about 11 months ago. Today, in the most definitive way, it reconstructs this, this massacre. And we're going to go through some of those, those findings in a moment. I'll also be joined by my colleagues Maz Hussein and Jeremy Scahl who've been reporting on the the negotiations that are ongoing between Iran and the United States and in particular, messages that are Iranian officials are sending through the negotiators. And also now publicly signaling a quote, unbelievable, I believe was the phrase level of flexibility that would stun even the Obama era Iran nuclear deal negotiators. The attempt by the Iranians to avert the war that Trump seems intent on, on carrying out is, is reaching unprecedented levels. Tonight, coincidentally, is the State of the Union. Donald Trump will address that Address the nation. Before we get started, I just wanted to remind everybody we don't put anything behind a paywall. We rely on reader and viewer support. You can do that over@dropsitenews.com by becoming a paid subscriber. You can check ways to give for a variety of different ways to make a charitable contribution. Or we have now if you're watching this on YouTube, we have set up I guess what they call memberships so you can, you can become a member here. We haven't figured out exactly yet what kind of benefits you'll get from that. Mostly the benefit you get is kind of feeling good about support, supporting something that you want to exist. But we'll find, we'll find something once a month or something. We'll try to do some member only discussions. But we want to make sure that we abide by that principle that our journalism, you know, stays, stays free and available to everybody. So if you can become a member or a subscriber or a donor, please do that. However, it's easiest for you. And so let me, let me welcome here Maz and Jeremy to discuss, you know, here we are only a few hours away from Donald Trump addressing the, addressing the nation. If you know, there's, there remains this open question is, is the president going to launch what is effectively an unprovoked war? And Jeremy, I want to start with, before we get into your reporting in, in the article you guys wrote, you mentioned this utterly bizarre exchange that Steve Witkoff had on cable news where he said that the Iranians are now, I believe he said, weeks away from weapons grade enrichment capacity, which to me should be read as a direct slap in the face to his own friend and boss, Donald Trump, who has been telling us since June that the, the beautiful bombers and the handsome fighters launched this like in incredible attack that set back the Iranian nuclear program for generations. And, and here we are according to Witkoff months later and they're, they're right back to where, where they allegedly were right before June, which we heard, we heard leaked audio from Netanyahu. He's, he acknowledged before the attack that they were years away. So setting aside the reality of the situation, they can't seem to keep their, their lines straight here. Jeremy, what did you make of Woff's response and what was the White House's reaction when you put that to them?
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Well, I mean Ryan, there's, there's definitely major flashes or flashbacks to the lead up to the Iraq invasion of 2003. You know, recall that you had the, one of the most famous moments in that buildup was when Dick Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and spoke about a mushroom cloud scenario that Iran was, that Iraq was, you know, you know, imminently going to be able to weaponize weapons of mass destruction and that the United States would need to intervene to confront that and crush it. And in fact what, you know, Cheney then he references reporting in the New York Times that was done at the time by Judith Miller. And it turns out that it was the White House itself that had leaked this to Judith Miller. And then Cheney appears on Meet the Press and then says, oh, and even the New York Times is saying this. So they sort of created this self licking ice cream cone to bolster that live filled narrative. And if you look at a lot of the media reporting, in fact the other day there was just an astonishing piece of outrageous writing posing as journalism in the New York Times where they started to say, oh, there's a risk that if the United States attacks Iran, that the Iranians could activate their proxy networks in Europe to attack American targets. And they mentioned the idea that Iran has some relationship with Al Qaeda. You know, I mean, you could say a lot of things about Iran, you could say a lot of things about Al Qaeda, but one thing you can't say is that Iran and Al Qaeda are somehow allies that are at this moment plotting, you know, joint attacks or operations against the United States. You know, the New New York Post is doing outrageous kind of atrocity propaganda stories about digging, you know, things out of women's stomachs in prisons. And we're, we're just, we're seeing it all again. It's, we're seeing this propaganda narrative. And so Steve Wyckoff, without citing any current intelligence or anything, just kind of offhandedly says that the Iranians are probably a week away from being able to weaponize their enriched uranium. That flies in the face certainly of every major national intelligence estimate of the United States right up to the present moment. And it also flies in the face of what Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio all said in the aftermath of last June's 12 day bombing of Iran, which was targeting its enrichment facilities, targeting facilities the United States said formed the, the, the, the center of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. They called it a complete and total obliteration. And last night, so you know, Witkoff makes this comment on Sunday. Last night, Trump posts on truth social media yet another claim that he had wiped out their nuclear program. And he said it is a development no longer, but rather was blown to smithereens by our great B2 bombers. So we put this question to the White House and said what basis did Steve Witkoff have to make this claim? And he did that interview with Trump's daughter in law Lara on Fox News and they didn't respond to that. They gave us a statement responding to some of our other reporting saying Trump's preference is to make a deal. But if not, the Iranians are going to rue the day that they ever failed to make this deal with Donald Trump. And so in the bigger picture, Ryan, what we're seeing right now is even though the sort of liberal media in the United States is constantly clutching pearls about the grave dangers of Donald Trump, they are willingly participating in this process of serving as conveyor belts for the most odious lie filled narratives and propaganda that Trump is employing to move this potential war forward.
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C
Yeah, and Maz, can you talk for a second about that? And then I wanted to get into the reporting that you guys published yesterday evening. When it comes to Iran's nuclear program, I assume if they could weaponize their program within a week with like half of the United States military capacity floating offshore, they would just do so. Like what? So what do we know about Iran's capacity to defend itself at this moment?
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Well, you know, to Jeremy's point, it very much seems like the Trump administration is almost like a parody version of neoconservatism. It's all the Same scripts we've seen before, but in this, you know, far more transparent and far more, almost absurd, darkly absurd sort of way. So you see in this case of Steve Wyckoff and Jared Kushner negotiating on the nuclear affair with Iran. You should Compare this to 10 years ago when they were actually negotiated a deal with them, the JCPOA in 2015. It was a very long, drawn out process, highly technical. The intricate details of all these subjects took literally years to sort through. And they theoretically are going to just bang this out in a few weeks. Two New York real estate guys, Steve Witkoff doesn't seem to actually have a good grasp of the underlying subject matter. He, he used the term industrial grade enrichment. That's not actually the term. It would be actually weapons of great enrichment he's referring to. And in this case you have a couple things that happened. First, they bombed Fordo and Natanz. And as we know, from what we know, the damage is significant enough to stop, at least indefinitely, any enrichment of those sites. They may have smaller sites, but the issue is that the entire country right now is heavily surveilled aerial surveillance. We know there's deep infiltration in Iranian leadership and or at least government sectors. They have eyes on many of the activities. It'd be very difficult for them to make a very large move like that at this precise moment with so much attention on them and the US military completely surrounding them. So I think it's highly unlikely and you know, to actually become a nuclear weapons state, it's not just about doing one nuclear test. You have to reorganize an entire organizational bureaucracy around the subject. It's a very laborious political process as well too. It can't just be done overnight. And even if they were to do a test that wouldn't establish a nuclear deterrent, you'd have to actually weaponize them, do multiple tests, show that you can deliver them and so forth. So the idea there's an imminent threat within 10 days is just a complete narrative concoction. And again, it's like a parody of the Bush administration because they made these claims too about Iraq. But these are even more farcical claims because we can see their farcical nature right in front of us at the moment.
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C
And Jeremy, let me put your, this article that you and Maz wrote yesterday up on the, up on the screen here. So this is the headline, Iranian Officials to drop site Tehran is showing quote, unbelievable level of flexibility in talks to prevent U.S. war. And so you spoke to some Iranian officials and I'll just read from here. We have demonstrated an almost unbelievable level of flexibility on the enrichment issue itself, said the Iranian official, who requested anonymity. Iranian negotiators, he said, working in coordination with the Supreme National Security Council and empowered by the country's leadership, quote, decided to exercise maximum flexibility on the nuclear issue, but only on the strict condition that it would genuinely prevent the outbreak of war, unquote. So what, what, what did you hear from your sources and what was what, what can people glean from what they are putting on the table here?
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D
You know, I should say at the, at the onset, there's been a lot of speculation about what exactly the Iranians are, are going to put on the table with the Americans. There's supposed to be these talks scheduled in Geneva for Thursday involving Steve Witkoff and the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Arachi, but we, we haven't heard anything formal yet from the Iranians. There's discussion about putting offers of US Investment opportunities in the oil and gas sector in Iran on the table of the Iranians purchasing civilian aircraft from the United States. So economic incentives that I think the Iranians are calculating would be of interest to Trump. And of course, they're well aware that part of what Trump did when he went to the, to all these Arab countries in the Gulf was he was making deals for the United States, but also was setting up financial incentives for his own, you know, family network and his cronies. So I think the Iranians are also recognizing they're not just dealing with a President of the United States, but they're dealing with a kind of gangster, ish businessman. But then when the sort of rubber hits the road, there's the issue of enrichment. Now, none of the Iranian officials that Murtaza and I spoke to would get into specifics, but the way that they're talking and they're referencing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal indicates that they are putting something on the table that go, that extends substantially beyond what the Obama administration was able to get in 2015. We also spoke to Rob Malley, who was President Biden's senior envoy on Iran, but also was the kind of lead negotiator, Under Secretary of State John Kerry, that sealed the deal on that 2015 JCPOA. And Rob Malley was saying to us that in order for it to surpass Obama on the nuclear issue, it would have to be a substantial suspension of all enrichment, maybe indefinitely or. And this is where things get interesting, maybe for a defined period while there's negotiation on other issues. What do I mean by that? The Trump administration and Israel have said we want to go after Iran's ballistic missile capability. People should understand Iran has a pretty sophisticated capacity with its ballistic missile system that represents its most robust deterrence against Israel or against attacks by the United States. When the so called 12 Day War happened and the Iranians responded with their own missile strikes on Israel, they showed a capacity to defeat the Iron Dome missile system, missile defense system that the United States has provided to Israel. They showed a capacity to also penetrate US Systems in Gulf Arab countries as well that house large U.S. military bases. And the Iranians have said, we didn't even go full force on you and this time if you attack us, we're going to. So it's a major component of Iran's national defense strategy to have these ballistic missiles. What Trump administration people have been talking about is we want to have to discuss limiting the range of these missiles, reducing the stockpiles. They basically want to incapacitate parts of Iran's or eliminate Iran's long range missile system that would have a capability of striking Israel. The Iranians have said this is an absolute red line. But maybe there is some discussion there, maybe there is, you know, a potential discussion about Iran allowing much more robust independent inspectors in to look at both its nuclear and its ballistic. I'm not saying this is what sources are saying. I'm saying that this is what people involved with the US deals in the past have said would be appealing to the United States. And then there's the issue of Iran's support for regional resistance movements, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, its allies in what has been known as the Axis of resistance. The Iranians we talk to are not willing to go into detail about what could potentially happen in non nuclear discussions. But they have said that if there is a temporary deal reached that averts a war right now and that results in sanctions relief. This is the main priority of the Iranians, beyond preventing regional war, is that the economic sanctions are mercilessly punishing Iranian society primarily for harming civilians in Iran. And it was the impetus for the protests that we saw beginning in late December, early January. Iranians are suffering because the US quite openly claims this was the point, is trying to strangle the Iranian population into softening the conditions for the government so that it can be overthrown. That is the US Policy. So what the Iranians are saying, we're making these extraordinary offers. We haven't seen them yet. This is how they're characterizing it. On the nuclear enrichment issue, we, we want extraordinary offers about removing these sanctions. And if we reach an agreement here, we can move into technical discussions about other issues the United States is concerned with. So the Iranians recognize they're dealing and this is what they told Murtaza and I. They're dealing with an erratic US President. They're dealing with a transactional US President. And it's difficult to know when he's representing the United States and when he's representing his or his family or his cronies interests. But they feel that they are doing yeoman's work to try to thread the Trump needle. And you know, finally what I'll just say, Ryan, is as we move into these talks in Geneva, we and Trump is about to give a State of the Union address. We should never forget that the United States last June used the veneer of being in the midst of about to go into another round of negotiations to give cover for a blitzkrieg where they launched bombers from the United States from the region. Some of the heaviest bombing was not from aircraft carriers or launched from the region. It was launched from the United States did refueling missions, dropped massive bombardments on Iranian society. We can talk also just briefly. I want to say this. The big scandal right now regarding Iran in Washington is the reporting that came out over the past 24 hours or so about the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kaine. You know, Trump likes to say we call him Raisin Cain. General Kaine is the chair of the Joint Chiefs. He is the senior military official that would be the one to present military options to Donald Trump. And typically what the chairs of the Joint Chiefs do in these briefings is they don't say Mr. President, I think we should do this or I prefer this option. What General Kaine's job is, and this has been true under all presidents is is to say here's this scenario, here's this scenario, here's this scenario. Here are the assessments on what we think happens if we do option A versus option B versus option C. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Barack Ravid of Axios. There a slew of stories that got unleashed yesterday saying General Kaine has come out privately to Trump opposing military action. Cause there's been a discussion if Trump does a limited strike initially then tries to soften the Iranians, but but the threat is that they could come in weeks or months down the line and then do a regime change war. So what the reports were and it caused great panic kind of in the narrative factory at the White House was the top general is basically arguing against this. I don't have inside information on this. But I've studied this process very closely because of my work on dirty wars and JSOC and the CIA. My guess is that there's some misreporting happening here. I highly doubt that General Kaine has sat around saying to Trump, I don't think you should do military action. What I think is happening is that General Kaine is presenting options and he's instructing Trump on the limitations of US Force capacity in the region. He's instructing Trump on the seriousness of the Iranian ballistic missile system and the potential for high casualty episodes of American personnel or other assets important to America in the region. And this is a classic case of the media with whipping up this story. It's goading Trump. Trump then comes out and says, General Kaine is like the most pro war person you could possibly imagine. He's a war hero. He ran Operation Midnight Hammer and blah, blah. You know, Trump's going nuts about this. So it's like, you know, I'm sure that General Kaine said things to Trump that are sort of like, you know, sir, if we do this, you know, our assessment is we could potentially have Americans getting hit at this base, at this oil facility. Israel is going to get pummeled. Perhaps we have the specter of more casualties. So we have this playing out. And then we have the Iranians telling me and Maz, we think there's a little bit of hype going on. We're not saying they're not going to bomb us. We're aware that that's a very real possibility. But things behind the scenes have played out differently. And what they said is our sense was that the, that Witkoff and, and the American delegation was at times taken aback by what we were willing to put on the table. So we'll see.
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C
Yeah, if you read between the lines of some of the reporting on, you know, General Raisin Kane's briefings that he's been giving here, you, you, you do see what you're suggesting, which is that he has, and if you look at like the, the kind of response from his camp to the claims that he's against the strikes, they'll say, look, what, what he's, what he's doing is telling the President the costs and benefits of every, of every, you know, every option. And one of the costs of the most robust option, like the, the largest strike against Iran could very well be that Iran launches a, you know, massive region wide strike as they have claimed that they would, which could then, you know, hit American military bases and and, and also do damage to Israel. And it, and it is interesting that in Washington that is read and metabolized into the media as opposition to war, like just simply like laying out the actual honest consequences of war is assumed to be opposition to it. Because in our last, you know, many recent military adventures, but in particular, you know, the, the Venezuelan operation and the, and the bombing of Iran, there weren't any, there weren't any united, there weren't any American casualties. Plenty of people were killed from Venezuela, from Cuba, from Iran, but no Americans. And so there's this sense that war doesn't mean death when it comes to the United States. War doesn't mean that we take on damage, it means they take on damage and also that it ends when we want it to end. Venezuela ended by Trump going in and swooping him up and saying we're in charge now. And the 12 day war ended when President Trump said, okay, we're ending this now. Maz there are a number of Iranian officials who have talked about how they, they, they regret agreeing or they pushed against agreeing to an end to the 12 day war. So because they said, you know, if, if we're going, if we, if, if we don't take a major cost from Israel and the United States here, they're going to be back in a few months hitting us again. So kind of a two part question there, you know, how are those types of hardliners, you know, viewing this, this, this round, this time and what is, what is their capacity, do you suspect, to respond given the like, intense amount of American firepower that is surrounding the region?
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A
Well, there was a report in the Iranian press a few days ago and it reported that some senior officials near, or advisors near Ayatollah Khamenei told him that this is basically a 1981 scenario. And 1981 refers to the Iran Iraq War, which is a very gruesome war of attrition that stretched out for years and years. And I think the implication of that statement was to imply that this may be maybe entering a long war of attrition now with either the United States or Israel or other parties in the region potentially if the war does expand to regional war. I think that there is a major issue here, and you alluded to it, Ryan as well too, that there's a difference in political will in the two situation, two parties here. For Trump, all his military operations, he's actually announced many of them after the fact, after they're already successful. Done. He just announced it on Truth Social that so on such and such happened. So for him, it's really a file that he'd like to close and move on to other affairs. For the Iranians, the entire issue has now become completely existential. So they would fight and engage in a very long, painful war simply because it had to. And they've also had an experience doing this before this. You could even say that whatever horrible things are happening in Iran right now, it's not necessarily the worst things happen in Iran in the lifetime of people in the leadership or that they personally experience as well, too. So their entire, you know, framing of this issue and risk appetite and so forth is very different from the United States in this capacity because it's not really a war of choice for them. And secondly, there are reasons that in a long war of attrition, well, I say it this way, actually. Israel, and also to the extent the United States, their military posture is not geared for a war of attrition. It's geared for short, decisive wars, shock and awe, things like that. They don't have political will. But also the actual material constraints are very real. And there's one in particular, which is the missile interceptors. And this was coming up even during the 12 day war. The US and Israel expended incredible stockpiles of these very expensive interceptors to stop Iranian ballistic missiles. Without those interceptors, the actual impact of those missiles has been many, many magnitudes worse. There were many dozens of people killed in Israel. It could have been hundreds or thousands of people or even beyond that without those interceptors. And now, by estimates, they've used about 25% of all interceptors that the US had in stockpiles, have been used up just in the course of defending Israel during the 12 Day War and also stopping Ansar Allah attacks in the region as well, too. Those interceptors are supposed to defend the entire planet. So theoretically, if the US Felt that maybe you'd have to deter China and Taiwan a year from now or three years from now or so forth, the replenishment rate of these weapons is very, very slow. It takes years to replenish them. And they've used up years of stockpiles now. So if they were to fight a war with Iran, they could theoretically burn through their entire stockpile. And then the Iranian ballistic missiles, the ones that continued firing, would hit unimpeded, any target they wanted in the region, or they use them all up, and they succeeded that. But then they would have no capacity to fight another war like this for many, many years, even if one does come up. So it's a very, very serious material issue. And what General Kane may have said, we don't know the exact details, but he's raising what's before reported. The point is actually very logical because there isn't really the capacity to fight a very, very long war. And if the Trump administration thinks that they're going to have a short, decisive conflict, the Iranians also get a vote in that situation. Iran is a very large country. You can't even destroy all the launchers. It's a country the size of Western Europe, very mountainous. These launchers can be hidden in caves and so forth and, you know, on regular highways and things like that. It's a very, very difficult task. And I think that it's absolutely correct that if the war started, it would have very unpredictable results, particularly if it kept dragging on and on without conclusion.
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D
I think also, Ryan, that there's. We had sources, we've done a lot of reporting at Dropsite in the past weeks about the US Side of this and what we've heard from sources who are talking to people inside of the White House or the Pentagon or intelligence. There is a degree to which it seems like certain political players in the Trump administration have gotten extraordinarily high off their own supply. And what I mean by that is, you know, they had this operation in Venezuela where they were, you know, the structure of it was Trump made a series of threats toward Maduro, President Nicolas Maduro. He said, listen, I'm going to take you out if you don't do these things. Maduro is dancing on stage and kind of not, you know, the whole thing was a bit cartoonishly cinematic for Trump's narrative. And then, bam. The United States positions the USS Gerald Ford off the coast. They do a special operations/ CIA operation that clearly involved heavy penetration into the upper echelons of Maduro's inner circle. They snatch Nicolas Maduro and his wife and bring him back to the United States and then they turn around and, and they quite clearly have successfully co opted in key ways the Venezuelan leadership to the point where you have U.S. oil executives doing joint appearances inside of Venezuela. So, you know, this is sort of, you know, Marco Rubio's big thing in Latin America. Oh, Venezuela. We're taking out the commies in Venezuela. We're going to move on to Cuba next. Iran is a very different, is a very different scenario. And, you know, if the United States political figures think that they have an option like Venezuela on the table, they're sadly mistaken. You know, Iran is also not a, the type of hyper centralized governing structure that existed, for instance, in Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. That was a military operation under the Obama administration, passionately supported by Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, where they used US And NATO air power to target the military capacity, which all which was not advanced of Muammar Gaddafi's military and government forces. They weakened quite quickly the capacity of the state to defend itself. And then they had various armed elements, some of which were directly supported by the CIA or other Western powers, moving to kind of create chaos and ultimately to extrajudicially murder the Muammar Gaddafi. If they think they're going to have some scenario like that involving Ayatollah Khamenei or other Iranian leaders, this is pure fantasy. It's not to say that the United States couldn't severely, after prolonged bombing, massively destroy the upper echelons of Iran's military and security power. It could, but at great cost, almost certainly including large numbers of American and allied deaths in the Iranian response. And even if they manage to create such chaos that it's unclear who's in charge of Iran, there's great questions about who would actually step in there. You know, Iranian society is a very diverse, pluralistic society. It is not just a matter of you have monarchists on the one side and you have Khamenei and the Islamic Revolution on the other side. And Iran is a very diverse country. It's also been building its institutions since 1979 and building huge civilian infrastructure, massive technological investments, highly educated society. So it's. If you try to apply these Marco Rubio fantasy scenarios to Iran, you're in big trouble. And I think that part of what happens in the White House is that even though General Kaine has allowed himself to be used by Trump for many political purposes, which is really a kind of dangerous line for military officials to cross, my sense is that Trump's gotten a pretty good dose of realism presented to him by certain elements of the military and intelligence. And the battle now is are the kind of neocon chicken hawks who desperately want Trump to be whacking regimes around the world. In their view, if they're going to somehow override what some of these military people are saying about the actual consequences if the US does this. Because what I've heard from military people is there's going to be large scale American casualties if the US Wants to do a prolonged war. And if they actually, if the Iranian government actually feels that it is existentially threatened, those missiles that they have can do very serious damage. Very, very serious damage. And I Think every American watching this should be aware of that. What they are discussing right now is a scenario that could result in large numbers of Americans being killed because you, you have nut cases like Rubio and Hegseth drinking buddy as Secretary of Defense who think it's fun to play war.
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C
I want to bring Shri Bhab in here before we move on to the forensic architecture thing because Sharif, a very odd moment kind of interjected itself into the run up to this, this war when the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee taunted Tucker Carlson online and said I some you want to talk to a Christian in Israel, you know, why don't you come, why don't you come interview me? And so Tucker Carlson said, okay, we'll arrange this. We'll, we'll do this. So they set it up. They do this. They do do their interview. Three hour interview. It posted last, last Friday. And in the interview, Tucker Carlson asks him, all right, you have said that the, the land of Israel is, is given to the Jewish people by Genesis. You're, you are a, was he a pastor? I don't know the exact language you use to describe whatever his ministerial position is within the Christian church, but he is in or, you know, he's, this is a serious theologian. How could be so. So he asks him to elaborate on that and points out to him that according to the Bible it says that, you know, from the Euphrates to the Nile would be covered by his definition of what land should be, you know, ordained to Israel. And he, and he finishes by saying, yeah, you know what? They can, they can have, they can take it all. That is a like the kind of thing we've heard from kind of evangelical lunatics over the decades. But to hear somebody who is the ambassador, United States ambassador to Israel, struck people in the region as rather jarring you. And you've now had a number of denunciations from regional partners. You know, Egypt in particular is on the verge of striking some sort of normalization with, with Iran. And so hearing, hearing from the American ambassador to Israel that in fact large portions of Egypt and Jordan and Syria and Lebanon, Iraq kind of all actually properly belong to Israel has led them to start some public criticism of the United States and some suggestion that they're not going to participate in these strikes. How much of this is serious? We've heard so much talk from these countries in this region and very, very little of it is backed by, by serious action. What, what is your sense of how this is? Because there's been some reporting that this has actually caught, thrown an actual wrench into the planning of this operation. What, what is, what is your sense of the reality versus just like the, you know, the typical angry chatter that you hear?
- [36:28]
B
Well, I mean, first of all, you know, Huckabee is more royal than the king in many ways. I mean, he's saying things that even Zionist Israelis in Israel don't say. You know, this idea of the Euphrates to the Nile, which is much of the Middle east, you know, they often talk of Greater Israel, which is encompassing the west bank and Gaza, which is historic Palestine basically. So, you know, reaction to his, his comments, I think there's often a lot of, a lot of bluster and you know, there's this like massive joint statement by all these countries together condemning it. But we see these similar kinds of condemnations which are, you know, very, you know, in their thinking, bold condemnations. They're just words. We heard it again just a couple of weeks ago when the Israeli cabinet voted to designate certain parts of the west bank as open for legal Israeli construction, in fact, basically legally annexing parts of the west bank instead of the de facto annexation which has already occurred. And we saw a massive joint statement by many countries in the region against this. This rarely affects policy. At the same time, we're seeing the United Arab Emirates potentially be a massive funder of the so called reconstruction of Gaza, but you know, helping to build these so called planned communities which are designed to contain and corral Palestinians. The UAE has massive amounts of defense cooperation, security cooperation with Israel. Egypt's relationship with Israel is a complicated one. You know, this is a country that went to war with Israel three times over the 20th century and was the main kind of opponent of Israel under Gamal Abdel Nasser. That all changed with Camp David and Egypt being brought into and being the most important ally in the region after Israel, to the United States. And it's the second largest recipient of US military aid after Israel in the world. So it's in this position where Egypt in particular doesn't want to lose influence over its border with Gaza, but also will never do something in direct contravention of the United States. So but I think they're playing this, this delicate balance where they do not want to see a massive war with Iran that's not going to benefit anyone, that's not going to benefit them in the region at all. So I think Egypt, probably the gentlest, is putting pressure. But we saw Saudi Arabia and even the UAE saying that they won't, you know, allow the US to use airspace or its territories for any attacks. I mean, you know, Germany and Mertaza have covered this more. But you know, this thing with Huckabee, you know, it's a lot of kind of turning the water. I don't think it's actually affecting any geopolitics actually and in terms of policy. But, but it does, it does kind of like, I think froth the water a little bit when, when you have these statements by the US Ambassador, it allows these countries. But I think, you know, these statements are more catering to their populations than to actually affecting policy.
- [40:03]
D
That, that's, that's 100% true. I think Sharif, because, you know, many of the, the condemnations of Huckabee in some ways were more intense and full throated the, than what any of these countries have actually said about Israel. And so, you know, it is definitely for, you know, in many ways it's for domestic consumption. I don't think there's any question about that. But one other little factual nugget, Ryan, that I wanted to throw in here, you alluded to it earlier, is that Iran and Egypt for the first time since 1979 are in the process and it's very far along. It's basically a done deal of restoring formal diplomatic relations. Even under Mohamed Morsi, who won the first democratic elections in Egypt and came out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Even under Mohamed Morsi, there was not that formal resumption of full diplomatic relations, even though there was travel and it was heading in that direction. What we were told by Iranian sources is quite interesting. They said that even prior to the June 12day war, Iranian DIPLOMAT but then it escalated after, it intensified after it that Iranian diplomats had embarked on a diplomatic campaign among the Arab Muslim world to repair relations between Iran and key Arab countries that the Iranians had assessed were second only to Israel, playing a sort of malign role in pressuring Trump to attack Iran or to take a very hostile stance toward Iran. We're talking about Saudi Arabia, we're talking about the United Arab Emirates to a degree, we're talking about Qatar to a degree, we're talking about Egypt. So the Iranians engaged in quiet diplomacy at times, public diplomacy at others. And what the Iranian officials told us was that part of what we're seeing is the fruits of that labor with these Arab countries very publicly, including countries like Saudi Arabia, which was very hostile to Iran and wanted Iran brought down in the first Trump term, coming out and very full throatedly saying we don't want a war. Now this is complicated. They in Some ways they're supporting the United States. They say, oh, we're not going to let our airspace or our territory be used. They're allowing other infrastructure to be used. In the case of countries like Jordan, they may well or almost certainly will participate in quote, unquote, defending Israel if the Iranians retaliate against a U.S. attack. But the Iranians also told us that they issued warnings to those countries about continuing to gauge in that kind of behavior. It wasn't meant as a threat, but just saying we're at a point here where you can have good relations with Iran. Let's take that opportunity. So the Iranians are saying this is not just by chance that this happened, that this is something we've been working on because we understood that particularly with Trump in power and his relationship with Qatar, with the uae, with Saudi Arabia on a business level and a political level, we need to also play that game. And they're saying that, that, that paid off for them and that, you know, one of the crown jewels of it is this restoration of full diplomatic relations with Egypt.
- [43:11]
C
Right. All right. Well, Jeremy and Maz, I'll let you guys go. I appreciate you you being here. We'll move on to the, the report that Sharif did with Forensic Architecture and, and Earshot. But thanks, thanks for your reporting. Highly Recommend people go dropsitenews.com and, you know, read the, read the piece that, that they did. Unusual level of insight into the thinking of the Iranian negotiators as, as they try to prevent, present some maximum level of flexibility to try to avert this war. We'll, we'll find out probably in the next days or weeks whether or not that could be possible. But Sharif yesterday at drop site in collaboration with Forensic Architecture and, and earshot and let me put this up, let me put this up on the screen. Oh, there we go. You reported on this new new report done by these organizations that is our most advanced look yet at the, that the, at the massacre, the, the infamous Red Crescent massacre of March 23 of last year, in which apparently more than 900 bullets were fired at these medical workers. And it feels that that was done in about the first five minutes. The, the shooting lasted upwards of two hours. And some of the final shots, according to this report, which is based on not just, you know, forensic and audio and visual analysis, but also on two eyewitness accounts were done at execution range of just a, just a meter at the very end. So first of all, tell, can you tell us a little bit how, how this report came about and you know, what, what are the, what are the top lines?
- [45:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, this is a months long investigation, nearly a year into what was described by the Red Crescent as one of the darkest moments of the war in Gaza. It took place in southern Gaza in the governorate of Rafah, in an area called the Talal Sultan. And it happened, if you remember, on March 19, 2025. The Israeli military resumed its scorched earth bombing campaign after abandoning the ceasefire. The agreement that was signed in January 2025, you know, on the 19th, it killed over 400 Palestinians in a matter of hours. A large number of them children. And this was kind of their, their first day of the resumption of the war. This massacre happened four days later. It was March 23, 2025. And essentially in a nutshell, the Israeli military ambushed first Red Crescent ambulance. And then they ambushed a five vehicle rescue convoy of aid workers who had come to try and find their colleagues in the first ambulance. So in total, they killed 15 Palestinian aid workers. They buried their bodies in a mass grave. They flattened the vehicles and buried them in the sand. Now this was a very big story at the time and the Israeli military was forced to change its, its account of what happened several times after the discovery of the mass grave and the emergence of these video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. And under a lot of pressure, the Israeli military conducted an internal inquiry though, as they always do. You know, they didn't recommend any criminal convictions or action against the army units responsible for this incident. But what has been happening over the past maybe seven months is that the research group's forensic architecture and ear shot have been investigating these attacks. So let me explain first how they did what they did and then we can go through what they found. So they've been going through. There is video recordings taken from the phone of one of the aid workers discovered in the mass grave. And then there are two audio recordings by phone calls from the aid workers to the Red Crescent dispatch that was recorded at the Red Crescent dispatch. And this is all happening during the massacre. They also conducted. There's two aid workers who survived this massacre and they conducted interviews with them using what's called situated testimony, interview methods. So what forensic architecture in particular does they take? Videos, open source images, satellite imagery, you know, social media posts, other materials, and they digitally reconstruct the scene, they make this 3D model and then what they do, they were on basically a video, that 3D model.
- [48:03]
C
Rebecca, if you can find that.
- [48:04]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [48:05]
B
I mean, this is an example that we're seeing now it's their recreation of the scene. And what they would do is basically get on a conference call, a video conference call with one of the aid workers, sit with him. And using this kind of immersive spatial model, the aid worker can kind of go through it. They're talking to him. Where were you exactly? Where was the soldier? And he can amend it and so forth. And by doing this, they can very accurately reconstruct the scene and the events surrounding the massacre and recreate it kind of minute by minute. But also there's these two audio recordings. And what Earshot did this is what Earshot specializes in, was analyze these using kind of these incredible techniques, one of which is called echolocation. So echolocation is this process of basically, you know, when you fire a gun, for example, the sound travels and then it'll echo. It'll hit a surface and then echo back.
- [49:09]
C
Okay, you can roll that one.
- [49:10]
A
Yeah.
- [49:13]
B
So, yeah. So what happens basically is that in the run up to the massacre, you know, over the months of genocide that the Israeli military was doing, it had destroyed and cleared so many buildings in this area of Tallulah Sultan where the massacre was taking place, that there was hardly any structures, any standing structures. And it was because of this destruction, actually it allowed Earshot to determine very precisely the positions and the movements of the Israeli soldiers as they're shooting. Because if they had multiple buildings around, the echoes would have been just too confusing. You can't make sense of it. But there was only like two standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves. And so they were able to use echolocation, which in another circumstance, like in the middle of a city, they wouldn't have been able to, to very accurately pinpoint where the soldiers were shooting from. And this audio analysis corroborated the testimony of the two survivors.
- [50:15]
C
Yeah. And what are we looking at here?
- [50:19]
B
So this is showing. Well, I can explain. So basically, the soldiers, at some point they started shooting from an elevated sandbank about 38 to 48 meters away. And then they started very slowly walking towards the ambulances until they're in between the ambulances and shooting the workers at point blank range. And this is showing kind of their progression going forward through it. I mean, it's. I encourage people to. We link to it to the reports on, in the article and they can like very, very kind of in minute detail explain how they came to these findings. But, you know, and then we can tell the story of what happened, basically. And it's, and it's, it's really horrific. I mean, there's so many horrific incidents, but this is one that was, that was documented in these ways so that we can recreate it. And there are two survivors. So, but basically, you know, at around 4:00am that morning, the Red Crescent dispatches two ambulances from two different areas because there was an airstrike in this part of Rafah called Hashishin. So the first ambulance gets there, it has its emergency lights on. These soldiers, we don't have video of this, but this is all from testimony. Soldiers just open fire in the ambulance. The two Red Crescent workers, the driver and the guy in the front passenger seat are killed. And the ambulance kind of veers off the road, stops near an electricity pole. The third Red Crescent worker, he's in the back, he dives to the floor and survives. So then the Israeli soldiers come to the ambulance, open it, drag him out, beat him with their rifles and take him to a nearby pit. And then they take him further away to that elevated, to that elevated sandbank area, like up to 50 meters away from where the ambulance was. And there's these other soldiers there. Then half an hour later, so now they've lost dispatch, has lost contact with this first ambulance. So they tell the second ambulance, which had finished its mission, you know, at that airstrike, it said, go find the first ambulance. We don't know where it is. So they're driving, it's dark, they're trying to find it, they run into another ambulance. And so they end up with then a civil defense ambulance and a fire truck. So then you have this five vehicle rescue convoy going to the scene. Okay, and this is like around 5am all of them are very clearly marked emergency vehicles. They have their lights on. And one of the Red Crescent workers starts filming on his phone. This is like key footage. So the convoy gets to the site of the first ambulance. They all stop. As soon as they get out of their cars, out of the vehicles, the Israeli military starts opening fire. This is 5:09am and we know this minute by minute. So the Israeli soldiers basically start firing from 38 to 48 meters away on this elevated sandbank. And from the reconstruction of the model, we know they would have had an uninterrupted view of the convoy and it would have been clearly visible. And you can, in the model, you can see what they kind of would have seen.
- [53:41]
C
And the Israelis initially said that they were moving suspiciously. A phrase.
- [53:46]
B
Well, they initially said, the very first thing they said was that they didn't have their lights on.
- [53:50]
C
Right.
- [53:50]
B
And then we have this Video discovered after the mass grave where you see them driving up with the lights on. So then they said, oh, we were mistaken. But they said, yes, they were moving suspiciously and stopping suspiciously, whatever that means. So then they just open fire and it's a barrage of gunfire. Okay, four minutes, four minutes of just gunshots, like 800 gunshots from this elevated sandbank. Then they start walking very slowly down. And this is again with the echolocation, we know this. And then they're just kind of these, the aid workers are either crouching or lying on the floor and they're walking in between the ambulances and shooting them, executing them at point blank range. We know that at least eight bullets were fired from kind of within meters away. And then one of the workers, Ashraf Abu Lebda, he's calling, he's one of the people who made the call to dispatch. And so this is where we hear some of these gunshots. And this is where we, where the echolocation comes from. These eight kind of point blank range shots. And one of them was fired just from maybe 1 meter, as close as 1 meter away from Ashraf Abu Libda. And it's the last time we hear his voice. And it suggests that this is the gunshot that killed him. And then, you know, the, the, there's a UN vehicle that, that comes, you know, maybe two hours after the initial attack that they, they fire on and kill the driver and Anwara staffer. And then a minibus comes, a UN minibus and it's like 200 meters away. They fire on that and then there's additional firing. And then finally it's over. And the Israeli military takes all the bodies, buries them in a mass grave, flattens the vehicles, tries to bury them as well, and then lies about it. And then one of the survivors, Muntah Abed, he was released. He was made to. The Israeli military took him and made him trying to like man a checkpoint with them and talk to civilians who were passing by. And then the other survivor, Asad Nasra, was basically held in Israeli custody. He was held in a torture camp called Sidi T Min, a notorious one in the Israeli desert. And he was released 37 days later. And that's what happens.
- [56:14]
C
I remember. Tell me if what your recollection is of this as well. I mean, when this first happened, I believe that the journalist Hind hin Caudry was the first to kind of start reporting about what had happened. And just based on her sourcing with the Red Crescent or with Honora. And I remember thinking could this possibly be a deliberate ambush and massacre of unarmed civilian medical workers? That, and then, and then an effort to bury them, to hide the evidence. We've seen so many, and we continue to see so many killings of, of aid workers, of journalists and the direct targeting of so many. But for more than a dozen aid workers on all of their vehicles to be relentlessly strafed deliberately, like with, and you, you correct me if I'm wrong, friends, guardians have found zero shots returned.
- [57:21]
B
Yeah, yeah. There was no crossfire in the area. All the bullets are from them. No one's firing at them.
- [57:26]
C
So there's, and, and like you said, there's no buildings anywhere nearby. There's no even possible way that you could even fabricate any sense of, of danger here. This is an area completely controlled by Israel Israeli government. Like there's no, I mean they're claiming
- [57:47]
B
the danger came from the ambulances. That's what they say in their inquiry. They, they thought the ambulances looked suspicious. They can't even claim that it's coming from anywhere else, which is, you know, patently ridiculous. Yeah, they're, and, and they're executing them, they're executing doctors, emergency workers as relying on the floor and shooting them and then burying them in a mass grave. And they, they justified the mass grave burial in their inquiry saying, you know, we have to get the bodies out the way. Because what they did actually after is that they continued to clear that area, put up earth berms, then create something called the Morag Corridor. This is very, with this, the site of this massacre became the site of a ghf, the Gaza humanitarian, that one of the first so called aid distribution sites of the GHF was on top of where these people were killed. Can you believe that, that they built it there. And this is the site where you know, this, the GHF took over so called aid distribution in May of 2025 and until October till the ceasefire, 2,600, over 2,600 Palestinians starving Palestinians were killed trying to get food under this system. Some of the aid sites and some at UN convoys, but an aid system overseen by the ghf. This is where it is. This is the site where the so called yellow line passes through. Now the yellow line is where Israeli soldiers withdrew to as part of the ceasefire agreement and control everything east of the yellow line. This is where like new, New Rafah is going to, supposedly what they call New Rafah is going to be built. And as Jonathan Whittall, who is also a contributor to Drop Site was The head of OCHA in Palestine and was at the scene when they discovered the mass grave. He said, you know, this new Rafah, if it's built here, will be a testament to impunity because no one, as usual, no one has been held to account. We asked the Israeli military specific questions about the executions, about the number of bullets fired, all of this. They just pointed to that April 20th investigation, that inquiry that, that called the, that said the execution, saying that Israeli soldiers executed Palestinians or aid workers was blood libel against the idf. That's what their official inquiry said. Even though all the evidence points towards that.
- [60:23]
A
Right.
- [60:23]
C
And we're now 34 months into this genocide and it, it is difficult to retain the capacity to be shocked. But I'm curious, you know, you covered this originally, but then diving deep into the kind of re. Reconstruction of this crime against humanity, how does this fit into the, the crimes that unfolded there over the past now, almost three years or almost two and a half years. Is it a difference in degree or difference in kind? It, it just, it's so like striking and staggering to, like you said, you know, walk up after firing at these medical workers from, you know, 30, 40 meters away to walk up to their wounded bodies and execute them point blank. It's, it's so far beyond the pale of what we understand to be humanity. Yet here it is. And nobody was punished beyond one brigade commander maybe getting. He was dismissed in his responsibilities or something.
- [61:47]
B
Yeah, he was dismissed. And another received a letter of reprimand. Unfortunately, in the context of, of genocide, this has happened a lot. There have been executions. You know, I, I documented one with my colleagues in the documentary we did at Fault Lines about the summary execution of all the men in. And this happened a lot. They would separate the men and the women to enter this apartment and just execute all the men. You know, there's, there's different things under international law where there's special protected status. I mean, you're not supposed to kill any civilians, but particularly healthcare workers who are there to protect life. Attacking them deliberately kind of triggers certain things in the, in the Rome Convention or the Rome Statute.
- [62:33]
C
So even amid battle, yes, you're not
- [62:38]
B
allowed to target journalists, aid workers, but these are the people that they're killing. You know, there's been airstrikes where they've killed 100 people in one airstrike. So it's hard to, it's hard to single this out. But as a concentrated massacre that was deliberate and slow, that I think this was the worst killing of the Red. The Red Crescent, which is under the Red Cross also maybe in history or, you know, in generations at least, so it stands out like that. But also the burial of them in a mass grave and then their vehicles too. There's something, there's something about that as well. And you know, I really, the article that we published is really, it's just a testament to forensic architecture and earshot and on their incredible work on this and to the incredible testimony of these two survivors. When this first happened, we did interview Munter Abed and we published an article and then the videos came out and the audio came out and kind of everyone started reporting on it. And you see what a difference it makes when, you know, the New York Times was the first one to report on the video actually, and this triggered an Israeli response and they had to admit that the sirens are sorry, the lights were on. And they eventually did this inquiry. But then ultimately people look away, the inquiry, no one's held criminally accountable. And then that's it. But I would just finally say that like forensic architecture and Earshot also put together kind of a 50 minute video which I encourage everyone to watch, which takes you through what I described and how they found it. But it also includes portions of those situated testimony methods with the two survivors. And one of them is very difficult to watch. He's describing, he's trying to place himself near an ambulance and then he's describing basically his colleague dying on top of him and right next to him being shot. And he's obviously very emotional when he's talking about it, but it's, it, it's a powerful video because it really goes through this massacre.
- [64:59]
C
Yeah, The New York Times is an interesting case here because I remember at the time, in the initial days after the massacre or maybe week, they, they had, they mentioned it in one article. The article was about something else entirely. And then at the bottom of the article it said something like, oh, in other news, you know, there are reports of a massacre of aid workers. But, you know, Israeli authorities say that the vehicles were, you know, moving, moving suspiciously or whatever that new, you know, lexicological contribution that they produced and gifted to the English language was. And then it was. And that was despite the fact that there were, you know, eyewitness testimonies about what had happened. It was only after they got the video and then their, their forensic team did impressive work like their, their video and their technical team does, I think the kind of the best work at the, at the news organization because it's based on facts, it's based on video. It's based on satellite imagery, it's based on, you know, nothing more than just laying out what actually happened. Not to get off, off track, but if you remember when there was that, those, those hooligans in whatever European city, you know, were, were fighting with each other and the New York Times, you know, called it like a pogrom. Yeah, that's right. But if you watched the New York Times forensic analysis of it, they got it completely right because they based it on video and another testimony.
- [66:44]
B
So I mean, testimony is the thing is testimony are facts. Testimony is.
- [66:49]
C
Exactly.
- [66:50]
A
Yes.
- [66:51]
B
As journalists who respond, you know, you have to double source it and you can't just go with what one person says, but you even one person says it's testimony.
- [66:59]
C
A named eyewitness.
- [67:01]
B
Yes. And they disqualify Palestinian eyewitness testimony as somehow not worthy of being credible for some reason. And you're right, they do do very important and good work when there is video evidence and they can do this kind of forensic analysis. But those same techniques need to be applied or the same standards need to be applied to eyewitnesses.
- [67:24]
C
Right? Yeah. Well, Sharif, thanks so much for, you know, sharing this. You know, very much appreciated. As, as I mentioned at the top of the program, if you can, you know, support the work that we're doing, you can do that either@dropsitenews.com and find ways to give or upgrade your subscription. We also now have turned on, or if you're watching here over on YouTube, we've turned on kind of the membership situation. We don't know much about how that works, but it's a way for you to, you know, basically support our work. And, and we're trying to make sure that we can always keep everything, you know, free and open to the public. This is not the kind of work that should be paywalled and kept, kept from people who can't afford to pay for it. So if you can afford, you know, please do contribute by either becoming a member here over@dropsitenews.com so on behalf of all of my colleagues here at Dropsite, thank you so much for joining me today.