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The RSF's Systematic Mass Killings in El-Fasher & the Latest on Hamas and Khaled Meshaal
01:38:14
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Sam. Ra.
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All right. Good morning and thanks everybody for joining us. I'm Ryan Grimm. I'm here with my drop site colleague Sharif Abdel Caduce. Sharif, thanks for being here this morning.
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C
It's good to be here.
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B
And so later in the program, Sharif is going to talk with our job site colleague Jeremy Scahill about his, about his new piece in drop site. We're going to start though with an exploration of the civilian toll that is being taken in Sudan. There's a new report out today from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and its executive director Nathaniel Raymond, who will be joining us. Because there's so little access for journalists in, in the region, one of the ways to try to get a sense of the scale of the, the catastrophic suffering underway there is through forensic analysis and, and the use of a satellite imagery as well. The report is, is utterly chilling and I don't, and we're going to go through it in some, in some detail with Nathaniel. And while we're doing that, I don't want to lose, lose sight of what it means either on the sense of scale, but also in particular for the people who are, are the victims of this. There's Sharif, there's one piece that, that I, that I that was particularly profound in, in the report. To me, one of the pieces of evidence that they cite as indicative of a, a slaughter of absolutely enormous proportions is this and I'll just read it real quickly. They say quote, pattern of civilian life in Al Fasher seems to have all but ended following RSF's total control of Al Fasher. The end of civilian pattern of life is evidenced by abnormal vegetation growth in markets, no visible civilian activity at water points, absence of crowds of people in the street, and no evidence of civilian transport including donkey carts and non RSF consistent vehicles. In other words, like a literal ghost town. Sharif, can you. So the RSF is the UAE backed force that rampaging through Sudan. Can you give us a little bit of historical context before Nathaniel joins us? That that led us to where we are now.
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C
Yeah. You know, there was another report that came out today from the International Rescue Committee. It's an annual report they put out called their emergency Watch List. And topping the list for the third year in a row is Sudan. Sudan has become by far the world's largest humanitarian crisis. Some of the site of some of the world's worst atrocities, mass killings, mass rape. But I think it's important to understand Sudan's conflict is often described as a civil war, but there's no civilian feature to this war. It's not like different kind of groups which had popular support, took up arms against each other. This is a conflict that has pitted the Sudanese armed forces against the RSF or the Rapid Support Forces. And it's really a battle between the old guard, which is namely the Sudanese army, the Sudanese armed forces, and associated parties and interests it represents, and this sort of new militia that amassed over the years a huge amount of influence, power and foreign support outside the official branches of the state. Now, these two military groups had an alliance of sorts after Sudan had a popular revolution in 2019, which overthrew Omar Bashir, who was president of sudan for almost 30 years. And Sudan had this kind of like Tahrir style revolution where he was deposed after months of protest. After he was deposed, the RSF and the Sudanese army entered into what was supposed to be a transitional power sharing agreement with civilians in order to pave the way for civilian rule. And this was short lived. The RSF and the saf, the Sudanese army eventually turned on the civilians and staged a coup against a transitional prime minister or president. And then they turned on each other in April of 2023. And there have been various countries supporting each side, but perhaps no foreign countries as deeply implicated as the United Arab Emirates, the uae, which is funding and arming the rsf. And the scale and the speed of the destruction of the entire country in this conflict is difficult to fathom. There are over 33 million people in need of humanitarian aid. Over 19 million people are facing crisis levels of food insecurity. Over 200,000 are at catastrophic levels, which is essentially famine. And there's over 7 million people displaced. And this happened in a matter of just a couple of years. And what we've seen since late October, as you mentioned, was an even darker and more violent turn when RSF fighters overran the last army held in Darfur, and particularly in the city of Aleshar, which is the capital of North Darfur. And we've seen reports of just mass killings of civilians and sexual violence. And estimates put the numbers at something like 60,000 people killed in a very short span of time. So today this report by Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab analyzed satellite imagery, and some of it is basically seeing there's so much killing that the blood is visible from space. And that is analyzing what's happening. But we're fortunate to have the executive director with us today, Nathaniel Raymond, to talk about this report. Nathaniel, are you there? Can you first of all describe what the main findings of this report and how you went about documenting what's happening in El Fisher and surrounding area.
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The main finding of the report is that we identified 150 piles of human remains throughout the city in the first week. And this is really important to understand. I'm glad you asked about methodology because this is the first time a civilian organization with high resolution satellite imagery has ever attempted an analysis of basically a Rwanda style mass killing in near real time. And so we had to basically develop a method. And the method was tracking these initial body piles from the first week of killing, the first few days between October 26th and in the beginning of November, and then using those as basically our study population of objects to watch how they changed over time. And they changed in multiple ways. Some disappeared, some were added to, some were subtracted from, and then many ended up being burned and in some cases buried. And so we, as you're seeing there in the appendix as you scroll through, we've put out basically the locations of those body piles. And this is very important because what we're doing here is we're basically tagging the RSF's pattern of killing and allowing this to be available to the International Criminal Court, to the International Committee, the Red Cross, to have basically a forensic record of where the bodies were. Now if you can go up and look at the map, I want to really pull it back up. Yeah, well, I want to talk about the map because the map through geospatial disposition, you're going to see a bunch of dots. It tells two clear stories, which are the two critical stories your viewers need to know here. And it's right there. Yeah, this is an example. So here, this is, which was the last civilian refuge inside Al Fasher. And it basically became a area where RSF went house to house. And we could see the discoloration that Ryan and Sharif that you mentioned about discoloration on the ground that was really in this area. And so this is a large civilian neighborhood where people had, as the city was falling basically over a period of weeks and months, fell back into this area.
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And so, and if people can't, if people can't read this on their, let's say they're watching on their phones. The, the, the triangle, the maroon triangle is, is labeled as object cluster with ground discoloration. And so that's, and then the black triangle is burning.
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Exactly. And so Daraja Ula becomes basically the locust point of killing activities and body disposal activities. If you see the inset map, you can see that square within the inset. If we can zoom in on that or go up to the full Al Fasher map, the second story emerges. And so story one is the slaughtering of civilians in Daraja Ula. But if we look at the. If we go up further, further in the report, you'll see in the first map of the whole city with the big dots right there in the inset. We can just use the inset. If you look at that inset, you see the dots to the northwest into that line, which is the berm, the earthen wall RSF built to surround the city. The second story is the trail of bodies of people who were killed trying to flee the city. Now, our humanitarian colleagues in Tooele, when they saw, and this for me, is the most horrific part of the story, when they saw the survivors come into Tooeleh, it was women with unaccompanied minor children. And they all told the same story, whether it was in Tooele or Al Daba or Gurney. The story they told is that the men were separated at the Bermuda. And they asked the rsf, where are the men and boys going? And they said, they'll join you shortly. Then they heard gunshots. So what we've done here is, along with other OSINT outfits, we've geolocated videos with Abu Lulu of killings by the berm that are consistent with the clusters of piles of bodies we see. And yeah, this is perfect up there on the north side by that wall here. Yes, exactly. That is a gate to exit the earthen wall. And we see that become a focus point of killing, consistent with survivor testimony, consistent with the videos of RSF themselves. And then we later see burning there. And so basically, this map tells us the two stories. They trapped the civilians that couldn't get out in the center of the city in the last refuge, they slaughtered them over a period of weeks and then destroyed remains in many cases. And then those who tried to escape were killed en route and killed at the gate, particularly men and boys.
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Yeah.
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C
Do you have any estimate of the number of people who have been killed since Alfesher has taken over?
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I'm going to give you some dirty numbers. I have a colleague on our team, Dr. Danny Poole, has a great line. All models are useful. All models are wrong. Okay. And so I'm going to give you a model here. The United nations estimate estimate is that about 250 to 260,000 people were still in the city when it fell to rsf. So if we put that up on our board here, we then add the iom, International Organization for Migration Displacement Tracking Matrix number that we subtract 100,000 made it out of the box. Now we can talk about that number, but let's take 100,000 off. That gives us 150. Then we have the Sudan Tribune reporting that 50,000 are in detention. Okay, that number I believe is not accurate, but let's use it for a second. That means we have 100,000 people left. Okay. Then we're hearing estimates from the ground that are range from 40 to 60k still alive in the city to a max of 100. Basically, if you saw the Guardian article where it said 60,000 could have been killed, that was based on our. That was me. I was the source of that number in a briefing to Parliament. And basically I said on the public numbers available right now, we're working with a mean estimate of 60k missing or dead. And that's where that number came from. Frankly, what you see here in this report, and the important one, sentence takeaway, the sheer scale of area with bodies against time, against removal activity means we're talking tens of thousands. And, and then that's your X axis against the Y axis, which Ryan mentioned, is the collapse of pattern of life. We don't see an alternative hypothesis. We don't see an area where tens of thousands of people are sheltering. And so we're left with grass growing in the city. The only logical conclusion based on this data is they have killed an enormous amount of people.
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B
And when you say 50,000 maybe in detention, that does seem like an implausible figure. Like just logistically speaking, you couldn't hide.
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You couldn't hide 50,000 people from very high resolution satellite imagery without there being a logistical signature such as open air prisons, etc. We've been monitoring Alfonso now 18 months. We know every building in the city and especially every building over three stories. There aren't many. So the question is, where do they put them?
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So. And they couldn't have been moved at great distance either, could they?
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That's a possibility. Now things. So we are hearing reports that there are some other prison locations that could be in play outside of the city. And also there's reports that they could have been moving them to Zamzam and which is the former IDP camp that fell in April. So it's really important that people understand there were more people in Zamzam at the time Zamzam fell than Al Fasher. And in April, that was about half a million people in full in the whole Al Fasher metropolitan area. Some estimates are as high as 1.5 million before the siege. So you're talking almost three quarters the population of Gaza in this network of camps in the Al Fasher City area.
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Can you, your report finds four primary patterns of mass killing. Can you just go through what you found? What are these four patterns?
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Yeah, basically we have the pattern of people fleeing, we have the pattern of people being being killed in door to door. We have the pattern of people being killed on the street. And then we also have these detention centers, such as the former Children's hospital in the east, where people, those detention centers existed before the fall. And we basically have a situation there where you basically have large set piece killings. And we watched the detention center where there was a line of people on day one. By day two, those people were gone. And there were piles consistent with human remains at 1.3 to 2 meters in length with the same coloration. And so basically those are the four modalities running, killed in their homes, killed on the street and then killed in custody.
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And have you seen video that you've been able to geolocate that confirms some level of all four of those modalities?
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I would say probably one to three out of four. Yeah. We don't have the house to house on video, but we have the street killings, the escape killings. And then obviously what happened at University Hospital with the striking video moving down that very visible staircase where they were killing inside University Hospital. There was a lot of confusion on that where people were confusing that with Saudi Hospital. When you're in a situation where you don't know which hospital massacre people are talking about because there's so many, that's a sign that things aren't going well.
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B
You, you alluded to this not being the first city that was sacked and then saw mass killings. What have, what have we seen previously in, in recent months?
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A
Well, let's go back even further to 2023. Let's start at the beginning, which is Jana. And so everything we're seeing in Al Fasher from, to use military term, TTP tactics, techniques and procedure of the perpetrator. In this case, basically the Off Broadway premiere of the Al Fasher killings was El Janeira. And we, we were working for the U.S. state Department at that time. And we, we did not have the imagery that we had here because it was cloud cover based on the season, it was the start of the rains. And so we were cloud dodging, which is the worst place to be. And so we really, the snapshots we were getting at moments with El Janina showed the same picture here on a smaller scale, which were piles of bodies that we could navigate off. And it was at that point that we began to take a step forward and start to get predictive and say, okay, if they're doing this killing with the Masuli, where are they going? And then we saw Zelenji, Kass, Artemata, Nyala, and we began to realize they were taking the crossroads in the major garrison cities to build a net around Al Fasher. And so we had an emergency warning go up within the US Government to US National Intelligence Council, National Security Council, basically saying, you have almost 2 million people fish in a barrel, sitting in a potential kill box at Al Fasher, with which is the last major gathering of the Fur, the Zagawa and the Berti people. If they're going to slaughter the Maas elite, if they're going to kill the Governor Kamis on camera, they're going to come for Al Fasher. And so we basically predicted that by the beginning of the dry season of 2023 to its end in spring of 2024, Al Fasher would be put under siege and attacked. Unfortunately, that was correct. And the broader story here is that we warned the UN Security Council. We had an emergency meeting with them in July, and basically I literally said to them, this part I haven't said publicly. I literally said to the representatives of the Security Council, I am begging you to. And I say this having been with UN Mission South Sudan and peacekeeping, pull off the emergency Rapid Reaction Brigade from UNMISS Double S in the south, get a Chapter six mandate, get those guys up there, whether they're Gurkhas, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis. Get a force around Al Fasher to create a reconnaissance picket. You got to do it now. You got about three to six months to get a force in position, and that didn't happen. And here we are.
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C
So Basically, with the RSF's takeover of Al Fashr, they've consolidated their control over the west of the country, kind of leaving Sudan sort of split into two, with the rest of the country under the control of the saf, the Sudanese Armed forces. And it doesn't seem like either party has the capacity to decisively overwhelm the other across the entire country. So there's obviously that tactical portion you talked about about taking control of a certain area. But. And as you mentioned also, the systematic massacre of the African population in Darfur is reopening the. The wounds of the genocide of the early 2000s, which was led by the Janjaweed, which the RSF grew out of. But do you have an analysis also about the level of support of the RSF from the United Arab Emirates. How crucial is it in. In. In this conflict for the rsf?
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Decisive. Like, you know, there's so much online pushback you get when you speak honestly about the role of the uae. But I need to just talk in pure military terms. Okay? We put all politics aside. The level of COVID support from the UAE to RSF is the single most decisive assistance operation for a paramilitary force since CIA support for the Mujahideen Operation Cyclone through the CIA in Afghanistan. Hands down in terms of volume of munitions, complexity of the logistics network. And we've been tracking the logistics network for months now. If you've read Robbie Gramer's incredible reporting of the Wall street journal from October 27, and this should have been like headline news around the world if we lived in a just world, that he had leaked INR Intelligence Research Bureau out of State and Defense Intelligence Agency reporting that in one case concurred our finding at Yale Humanitarian Research lab on the Ch95 fixed wing drones, saying that, yes, they are there and they're flying out of Nyala, they're flying over Al Fasher. And they basically, that was the moment that the RSF got an air force, okay? And 20 years ago, the John DeWeed had rusty Enfield rifles, AK47s, maybe a Sterling machine gun, and camels, pickup trucks and horses. They now have four classes of UAVs, including. The most important thing we talk about is their suicide drone capability, which is their Delta wing, what appears to be what's called Sunflower. We think they're Sunflower drones from Norinco corporations of China. It means that we're in a situation now where the RSF can hit over 1,300 square kilometers in range. They can disrupt civilian aviation. We've mapped the pneumatic slingshot launchers that they have at Nyala. And this is a stunning change in capability, which is that SAF has lost air dominance and air superiority. I was doing a podcast with Sudanese where I said that in the level of pushback I got on them losing their air superiority, which had been SAF's really killer app for about 20, 30 years of war. Their MIGs, their Fantans, their Sequoia Grand Strike Fighters. Now that doesn't matter because you've got. RSF has three advantages. One, they have more personnel than saf. SAF is running out of men in terms of force to space ratio. RSF has an advantage right now. They pay their men in loot. The more they're looting in Al Fasher. And now El Obaid after Baba Noosa, they are going to only grow in number. The Missouriya and other tribes of Beni Habas will join them to get their payment in lieu. So that's thing one, thing two is they have aaa, they have anti aircraft artillery in terms of manpads, in terms of the Pantsir S. One, they can shoot down SAF planes. The third thing they have now is this intelligence sensor reconnaissance capability with these Ch95s where they're able also to do electronic jamming. And you need to see that in the first 24 hours on Al Fasher they knocked out Starlink, they knocked out all civilian comms. And that CH95 is an Eland JMR capability. Okay. And so that's disastrous because now they've shown in Al Fasher that they can really use this UAV advantage to watch, to hunt, to kill.
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C
And Ryan or maybe Nathaniel, what's the response of Washington been? Obviously Washington and the Trump administration in particular, close ally of the uae. We saw sanctions recently, but they were targeting Colombian groups or individuals, one of whom is based in the uae. But the Biden administration did issue some sanctions against companies in the uae. But you know there is leverage by the United States over this conflict through the the uae. Have you seen anything, you know, by this administration about it?
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A
I. May I speak in. Politically the. The Trump administration response has been like putting a hello Kitty band aid on a sucking chest wound. The Quad process really needs to get attention from journalists more than it has led by.
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C
Can you explain what the Quad process is?
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A
The Quad is just the current name of the multilateral negotiations for an end to the war. When Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale we were working with the State Department. We were supporting the first iteration of what would later become the Quad which was called Jetta 1. We supported Jetta 1 and Jetta 2 process, providing basically monitoring of ceasefire conditions as part of the quote Jeddah declaration negotiate between Saudi Arabia, United States with RSF and saf. And since then there's been multiple processes. Another one's called alps. But we've ended up with the Quad which includes UAE as part of the negotiation group with the Americans. Now the, the issue here is that you, you need to understand RSF uses negotiation and uses pledge of humanitarian ceasefire every time it is either initiating a massacre or wants to complete it. Jana was done during Jeta 1, we watched it. You had Nyala and Zelensi during Jeddah 2 and now you have Al Fasher happened in the middle of the Quad. That's not a coincidence. RSF uses this negotiation process as cover for action to get military positioning. Usually when they're conducting an atrocity and it's worked and they basically have played the international community as a bunch of dupes because the international community doesn't want to do. The only thing that's going to slow this down is basically the end of duty free shopping in Terminal 1 in Dubai. And what I mean by that is until there is economic pain that Mansoor and Mohammed bin Zayed feel in terms of international tourists either will not or cannot go to Dubai. This is not going to end. The.
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It's complicated by President Trump's financial links to put it in the most generalized terms with the uae like the Trump Organization. Trump himself has billions of dollars worth of business that, and I'm calling it business generously, like it's, it's more, it's more properly understood as bribery as the UAE giving money to the Kushners to and the Trump Organization and to Trump efforts that are not, you know, the most, you know, well maximized for profit but are maximized for, for political advantage. So I mean, have you, have you seen that dynamic come into play that the, that the US does have enormous amounts of leverage that it could use when it comes to the uae, but they are cross leveraged by our own president's complicity with the UAE through its transactional relationship?
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A
I'm going to say something that's going to sound strangely controversial and this comes from our experience being in the Biden era effort around the negotiations. There is almost no daylight between the Biden administration policy and the Trump administration policy. The only difference is that the Trump administration policy is occurring within the clear context of multiple violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. We put that aside, okay? We put that the Trump family relationship with Gulf states, particularly Ben Zayed. We put that aside and just look at policy on paper. One could even make the argument that the Trump administration, with Boulos's current efforts, the negotiation reported today with Berhan on Saff's side is frankly a more robust type of diplomatic engagement than what happened under Biden. We need to put the Biden administration in context. And you know, we lived this firsthand and that's why we left. We rejected a State Department contract to continue with the State Department and we went independent because we thought the danger to Al Fasher in The spring of 2024 required us to walk away from the US government service, which broke our heart, but fundamentally was the moral thing to do because we needed to camp out on Al Fasher. The reason we needed to do that is because in the fall of 2024, the Biden administration in the Oval Office shook hands with Mohammed bin Zayed and signed a major defense partnership, what's known as an mdp. So you have NATO allies, you have the alliance with Korea and Japan. Outside of that, the highest level of military alliance of the United States is an mdp. There's only two countries that have an mdp, the UAE and India. And the MDP for UAE was signed in the Oval Office. And so we were screaming bloody murder, literally screaming bloody murder by the summer of 23, saying to Blinken level, you need to have a genocide determination. Now, okay, just on what happened on the Mosuli. The genocide determination didn't come until January 2025 under Biden, in the last 48 to 72 hours of Blinken being in office on the seventh floor, Foggy Bottom. And so you need to put in context that the Biden administration prioritized the UAE security relationship over the civilian protection urgency of stopping a genocide. That's the fact, and I can dance around it, but that's what happened.
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B
What was the Biden administration response at the Blinken level or below? What was their defense of this?
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A
You know, it was. You know, and it's the same. The defense of it is what is now rippling through British politics. Okay. With the aftermath. The Guardian story about the two whistleblowers within fcdo, British Foreign Ministry, the British in the American response was the same, which was prioritizing a negotiated end to the war, seeing SAF and RSF as morally and militarily equivalent. And so to do that, to maintain that illusion that that was the case, really required downgrading what was happening in Darfur, downgrading the evidence of what was happening in Darfur. And so the critical moment for us was in the summer of 23, after we had the Janae massacre. We were seeing through NASA satellites this blooming thermal signal to the north of Elginana towards a larger community called Serba. And what was happening was Arsenal, okay? There were no SAF forces there. Those were entirely mossily rural farming communities. And we could see through a NASA sensor they were on fire. And so we started to do technical term, a tip and cue play where we would detect a thermal bloom. And then we would take a picture of it with a higher resolution satellite. And what we saw was what was called selection, which is someone had walked with a torch Tucal to Tuchel, so hut to hut, burning these communities, in one case, we could see the civilian population in Seriba being surrounded and basically.
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B
Burning with people in them.
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A
Oh yeah, yeah. In the ground reports that we were getting is that basically RSF had trapped them and then was lighting their homes on fire around them. And the signal we saw was consistent with that. And so at that point we, you know, broke glass, pulled the fire alarm within the government and said, guys, you have, they're using the fight with SAF as cover for action to attack places where there are no staff. And, and so that, that did not work with what the diplomatic plan was in Washington and London.
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C
So what do you think is coming next? So we've seen this, you know, systematic massacre in El Fisher and surrounding areas. What's coming next? Because it doesn't seem like this is being reined in at all.
- [36:41]
A
Quite the opposite. Like 2026 is going to be the bloodiest year yet. And without outside force intervention against the rsf, here's what's going to happen. So, you know, call me Nostradamus, but I'm putting, you know, my, I'm staking it right now, which is El Obaid is started to be bombarded. Kadougli, there's already attacks happening. What's different here is SPLA North American under General Abdelaziz El Hilu is coming into the fight now on the side of rsf. And so you're going to see a situation where we can divide what's going to happen next into the part which is going to be different than what we've seen before and the part that's going to be the same. The part that's different is the ethnic makeup in West Kordofan, North Kordofan is not the same as Al Fasher. And in the case of Kadoukli, you have Nuba people who ally with SPLA north. And so you're going to have a situation where there will not be hopefully whole scale massacres of civilians because you have a fighting force with the RSF that is allied with those local people. So that's a difference. What's going to be the same is they're using starvation tactics. They are using UAV based bombardment and heavy artillery bombardment. And here's the military goal of RSF is that they are trying to basically take El Obeid, Kadougli and Dilling to put them in position to attempt an offensive against Khartoum and Omdurman by probably the next dry season after this one. So the fall of 2026 into 2027, they're going to be projecting again to try to retake Khartoum and Omdurman. And so this. You have to understand that if they take those three cities, SAF is basically backed into a corner. And it's. It's where we're headed. There does not seem to be SAF capability to stop RSF's march in the court of funds.
- [38:53]
B
And that's millions of people in that. How many millions of people in that net?
- [38:59]
A
Tens. Like, you know, we're talking millions to, you know, a large third of the population of Sudan.
- [39:11]
C
Well, Nathaniel Raymond, thank you very much for all your work and for this report. We're going to link to it on our website. The executive director of Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab. We're going to continue.
- [39:26]
A
Can I thank you guys for a second? I want to thank drop site news for you guys have paid attention to Sudan in a way that is a model for the rest of the media community. You guys are reporting it as the story that deserves to be reported on. That really matters for me, for our team and for Sudanese. So I got to say thank you.
- [39:48]
B
I did want to ask you, before you go, the last question. What's it been like for your team to see this slaughter coming and, and then to know it's coming and then to have watched it happen and now to know that it appears to be only accelerating? Like, how do you.
- [40:09]
A
Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that. We, we said in, in July 2023, we said, when Al Fajr falls, there will be no rescue. We will have to watch the city get slaughtered. And I want people to get into a mental position where we're ready for that. And the team has. Now, just to put it in context, this team has done a report every nine days for 18 months. There was a period where we were doing a mass casualty incident the lead up to the siege every 36 hours for the better part of over 70 days. And so they're shot, but they've held the watch. I mean, it's been like the watching the OSINT and satellite imagery analysis equivalent of the Battle of Britain. It's three and a half times they've sat a siege, three and a half times the battle of Stalingrad and three quarters the siege of Leningrad, and they have not broken. Okay. So for me, on one hand, I'm incredibly proud of these people, many of whom are young men and women who have comported themselves with the highest of honor. On the other side, I'm heartbroken that we didn't have a different result, but we knew there never would be. And now these people are going to carry that sense they did everything they can and it wasn't enough for the rest of their lives. Yeah.
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B
There's no words for it. Thank you. To pass on our. Our gratitude to your team for what they're doing and trying to do.
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A
I will. Thank you.
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C
Thank you. Nathaniel and Ryan, I know you have to jump off, so we're gonna actually bring in our colleague Jeremy Scahill, who is just back from Qatar where he conducted a number of.
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B
Windows. Yeah.
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C
Probably the most recognizable figure in Hamas who's still alive. Sierra, thank you. Khaled Machal, who is the founder of Hamas and led the group for a long time. Jeremy, can you first talk about the context of where you met Khaled Mashal in Doha, the Doha Forum. Forum, and give us some background on. On who he is and his significance in the movement.
- [42:46]
D
Yeah, I mean, Sharif, before. Before I do that. Just while. While we're talking right now, there's. There's some interesting developments underway in Qatar itself. You know, of course, this is the headquarters of U. S. Central Command. And. And also Qatar was bombed by Israel on September 9 when the Israelis tried to kill the Hamas senior leadership and its negotiating delegation while they were reviewing a proposal for a ceasefire that had been delivered through mediators from Donald Trump himself. And we've reported extensively on that. But what's happening right now is that dozens of countries have sent either military attaches or political representatives from Europe, from the Middle east, from. From around the Islamic world and elsewhere to a meeting that's being convened by the United States. And that's because the Trump administration is focused right now in the context of Gaza on trying to say that they're going to move into phase two of the Trump plan. Phase one, as Trump's people are calling it, although the Palestinians only agreed to. To an initial framework about a ceasefire and exchange of captives. Frame one was about exchanging the Israeli captives in Gaza for 2000 or so Palestinians who are being held by Israel, and then an additional number of bodies of Palestinians who were killed or died in Israeli prisons or jails or custody in exchange for Israeli captives whose bodies were being held inside of Gaza, some of whom were killed by Israel's own bomb. So the Palestinian resistance only agreed to terms related to a ceasefire. And so called phase two is about everything else in Trump's plan, this kind of overarching colonialist agenda. And the Palestinian position has been that Hamas and Islamic Jihad don't have a mandate to negotiate. These bigger questions that cut to the heart of the future of a Palestinian state or what that state might look like, or the connection, keeping a connection between the territories of Gaza and the occupied west bank in Jerusalem. But nonetheless, Trump is saying, we're moving forward with phase two. And they keep falsely claiming that the Palestinians agreed to everything in Trump's plan, which, again, I emphasize they didn't. But what's happening right now in Qatar is that the US Is scrambling to try to get any country to agree to deploy troops to as part of what the Trump plan refers to as an international stabilization force. Now, Trump and his UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz, have said that the first mission of this international stabilization force is to disarm the Palestinian resistance. And major Islamic countries, Arab countries, who Trump had sort of said at the beginning were going to be the ones that deploy in Gaza to do this, have said, we're not going to go in with that mission. In fact, when I was in Doha attending the Doha Forum, there was an interesting event where the foreign minister of Egypt and the foreign minister of Turkey, two of the most important players in the reaching of this agreement between the Palestinians and Israel, where the foreign ministers of both Egypt and Turkey said quite clearly that the issue of disarmament needs to be approached in a realistic way. And they pretty clearly indicated that neither country, Turkey nor Egypt, is interested in deploying forces that are going to have anything to do with fighting Palestinian resistance fighters, not to mention disarming them. So, you know, Israel's position on this has been, good luck, try to get a force to come in there and disarm the Palestinians. You know, Netanyahu is saying quite openly, when all that fails, Israel is going to relaunch an intense military operation and we're going to disarm the Palestinians. Now, it's important to remember they've been committing a genocide for more than two years, and no Palestinians have raised a white flag. The Palestinian resistance has not surrendered its weapons. The Palestinians have not capitulated. In fact, the Palestinians have refused to do that. Even the fighters who are trapped in tunnels in Rafah, the Israelis are trying to set conditions for not murdering them that have to do what they need to strip naked. They have to come out, they have to surrender to the Israelis. Those fighters who have been cut off and have no communication with the command authority of the Palestinian resistance are individually refusing to do that. So what is happening right now as you and I are talking in Qatar is that all of these nations are meeting and the US Is basically threatening them or cajoling them or trying to negotiate with them. Because there's different things happening with different countries saying some of you need to start deploying troops. In fact, Barack Ravid of Axios, one of the most connected journalists to both Israel and the Trump administration, reported over the weekend that there was a meeting last week in Tel Aviv with European Union officials and the United States in Israel, during which US Officials told the Europeans that if you don't deploy troops as part of this force, then you can't complain when we allow the Israelis to remain entrenched inside of Gaza. So they have a problem right now. Israel also is trying to block Turkey from being part of any deployment inside of Gaza. And so the issue right now is if the Trump administration is going to find itself in a position where it has no takers, no country willing to deploy forces with a mission to disarm the Palestinians. And they're listening to Qatar and Egypt and Turkey, and even the countries that Trump said we're going to deploy, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, they now are saying, in fact, sort of publicly, we also don't want to be a part of disarming the Palestinian resistance. So either the US Is going to have to find some country that it can blackmail or bribe or whatever into doing it, or they're going to have to listen to what Egypt and Turkey in particular are saying, because they would be the two central figures from the Islamic world that would potentially deploy forces. Egypt's foreign minister, citing the pervasive ceasefire violations by Israel and the constant attacks against Palestinians every day, this kind of low boil continuation of the genocide, said it's urgent that we deploy it international force, but not to disarm the Palestinians, but to stand between the Israeli occupation forces and their violations of the ceasefire and the broader Palestinian population. So we'll see what happens with, with these developments.
- [49:41]
C
Well, I mean, can I gave you that context because to remind people also when you talk about disarmament, this is not a conventional army that is going to, you know, give up tanks and heavy armor and weaponry. They're fighting with makeshift weapons and munitions. And as in one of, you know, your previous pieces where you spoke with a lot of Hamas officials, I forgot who said it, but you know, this is basically weapons of willpower. When you're talking about disarmament, you're talking about trying to, about surrender essentially, because it's not like they're going to give up these weapons that, that have any kind of decisive advantage over the Israeli military. It's, it's, it's more about giving up fighting.
- [50:25]
D
Yeah, exactly. And the, the, the official who, who said that they were weapons of willpower was from Palestinian Islamic jihad. This was Dr. Muhammad Al Hindi, one of the founders of Islamic Jihad. And you know, of course they are, they were the smaller partner with Hamas in the operation Tufan Al Aqsa Al Aqsa flood on, on October 7th. And what Muhammad Al Hindi said, and I've heard this again, you know, our colleague Jawah Ahmed and I met with a number of senior Hamas officials on this trip in Doha. We saw some interviews we did on the record, others we were getting a sense of things. You know, when you talk to people off the record, you. And this is true in journalism across the board, you know, people speak in a more free manner. And so some of the interviews we did on the record, and we're going to be publishing those interviews this week, we started with Khaled Mashal and we can talk about that in a moment. But we also met with other officials, including people that have been involved directly with the negotiations. But the general sense that you have when you speak to people from the Palestinian resistance and from Hamas is that they understand that the issue of arms is about surrender. And, you know, people will talk quite openly about what these weapons look like. We were told that there has been an almost total shutdown of the domestic manufacture in Gaza during the genocide of most of the weaponry. Yes, they're, they are capturing Israeli ordinance. They continue to manufacture some ammunition, some improvised explosive devices, but in general, the larger production that they were doing, and it was all, it was domestic production. They emphatically deny that there's any significant smuggling of weapons going on. But what you're talking about is small arms. Even if you look at the events of October 7, the most decisive weapon that was used by the Palestinians was ingenuity, because that was a small arms fire operation that was the product of very intelligent use of open source intelligence and of planning and of timing. It was not about tanks, it was not about air power. And that remains the case. The most central weapon that the Palestinians have always had has been their determination and their refusal to surrender the cause. So Netanyahu was unable and Israel was unable to defeat the Palestinians militarily. And so what they're trying to do is use the international community to hand Israel a victory of the Palestinians being crushed that they can't achieve on the battlefield. And that quite frankly, Palestinians were telling Jawah and I they're not going to achieve it, even if they do try to impose a foreign force. Khaled Mashal, whom Israel has tried to kill before we could talk about that story was saying that whether there's a Hamas or not is irrelevant when you look at Palestinian history, that there are always going to be Palestinians who refused to wave the white flag. And he also said, why would we trade one foreign occupier, Israel, for another, an international force? So from the Palestinian perspective, if you want to talk about it on a technical level, whether it's Osama Hamdan or Bassem Naim or Khalil Al Haya, the political leader of Hamas in Gaza, or Khalid Mashal, the political leaders, leader externally of Hamas, the head of their international bureau, all of them are saying, we're willing to have an honest technical negotiation about what is the concern about the weapons. And if the concern about the weapons, which are small arms and a massively depleted collection of small arms, not to mention a almost entirely depleted supply of rockets that could fire into Israel, we'll have that discussion. And so what they're saying is, and again, I think it's really important to emphasize this, they're saying we will accept a Palestinian police force that is nonpartisan, that is deployed in the streets of Gaza in the context of Trump's plan, which calls for a technocratic committee of Palestinians to take over the governing authority. Yes, there's questions about who's actually in charge of that committee. They don't want, you know, foreign guardianship or trusteeship. But let's say that there's some resolution to that. What they're saying, the Palestinian resistance is saying is we will give you a guarantee that exists under threat of Hamas being accused of breaking the ceasefire, that not a single weapon of the resistance will appear on the streets, that anyone wielding a weapon that is not authorized by this police force to have it can be arrested for a crime. They're saying that we will give you our guarantee. And what, and what is the collateral on that guarantee? It's a resumption of a war with an endorsement from Arab and Islamic countries and a UN Security Council resolution. So what they're saying is, let's talk technically and remove this from Israel's filter of everything. What is the issue about weapons? You're concerned that there's weapons that are going to be used to attack Israel. We're willing to sign an internationally overseen Hudna long term truce of three years, of five years, of seven years under threat of a war resuming if they violate it. We're willing to store the weapons and to agree that the sovereign authority in Gaza is that police force. That's what they're putting on the table. If the actual goal of Trump or whoever wants to say this is we don't want any attacks emanating from Gaza toward Israel, what the Palestinians have laid out is a technical plan for how to achieve that without inflaming a 77 plus year situation by Israel trying to win a victory that it failed to win on the battlefield. Ceasefires are not signed to then allow a continued killing of the combatants who signed the agreement. And what Israel is doing right now is they're continuing to kill not only Palestinian civilians, which is primarily who they're killing right now, but they are targeting Qassam fighters, they are targeting the leadership of the Qassam Brigades. In fact, there were reports that there was a major sort of argument that took place between Trump and Netanyahu because of the killing of one of the top commanders of the Qassan Brigades in the last week. And I think people need to understand this. It is not a legitimate response to Israel killing Palestinian resistance fighters to say, well, they were Hamas or they were Qassam. The ceasefire was signed with Hamas. And so what's happening now is that the Palestinians are showing tremendous restraint. They are not returning fire against the Israelis, they are not engaged in attacks against the Israelis. They seem willing to make an actual deal. But there are bottom lines. When Khalid Mashal, you know, Khalid Mashal is a very interesting figure. Ten years in the decade before Hamas was formed in 1987, Khalid Mashal, whose family was expelled in 1967 from Palestine, spent much of his life in exile. He was a student in Kuwait. And he was part of a group of individuals who were discussing the formation of a new national liberation force that was Islamic in its identity. And those discussions and meetings that Mashaal and others were part of ultimately crystallized in the formation of what was called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its acronym in Arabic, Hamas. And so Masha's from the very beginning was part of Hamas. He rose kind of through the ranks. Early on, was a member of the political Bureau. And in 1996, he is elected head of Hamas's political bureau. And for all practical purposes was its international leader, recognized by much of the world. And in 2004, when Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was assassinated by Israel, Mashal very clearly then was viewed as the leader of Hamas. And his credibility was elevated significantly in the 1990s, a year after he became the head of the political bureau when Israel. This was a year into Benjamin Netanyahu's first run at being prime minister. Netanyahu had been Elected prime minister in 96. And in 1997, Netanyahu orders Mossad to assassinate Khaled Mashal in Amman, Jordan. And they send two Mossad agents posing as Canadian tourists. And Mashal was with his children in the car and his bodyguards. And he gets out of a vehicle on the streets of Amman, and these two guys approach him, one of whom had what appeared to be a cast on his arm.
- [59:42]
A
And.
- [59:42]
D
And they came up next to Mashal and they sprayed a poison into his ear. And Mashal, at the time, he thought that they were guys that were gonna try to shoot him or something. So he didn't understand what had happened. He felt some kind of a shock to his system and then realized he hadn't been shot. And these guys start running, and one of Mashal's bodyguards starts chasing them and eventually catches those two guys with the help of some plainclothes Jordanian police officers. But Michal then quickly becomes severely ill and is hospitalized, and they realize he's been poisoned. King Hussein of Jordan. This is a true story, by the way. The King Hussein of Jordan then is briefed on all of this, and he tells the. He tells Netanyahu, if you do not dispatch the Mossad to bring an antidote for Khaled Mashal for this poisoning, we're going to put those Israeli spies on trial and they may be executed. And we're also going to withdraw from the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. And what ends up happening is that Netanyahu has the head of Mossad get on an airplane, he flies to Amman, they administer the antidote to Khalid Mashal, and he's resurrected. And that sort of placed him in a period of mythical importance because of this well publicized international incident in which the Mossad tried to kill him. And then there was a brinksmanship that took place. And then he's resurrected and he becomes, you know, I think, an extremely well known figure internationally. And he was the large, largely the political architect of Hamas then in those ensuing years. And one of the key people that was the strategic planner of Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, in which they won not just Gaza, but all of Palestine. And then Ismail Haniyeh became the prime minister. And then there was a power struggle that took place between Fatah, the ruling party of Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas. And that's when you had this split authority take place where Abbas consolidated Fatah's control of the parts of the west bank they're allowed to control nominally. And then Hamas became the governing authority for the past two decades in, in Gaza and, but then in, in 2017, Khaled Mashal one of his last public act as the head of Hamas's political bureau was to preside over the public unveiling of a political manifesto from Hamas that addressed questions that the international community had been asking and, and that had been debated within the movement. And, and what was most relevant to the kind of international discourse is that Hamas put on record in this document from May of 2017 that if it was the democratic will of the Palestinian people to establish a Palestinian state along the borders of June 4, 1967, just prior to the Arab Israeli war, when Israel's massive land grabs intensified and they, they took huge territory that Hamas would go along with the will of the Palestinian people. They also put statements in rejecting antisemitism and saying that it was a European phenomenon that then resulted in the holocaust of World War II. And they adopted sharper language defining Hamas's role as a national liberation force. So Mashal then leaves as head of the political bureau and the political orientation of Hamas shifted in a sense more toward Yahya Sinwar, who became the head of Hamas in Gaza, and Ismail Khaniyeh, who had been elected the prime minister and was the prominent political leader of the movement and the head of the government for many years. And when the genocide began after October 7, Khaled Mashal was not among the most prominent Hamas officials speaking about it. He very seldom gave public speeches. It wasn't that he disappeared, but you didn't hear all that much from him. But then when the September 9th assassination attempt took place in Qatar, you know, just couple months ago, the Israeli media was filled with reports that Mashal had been killed. And there were people online celebrating it. You know, there's, there's a very, a really big obsession, you know, with Israelis and Khaled Mashal. And then Mashal starts to once again give major speeches and Netanyahu mentions him by name. And last week when we were in Qatar, everyone gathered around because Khaled Mashal was featured in a one hour interview special. And his remarks then were widely distributed on Hamas's official channels and promoted on their telegram and elsewhere, which was quite interesting because Mashal and Musa Abu Marzouk are two of the most senior people from Hamas that were there from the beginning, that are still here because Israel assassinates them so much. And Mashal is interesting. He had a close relationship with Jimmy Carter for former U.S. president. He spoke, when we met with him, he was speaking a lot about his fondness for Jimmy Carter and the overarching sense that you, that we got from Khalid Mashal. He was basically saying he pays very close attention to the discourse in the United States. He was saying that, you know, he hopes that Trump listens to the, the wing of people, the growing chorus of voices from within the MAGA movement who are saying that, that it is not in America's interest to adopt whole cloth Israel's agenda and to break with the Israeli agenda and to prioritize, you know, America, you know, clever political messaging. But I don't think it was just, I'm trying to cater or fix my message to Trump. I think what Mashal was saying is they're in this crisis, in this genocide, in this horrifying reality that's been created, underwritten, armed, etc. By the United States and implemented by Israel, there is opportunity for a reset of sorts. And so I think what Mashaal was saying is stop looking at us through the lens created and wielded and imposed by Israel and objectively look at the Palestinian cause for the past 77 years. One of the most interesting things was he said, you know, we're watching what's happening with Ahmed Al Sharah, the interim president of Syria, who was once Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, who then became the leader of the armed faction, anti Assad faction, that overthrew the Assad government and then took power. And Trump has embraced him and Trump is promoting him. And he said, you know, the Palestinians should be looked at in the same way that there's an evolution of movements and that if you objectively look at our history, you'll see that we fit squarely within national liberation movements. Now, I pointed out that, yes, they're embracing Ahmed Sharah, but look at the cost he's being pressed to normalize relations with Israel. Israel is occupying an increasing amount of Syria's territory. Israel bombed the entire conventional military infrastructure of Syria the moment that the anti Assad forces took power. But, you know, and Mashaal said all of that is true, but he also was saying we have to deal with the world as it exists. And, and I think that in the erratic, unorthodox nature of Trump, they're trying to say, if you objectively look at this and you're willing to break with the rancid ideology that's at play here in American policy, you'll see that we're open to a realignment or a resetting of the dialogue on Palestine with the West. That's what Mashal is saying. And, you know, it's, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, you know, Mashal remains a controversial character or figure among Palestinians. You know, there's a very diverse discourse about him online. You know, a lot of Palestinians don't like him, but others revere him. And I don't think anyone would doubt that his status as an elder statesman within the Hamas movement. You know, people have a lot of debates about who he is, what they think of him, whether he should be the one speaking. But there's no question that this is someone who, even a decade before Hamas was founded, was. Was part of the discourse that led to the rise of this Islamic resistance movement that now is at the center of this, you know, of this entire period of history.
- [68:28]
C
Yeah, no doubt one of the central players, you know, for decades. And as you said, you know, I found a lot of what he said very interesting, controversial, as you said. You know, he's bringing up Ahmed Al Sharah, which, you know, a lot of people who support decolonization and Palestine are very worried about the direction is going. This is a person who. His nom de guerre was, you know, Joleni, which comes from the Golden Heights. He said he was radicalized by the second Palestinian, Tafada, and then seems to be capitulating sort of out of no other choice, no other option. And Khaled Mishal seemed in his interview with you to be kind of specifically directing a message to the Trump administration and saying, this is not in your interest. It's not in your interest to support Israel. We will work with you. It wasn't by any means an anti American message. And you know, you also interestingly asked him about 2003 in Iraq and the Bush administration's so called de Baathification policy.
- [69:38]
A
Yeah.
- [69:40]
C
Can you explain first of all what that was and then what do you have to say about it?
- [69:45]
D
Yeah, you know, I mean, also another thing, you know, all of these guys that I talked to from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, I mean, they're, they really are students of history, not just the history of Palestine, but, you know, it's. I mean, Khalid Mashal himself was a physics teacher. I mean, it always strikes me, it's so interesting the cartoonish way that these guys are portrayed. They also have a whole other part of their life and oftentimes they're very intelligent, well versed people that have a very firm grasp of not just the history of Palestine, but in general history of, of American imperialism and anti colonialist struggles around the world. But in, you know, in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, initially there was a US general named Jay Garner that was put in charge of the occupation. And Jay Garner was a military guy. And his. His concept at the beginning was basically to cut off the general class of the Iraqi military, work with the colonels underneath, basically preserve Saddam Hussein's intelligence and security infrastructure as a way of ensuring that Iraq would have continuity and stability. That you essentially chop off the head of the regime and you start paying salaries and you keep the infrastructure in place. But the Bush administration had this very strong ideological strand within it, and they became obsessed with the idea that they needed to erase the entire ideology of Baathism, the. The Baath Party of Saddam Hussein, and that anyone affiliated with the Ba'ath party should be banned from participating in anything official in society. That they. That it was. It was. They basically took, you know, the kind of denazification concepts from World War II that were applied in Germany, and they wanted to sort of do a cookie cutter version of it in Iraq. And it was catastrophic on multiple levels, because on a military level, what ended up happening was that you had roughly a quarter of a million or so Iraqi soldiers. And remember, this was a military that had close relationships with the United States for a long time when Saddam was a convenient ally. And they said, you're all fired because you were members of the Baath Party. So it was the day they did that, and it was order number one of the Provisional Coalition Authority under L. Paul Bremer, who was an ideologue who cut his teeth under Henry Kissinger, was the day that they sent trained veterans of the Iraqi military, some of the commanders who had been trained by the United States, into the Iraqi resistance. And you saw a dramatic uptick in successful insurgent attacks against American occupation forces because of de Ba'. Athification. But it also applied to civil society, to basic functions of government and, and sanitation and other, you know, just how you run a city, how you run a country, because they were so blindly following this ideology that we need to de. Bathify the society. So I put this to Khalid Mashal in the context of sort of how you stabilize Gaza. And what Mashal was saying is, look, we're. We're willing to accept an international force to come in if its mission is not like disarming the Palestinian people and trying to compel a surrender of our liberation cause, we'll accept that. And Hamas, by the way, has always been against foreign troops deploying. So this is something quite. Another senior Hamas official said there was debate about this, and they ultimately tried to show that they were willing to be flexible in agreeing that their Public position is we agree we will allow an international force to come in. So that's one thing. Number two, Hamas has said we'll resign, you know, effective immediately as the governing authority in Gaza. But. And we'll totally support an independent, technocratic Palestinian committee to come in and manage the situation. But what I was told, Sharif, is that in the negotiations about this technocratic committee, no one discussed the issue of security. They were talking about sanitation, education, basic, you know, governance things. But they didn't. And Hamas's negotiators said, how are you going to secure Gaza? So that's when the discussion started. And what another senior Hamas person told me was, the police force in Gaza is not the Qassam Brigades. And so, you know, are they going to work with the police force? Because Israel has really lied to the public and claim that the police in Gaza are somehow the armed resistance, when in reality it's a civil police force that exists. So is the doctrine of de ba' athification applied to Hamas mean that now police aren't police anymore in Gaza? These are questions that if you're gonna manage an occupation, which Trump now has to do, you need to be asking. So from Hamas's perspective, they're saying, okay, you want us gone? You wanna, like, erase that? There was Hamas here ever. Okay, you can try that. But, like, we're the only government for 20 years, and prior to us, there was lawlessness and chaos and looting and, you know, so who's gonna stabilize this place? You don't get a sense that any of them are excited about the prospect of this collapsing. I really get a sense from talking to people from Hamas, like Trump should really look at this, because there's going to be total mayhem if they don't have a security force that has credibility. Especially if you want a security force to have the authority to say, we're the only guns on the street, not the Qassam Brigades, not Sariah Al Quds. You need to look very carefully at the composition of that force. So what Jawa and I were hearing from Hamas people were technical questions about how you stabilize the atmosphere so that there can be reconstruction. And they understand very well that the Israelis know all of this and that. That they want there to be civil war. You know, other prominent Palestinian leaders that we met with. What they're talking about right now is that if they don't impose a force with credibility on the street to be basic police, basic law enforcement, that allows the facilitation of food distribution without looting by gangs, that allows a resumption of not just emergency health services, but basic health services that all human beings deserve. If they can't do that credibly, the people that will benefit are going to be gangs. The people that will benefit are going to be criminals. And they believe Israel wants that. They believe that Israel wants to set the conditions where a civil war breaks out within Gaza. And this would be a very rare occurrence. It's not that Palestinians have never fought Palestinians. It's that that is not the common narrative of the past 77 years by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, when you talk to Hamas people about even Mahmoud Abbas, even when you're off the record, no one is sort of like heaping scorn on Mahmoud Abbas. Clearly they think that he's been a collaborator. Clearly they think that his time in office has benefited the Israelis. But every Hamas person I've spoken to said it is in the interest of the Palestinian people to have a unified Fatah, for that party not to break apart, which it could break apart. If Abbas is 90 years old, he could die. And there's at least four different power centers vying for leadership of Fatah. So I guess, in short, what I'm saying, Sharif, is whether it's Khalid Mashal or it's people that are working on a technical level, the message that we heard is we're concerned that Trump is pushing forward with this plan without thinking through the security environment in Gaza, which is necessary for all of this other stuff to work. They are listening to Israel's propaganda about disarmament and not listening to the actual, on the table, concrete technical offers that the Palestinian resistance is making, that they're insisting on keeping this colonialist umbrella above the whole thing, which. Which is never going to work if you know anything about the Palestinian struggle. And what they're saying is stop playing Israel's game. If Trump really is the owner of this now, which he is. Mashal said, you have a double responsibility now because you're not just the underwriter of the Israeli occupation. You've now said, this is your plan. So if he wants it to succeed, what they're saying is meet with all of the Palestinian factions, give credibility, give a credible mandate to Palestinians to govern their own affairs, and then you create the space where we can discuss all these other big things in your plan. It's very reasonable, and it doesn't. There was not a moment that I, that I got a sense that they were thinking of ideology. I genuinely think they're worried that more of their people are going to die. And I'm not just talking about Hamas. I was also meeting with Mustafa Barghouti that they are genuinely worried on a governance level that if the US doesn't drop Israel's ideological lens and crack that thing into a million pieces, that they are going to create the conditions where many more Palestinians die. And then you have the west bank and multiple Palestinians we met with said that any moment and that the history of the first two intifada show this, you could have a mass uprising that takes people by storm because the west bank didn't participate in October 7th. And yet more than 1000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes. So what they're saying is you better listen to Palestinians about how to stabilize Gaza because you're also going to have a major eruption occur, maybe not now, maybe not next week, but in the near future a major eruption is going to happen in the west bank because they are slaughtering and displacing Palestinians at record pace there.
- [78:59]
C
Just a couple more questions, Jeremy, because I wanted to ask you also about, you asked Khalid Michel about the response of Arab countries, Arab and Islamic countries, but mostly countries in the region, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the uae making these deals, with Trump signing off on his so called, you know, 20 point plan, giving their stamp of approval on it. What did Michal say? Did he express any kind of frustration? Did he say anything about them betraying the Palestinian cause or did he strike a more diplomatic tone?
- [79:36]
D
Yeah, it was interesting in the room because I was saying, like, how can you not see this as a betrayal? What I was talking about specifically was this UN Resolution as well, where.
- [79:48]
A
You.
- [79:49]
D
And I have talked about this before on the stream. Sharif. But what the UN Security Council did was to put its stamp of legitimacy on the deployment of an armed force under the direct command of Donald Trump, not President Donald Trump, but of Donald Trump and his so called Board of Peace. And you know, these Arab and Islamic countries were the window dressing, you know, for Trump to be able to do this and say, oh, see, the Arab, you know, the Arab world is behind me, the Islamic world, every country in the world is behind me. Mashaal was very diplomatic about it. On the one hand, he, he quite interestingly pointed out that there's business deals happening not with Trump as the president, but with Trump as the, you know, the Trump family. And that this has undermined a stronger response from those countries is how he put it. And he also said that they are not the deciders in any of this and that Palestinians recognize that with all of the anger Palestinians can have toward the Ummah, toward the broader Islamic world in the face of this genocide. There's only one force in the world capable of stopping Israel and it's the United States. So, you know, he kind of, he kind of pivoted from acknowledging it. I would say in quite diplomatic terms that there are issues there, let's put it that way, to then saying, but you know, look at the real, the reality of it. You know, yes, there is, he didn't say corruption, but there's business dealings going on and you know, speaks for itself when he says that. But on the other hand, who controls Israel? Who, who, who has the ability to hit the on off switch? It's only the United States. So, you know, that was, that was how he was talking about it. I asked him also, you know, have you met with any European officials? And his answer was a little bit, you know, it was a little bit muddled how, how he answered the question. People can read the whole transcript, by the way. We felt like it was in the public interest to put the whole thing out. So we published the whole transcript at, at drop site. But he was, he was saying there are discussions, but it's at a, it's at a lower level. And there have been points when it's been at a, at a higher level. But I think one thing that, you know, that is one possible scenario that, and I'm just saying this based on my own monitoring of the statements of European officials and others, the eu, particularly the French Macron, are continuing to promote this idea of a so called two state solution. And they're saying that the Palestinian state in this equation needs to be disarmed. It means though that there is some discussion that will probably happen at a higher level with European officials. And right now the only person that they're speaking to is Mahmoud Abbas. And you know, Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree law in November that pertain to local elections in Palestine. And in this decree law it says that any candidates must formally endorse all of the prior agreements made by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which means Oslo, which means the Quartet Principles, which means recognizing Israel, which means recognizing Israel's control of the vast majority of historic Palestine, which means recognizing a renunciation of armed resistance. So this means that not just that Hamas can't run in office, run for office, it means that even Mustafa Barghouti, who's a physician that controls no armed force, that he's not allowed, he came in second in the last time there was a presidential election in 2005 in Palestine that he can't run. Well, we were told by a source this week that who has seen the draft that is being circulated now. Palestinians, by the way, are never allowed to read these things until in full, until they're, they're issued by Abbas. They give some version of it, but not the final text of it for debate or discussion. But this is a bit of news I'm about to tell you. A source told who has seen the draft of the law that they're preparing on a national level in Palestine said that they that it's virtually identical to the one on local laws, which means that Hamas wouldn't be allowed to run in elections and which means Dr. Mustafa Barghouti wouldn't be allowed to run elections. But in addition to endorsing all of these past agreements made by the PLO from Oslo through the Quartet principles, any political party with an armed wing or an armed militia cannot participate in elections. This is, this means that what Abbas's, what Abbas is doing is issuing decree.
- [84:29]
C
Laws, has an arm doing.
- [84:33]
D
It's a remarkable statement that they're making. Fatah has an armed wing, but Fatah isn't in control. Emmanuel Macron is in control right now. This is the point I'm making that Abbas himself, I mean, I don't know to what degree it's Abbas versus the Abbas organism that is functioning here, but if they put that term out there, what that would mean is that Palestinians do not have a right to be organized in any armed fashion outside of acting as security agents for Israel. That's what that would mean if that term ends up in the actual law. It would also mean that Fatah is disarmed, that Hamas is, that none of them are able to participate in, in elections unless they fully renounce having an armed wing. So this is where we're at right now. And I think that, you know, the people, this idea of two state solution. Muhammad al Hindi already says there's already two states and both of them are Israeli. You know, that is the imposed reality because of the settlers, because of the, there is no actual Palestinian state anywhere. And he also says show me the border of that other state. Like where is the defined border of that other state? Those aren't radical questions. Those are fundamental, factual, historical questions that should be answered. So, you know, I think there's going to, there's going to be attempts to say, well, can we find a moderate person from Hamas or who are the moderate? You know, Palestinians and Hamas officials are very well aware of that history. And I think that People are aware of what happened with Yasser Arafat. So, you know, Mashal is someone that maybe Europe or others would look at and say, oh, he's a guy that we can do business with. Osama Hamdan, one of the longest living members of Hamas, was on Al Jazeera Mubashar this week and made some interesting. We also met with him when we were in Qatar, but he made some interesting comments where he was saying Saudi and other outlets are promoting this idea that there's a split within Hamas. And he rejected that. And he said that you look at the assassination of our leaders, you look at what's happened during the course of the two plus years of genocide, the fact that when they've systematically murdered all of our leaders, the heads of our political bureau, the political leadership elected, etc. That we still were able to join together and give unified responses to these edicts coming from the most powerful country in the world. And that there is a genuine logical process happening about the current political orientation within the Hamas movement. I think that's sincere. I think certainly Western countries are going to look for people that they can carve out that they can bring over to the side. But, you know, we're going to continue reporting on this. Sharif. I mean, it's quite interesting. You know, it's not that there aren't certain spheres of thinking within Hamas that every single person agrees on every single thing, but there is a consultative process, there is a democratic process within that movement that doesn't often get. Get discussed. I mean, this is for a different time. But we met with someone who's a political leader within Hamas, one of their most senior people who spent 14 years of his life in prison. He's a Hamas official from, originally from the west bank. And he was describing the way that Palestinians organized themselves within the prison. He was one of Yahya Sinwar's cellmates and just talking about the democratic process of how they choose their leadership, et cetera. So one thing I think we've been trying to do at Dropsite is to, is to actually check the facts and look at like, what are the nuances of all of these questions. And you know, and I think, I think that that's a real crime in the journalism that's taken place on Palestine for a long time, particularly in the Western press, is it's important to understand what these movements actually are made of, who are the people behind them and what are the actual facts, how are they run, how are decisions made? But I do think the west is going to always. They're always going to look for the person that they can say, well here's our moderate person to talk to. And what the Palestinians are saying is you need to talk to 14 plus factions because you don't let us have elections. You don't respect that the Palestinian people should be able to vote for whom they want without them being threatened with isolation and sanction and bombing and living in an open air prison. So I think on an objective level, at the end of the day, what Khaled Mashal was saying to Trump was read a book, read an actual good book about Palestine, understand the facts of the people. You can't compare us to someone else. And I think it's a legitimate request, actually study it, place the Palestinians in the context of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, anti colonialist revolution and fact check it, see if we're telling you the truth or the Israeli narrative is correct and they all believe that at the end of the day, if you actually look at it. No, no, I don't think that's going to happen. I'm saying it's of course not Sharif. I'm saying what he's saying is a reasonable position. But I think it also is what's happened with lots of ordinary people, lots of ordinary people who maybe knew something about Palestine over these two plus years have gotten a crash course in education and have realized that there has been a mountain of lies built in front of their eyes on the question of Palestine.
- [90:01]
C
Well, I think a lot of the opposition is not just anti occupation as it used to be, it's anti colonial, it's anti Zionist as a racist ideology. And I think that's been a sea change for a certain generation in this country. I think we should wrap up. But I'll just say finally, just like one point for me, I think there's this big fear that basically the international community, not Israel, because Israel just wants annihilation, but Western powers just want to return to October 6th. There's a lot of talk about reconstruction and peace and to just as if we can just forget these two years of a live stream genocide with zero accountability, that we just let it happen. And getting to October 6th is the bar that is acceptable. And there's almost like because of the level of killing that, you know, negotiations even by some Palestinians are to get to that. Yeah, I mean, what do you think of that? This, this is what is almost most frightening for me. Maybe that's impossible at this point because of what we just discussed, because of Israel really becoming a pariah state. But it is what is on the table?
- [91:23]
D
I mean, yeah, we're working on. Jawa and I are working on a story right now about a very interesting interview we did with another Hamas official who works on a kind of granular level on internal Palestinian affairs. And he said something interesting. He said Palestinians didn't come this far, especially the past two plus years, to have you come in and say that what we need is a little bit better food distribution, you know, or that the tent quality needs to be improved. You know, we're about liberation. And so, you know, I think, I think that really the crossroad that we're at right now, Sharif, to like give you my thoughts on what you just said, is that if the world thinks that Palestinians are going to accept just going Back to the October 6th reality, I, I think history indicates that that is a, a fool's intellectual errand. I think that, that people in Gaza from, you know, from talking to Palestinians in Gaza and who are working on infrastructure in Gaza, to say the least, are completely exhausted and shattered in so many ways and want a safe place to sleep tonight. They're also enduring biblical type flooding and raining. That is horrifying. And so, my God, give them a break from all suffering. Like, no question about that. But then after that happens and after people are actually allowed to sleep or to grieve or to mourn or to recover the remains of their loved one that had been buried for two years or longer, then the reality presents itself again. What is their future? Or the future of the children that have grown up seeing all of this? You think they're just going to say, well, build us a better, oh, now we're out of a tent and now we're in a conex box. We're in a trailer now. And I think that many Palestinians are going to say no, no. And we're not. We're not. We're not going to live like this anymore. So then the moral burden is not on the Palestinians. The moral burden is on all of the rest of us. It's not a question. What are the Palestinians going to do? What do I want from Palestinians in Gaza? I want those suffering to end against them. What I want is for all of us to say we need to pick up the mantle and demand that there, it can't be a reset of the clock to October 6th except October 6th. Plus you've genocided and raised the whole place to the ground. So, you know, it's on all of us. And the attention is waning and people and fading and interest and engagement and all that stuff is going down, but there isn't a more important time to pay attention than right now. And, yeah, the burden is on all of us. The Palestinians in such a steadfast way have refused to die as a people, not just during this genocide, but for 77 years. So that should be the question that you're asking. Sharif, should be the one put to all these European countries who say, ooh, we'll allow a Palestinian state, but it can't have a weapon. When are we ever going to talk about Israel's weapons? When are we ever going to talk about an open, genocidal, lunatic regime that can be rightly compared to the most brutal apartheid systems throughout history? When is the world going to wake up and say, we need to stop pretending that the Palestinians are the aggressors and start naming the actual aggressor who we're underwriting, morally, legally and with weapons? You know, you know that and I know that. But, like, that's what should be happening. Not Emmanuel Macron is now writing a new constitution with Mahmoud Abbas that they're putting laws that say who can and can't run for office. And if you're too militant, too uppity, you're not allowed to stand for public election like the European Union. That's really what they want to prioritize right now, is figuring out more of a way to strip the Palestinians of their rights instead of saying Netanyahu is the aggressor. Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal. Israel is an apartheid state. This isn't the burden of the Palestinians now. It should be the burden of the entire world.
- [95:31]
C
Yeah. And again, I encourage people to go and read Jeremy Jawah's reporting with Khaled Mishael, which includes a full transcript. And where he brings this up, he brings up the case of apartheid South Africa and how the U.S. one of the last countries to eventually abandon support and boycott that country, which eventually led to the apartheid regime's downfall. So, yes, the latest interview is. Was just published yesterday and we're looking forward to more of your reporting, which will be coming out this week. Thanks a lot, Jeremy, for, for all your work. That does it for today's live stream. We're here Tuesdays at 9:30am Eastern. If you want to support our work, you can subscribe@dropsitenews.com you can also make a 5013 tax deductible donation to our work by going to dropsitenews.com and clicking on Ways to Give. Make sure to follow us on social media let people know about our work. On behalf of everyone at drop site, thanks for joining us. I'm Shabus.