and my question to the the international community and americans, how many kids? how many kids will it take for you to have your humanity? 3,00, 5,000, 10,00, how many babies do you need to see, dead and pulled out of rubble, for you to have basic human empathy and dignity as human being, how many kids? hello everyone, i'm ranya kalick and this is dispatches. israel's genocide in gaza has shocked the world with an endless flow of videos and images of palestinian children cut into pieces by american bombs drop by israeli war planes deliberately intended to destroy a civilian population. israeli leaders have said as much. despite the explicitly genocidal rhetoric of israeli officials, western leaders continue to proclaim their support for israel's right to defend itself. yet we're told by the mainstream corporate media that that it's their fault for

resisting their extermination, it's their fault for hating israel, it's their fault, we're even told because actually they bomb themselves, but this war on gaza is different than past wars, not only in the scale of israeli aggression, but in the reaction on the street from the middle east to the united states, while western media runs cover for israeli atrocities, people are losing their jobs across various industies for speaking out. the suppression has never been this intense, yet still israel is losing the narrative war. most people want to see a cease fire, and tens of thousands have protested across the us to demonstrate their opposition to biden's unconditional support for this genocide. joining me to discuss israel's genocidal onslot in gaza and how it has the potential to snowball into a catastrophic regional war. i'm joined by journalist abby martin, creator and host of... the empire files. abby martin, welcome

cuz obviously we're going to be talking about the horrific genocide that's taking place in gaza, and i just want to clarify, we are recording this before there has been a ground invasion, but obviously every day, every hour that could change, so if that has happened after this goes out, just keep that in mind as you watch this, um, but anyways, abby, i guess like there's so much to discuss, you've done so much journalism on the issue of. sign um, both on the ground and away, and i want to start off by asking you about your documentary, gaza frights for freedom, which was released in 2019, and that was four years ago, and it's an excellent documentary for anybody who hasn't watched it, i encourage you to go check it out after you've watched this episode, i will include a link to it in the description, um, and it's still making a huge impact to help people understand the situation that gaza is in, which is obviously gotten like significant. worse in the last

two weeks, but can you maybe start out by telling our audience what is gaza fight for freedom about and why does it still matter as we witnessed the atrocities being committed against gaza right now? well ronnie, i think everyone has that light bulb moment, like mine was the gaza flotilla massacre in 2010 when israeli commandos you know jumped a ship in international waters and just executed, i think like nine piece activists, one american citizen, and then of course the fog of war coming out of that attack was... literally apologizing and whitewashing this massacre everything compounded as i started and i think that that really woke me up to wow something is very very wrong with what we're being told with this so-called israel-palestine conflict and then you know working with palestinians and every time israel would go a a one of their bombardments of gaza every couple years bombing people and essentially caged area. my friends and colleagues that were palestinian had to check in every... couple hours to to see if their

families were dead or alive um and it was just so harrowing and so horrifying. fast forward to the great march of return. this was uh i think when mike and i went to the occupied west bank in 2017 um this was year before palestinians in gaza decided to do this mass civil disobedience action where for 18 months they were going out every single friday um tens of thousands at the beginning and then it kind of... widddled down um into just thousands of people, i mean this was a consistent determined action, completely unarmed, um, men, women, children, medics, journalists, all of these people went out, it was in no way directed or engineered by hamas, this cartoonish depiction of hamas, stage managing everything in gaza and taking away palestinian's agency, it was devised by poet named ahmed artema, who just simply wanted to to... kind of do this peaceful

action where he was drawing attention of their plaid as refugees, and it was mostly symbolic to erect tents and basically call attention to their plaid as refugees, and show the international community, look, um, you know, we're still here generations later as beseeg refugees, ethnically cleansed right from you know this partition where our ancestral lands are just right there, we can see them that we can't go to them, and and i think we know what happened, ranya is that israeli snipers perched up on hilltops, just took everyone out, um, looking at people, civilians through through their scopes, um, their sniper scopes and took out journalists, medics, children, disable. old people, these are all agrigous war crimes under the geneva conventions in a standing army, like between armies, an armed battle, it's still agreeus war crimes to target those protected groups, so the fact that there were no militants shooting at israeli soldiers, it was just simply civilians and mass and israeli snipers

still pick them off one by one, um every couple hours you would hear the shot ring out and and people would just drop dead or drop injured and wounded and and be brought back to the ambulances and of course they would target the ambulances, and when this happened, um, i, i just thought there's nothing that's going to be more agregious than this, right? i mean, israel is committing such heinous war crimes for all the world to see, and there's no argument, there's no argument that they could give, there's no fog of war, there's no flipping the script here, like that's why we wanted to work with palestinian journalists to tell this story, because i just thought, look, this is such a clear cut case of israeli war crimes, it's incontrovertible, it's super proof. and we based the entire framework of the movie around this un report that was released, everything's documented, but ranya just didn't matter, um, and and now, you know, 2023, that that was four years ago, as you mention, israel's taking out as many people as they killed in the great march of return in like every couple hours, i can't

keep up with the amount of civilians that are dying in mass, because in the great march of return, it was 214 people that were picked off by israeli snipers, 8,000 people shot with live ammunition, and now every couple hours i'm hearing that hundreds of people are are dying every couple hours, and it's just like, you think that it can't get worse, and it just does, and they made the great march of return about israel and they made it about the human shields and they continued to pose as the victim, even during that, and international law did nothing, and the un sat back and did nothing, and the us continue to green light israeli apartide, and so the... audacity, the cubrus and the arrogance of thinking that you can keep 2.3 million people in this caged getto and not expect anything to happen, and so that's led us to where we are today, and even in the movie, it said that you know by 2020 the un was saying, this is an uninhabitable area, the lack of potable

water, mean all of those things, so that was four years ago, and it was already 50% of all diseases were because of toxic water, mean how is this sustainable? i mean obviously it's not in now gaza is dealing with a situation where it's just being completely leveled you have israeli leaders essentially saying we want to turn it into a parking lot and i i just honestly at this point it's like you have no words anymore because just watching image after image i'm just not sure like what is the world's threshold for videos of palestinian children in gaza being chopped into pieces by american bombs delivered by israeli jets like obvious. over 2,000 and that's probably an underestimate because like like right now they're talking about hospitals shutting down, they've run out of fuel, mean you think about like the babies and incubators lie that the us spread in the lead up to the first golf war uh in congress

that famous lie uh in this case it's not a lie, actually babies and incubators in gaza are very likely right now dying because israel's denying fuel to hospitals and i just don't understand how anyone, anyone can see images of children, i don't care who they are, just any children, being chopped up into pieces and dying needlessly, being murdered and call that self-defense or standing by a civilized country or any of the insane rhetoric we've heard, i'm sorry, i'm going to probably get a little angry throughout this, because yeah, this is really outrageous, but you know, speaking to that, you you know, i've seen you posting. messages from your contacts in gaza where the situation just sounds completely apocalyptic. i actually just saw before we started recording that the al-jazira arabic correspondent who is right now in ramula just got news that his family his like wife and daughter and brother mean i

think it was his brother but his basically his whole family was killed in an israeli air strike by the way on the south in connus in the south where they were told to evacuate to. so everybody, everybody from gaza has family being killed. i'm curious what are you hearing from those younow on the ground in gaza? well, so all the people that i'm in contact with were people that we we did the documentary with and so... so it's been, it's been an apocalyptic nightmare unfolding for the last four years and to see my friends and colleagues who want to remain anonymous because we already have seen 20 journalists be killed uh, you could argue whether they're targeted or not, we know sharin abuleo certainly was and we know that the journalists during the great marcher of returns certainly were, so regardless, there is no like accountability for all of these journalists who are losing their lives during this onslot, and so... i you know my colleagues do not want to be targeted um and so that's why i'm you know not naming them,

but one of them who was our field producer through the entire movie has been rendered homeless by israeli bombs, he's been to this place three times, then he moved into his parents home and then that's when they got the mass leaflets being dropped saying everyone needs to leave to the north, i'm sorry to the south, and so they just aimlessly were fleeing to the south as bombs were dropping, we know that israel was bombing these aid convoys. that they then later claim that islamic jihad booby trapped the aid convoy um of people fleeing absolutely barbaric genocidal stuff ranya my other colleague who's there he woke up this morning to the news that his brother had been murdered his brother living in a house with 30 people and i want to just read you please i want to read you what he said and it it's sick this is where the at right now, he said my brother was murdered in a bombing of his friend's house and 30 people were killed, as

usual, mostly women and children, my brother left behind his wife and two children, the youngest of whom is four months old, we're in a state of intense sadness and fear, every moment that we will lose another person, he was like some people in other countries different in opinion about whether they're going eat today or have a break, he was like the ordeals that we're dealing with is if bomb hits us, there's no doubt that it will destroy. all of us, he was like, so we're trying to grapple with, do we stay together or do we separate so we don't all die together, mean i mean it's insane that 40 miles away from this genocide taking place that you have israelis going to the beach, going out eat, just living their lives, ranya, and you have our friends and brothers and sisters on the ground in gaza deciding, hey, should we stick together so that if bomb hits the house well? all die together or should we separate so that one of us will live on and perhaps tell our stories and take

care of our infants who won't have family anymore, mean just wrap your mind around how the decisions that are being made by people there, and this isn't even to mention the fact that food and water and electricity have been cut off, you know because they're sub-human, they're animals in the words of these israeli ministers and the us doesn't care, right? liberals don't care about this, sarah silverman was saying, hey we're at the point. that why do these animals deserve water and electricity, so water born illnesses, food born illnesses, all of these things are happening aside from that, you mentioned babies, keep thinking of formula, babies screaming, starving to death, not even the ones being bombed and beheaded with bombs, the ones who can't eat, the people on dialysis, mean there's no time even talk about those victims and there's no time to grieve the... death and destruction that's happening aside from the heavy bombardment of israeli bombs and to hear every day from my

it's like i don't even know what to say other than i will do my best to like share this information and hope that it will help humanize the plight of what is going on ronya and that is just what you put it like that it's so insane to think about top of everything you just described there's this like worldwide gas lighting going on with where it's your fault, you're bombing yourselves, you're basically all human shields for a terrorist organization that is the same as isis, it's your fault, you hate israel, you're anti-semites, you deserve this, and just by world leaders and mean the reason i raise this of course is because you've been covering the issue of palestine through your journalistic career, and i as all i think all of us who've been following this issue recognize there are the same israeli talking points and every single time, like a broken record, and they're all repeated ad nausium by cnn, by msnbc, by bbc,

by all the mainstream western channels, so i want to ask you to help our audience debunk some of these talking points, one in particular that i think is very insidious is that you hear the israelis and biden and anthony blincon and ursala vonderland keep repeating every five minutes in tweets buse they just have to remind us like every five minutes that they support this genocide and they stand with israel, um, and never to justify it, they keep repeating that hamas is using hamas, they say hamas doesn't represent palestinians or their aspirations. in fact hamas is using them as human shields and that's why palestinians are dying, therefore hamas is actually responsible for all the dead children that israel is killing, and you've done i think a great job uh, basically debunking this entire this entire claim, so how how should people, how do you at least, let's ask you that, how do you respond to

that claim as israel inflicts its most vicious acts of violence against gaza civilian. population, how do you respond to the claim that hamas is using palestinians across gaza as human shields? yeah, no, it's a really good point because and i want to go back to the hamas equals isis, well in fact they were saying hamas is worse than isis because they started off with that, and that's why i think they wanted to just unload like aerial bombardment um, similarly to what the us and russia did with isis and you know syria and iraq. and that was you know we we know that those air strikes were taking out hundreds of civilians a time and there was kind of like this way real quick real quick i just want to say it actually like mainstream american media has reported that israel has dropped more bombs by the sixth day of israel had dropped more bombs than the us had in like a month of carpet bombing rucca i just want to throw that in there that is crazy no

that that's crazy because we saw the aftermath of the rockaboming i mean it was like leveled um and hundreds of civilians that died and it was kind of secondary to think of all the civilian casualties because isis was like so barbaric and so subhuman that well we just needed to do everything we could could to take out isis and that's what they wanted to cement in the first place um but then i think people were seeing the horrors unfolding on the ground and palestinians dictating their own reality through social media and so it switched back to the old tired human shield talking point which aside from just like picking point a picking apart that narrative, mean if you look at like the the swath of of the history of propaganda used um toward american allies and i'm sorry from american allies toward our so-called enemies back all the way from world war 2 and beyond and vietnam and korea and iraq and libya, you can see that tired

talking point being propelled by the mainstream media, whether it's the viet kong, whether it's gaddafi's you know civilians. whether it's the rocky civilians, it's always they're going to use human shields, like basically anticipating there's going to be a large amount of civilian casualties, but they're all human shields for these crazy dictators or for these crazy genocidal maniacs and so just know that it doesn't matter, because they're the ones putting their civilians at risk, and so it's always been a racist dehumanizing trope and veil, like basically veil to commit mass death and destruction, and it's sick and for some reason it just sticks with palestinians. palestinians are continued to be called um mindless human shields, the their agency is completely taken away and they're all just looked at as some sort of death cult who marters their own children. it is disgusting and it's sick and let's look at the propaganda, because israel's basically saying everyone of the gaza strips a human shield for hamas because they elected hamas in 2006.

well, they can't leave, so first and foremost it's a situation of israel's own creation, even if that... were true, they are not allowing civilians to flee, it's the only place in the world that refugees can't even leave by boat if they wanted to, they're shot in the waters if they stray too far, they can't go into rafa, they can't go into the arez crossing, um, because israeli snipers will shoot to kill, there's like a literally nogo zone surrounding their entire partitioned land, so it's crazy that israel's like pretending that this is true when they've created the situation, so putting that aside, their actual evidence that they always put forward are literal cartoon infographics, they either release like images of arial like infographics of gaza with like red squares around them and they're just like, here's a rocket launcher, see and it's right next to this un building, so naturally we have to blow up the shelter right, because this rocket launcher is over a couple streets away, and it's just always this red square on

like a like aerial shot of the street, it's like okay, great i'll take your word. for it um and then aside from that they literally use infographics, i'll never forget in during the shake jura um horrible like ethnic cleansing going on in sheik dran the pograms that were going on and also during the great march of return they were releasing infographics of just cartoon images of people standing on rooftops holding missiles and grenade launchers and it's like okay that do you think that that's convincing anyone and then and then the argument completely falls apart when you look at the great marge of return because they were using argument to justify shooting elderly people and disabled people and children and medics and um and journalists and that that's outrageously false, they were not human shields for anyone, there were no militant. there and so when you apply that logic just to that instance alone ronia, the argument falls apart and their credibility is completely shot, and so we can't trust anything that

they say, everything israel uses for their playbook has been debunked, and then if you apply the same logic to israel, well they're using human shields too, they have military bases in the middle of residential neighborhoods, they broadcast from densely populated areas, if hamas targeted one of their military base or one of their media towers, is there any doubt that that would be called a war crime? no, the standard of international law should be applied the same, that that's the whole point, there should be no bias at all, you should look at the facts and let the facts um, go where they go where they are, and unfortunately there's a complete, not only reversal of the truth, but just a misapplied version of international law that somehow only applies to who israel deems its enemies and i'm sick of this whole hamas run, hamas like narrative in the corporate media too, as if that again takes away, strips palestinian agency and pretends like hamas has a gun to the head of palestinians who are like lying about their

situation or about the hores unfolding on the ground and immediately makes people think that they can't trust the news coming out of like the hamas run health ministry about civilians dead or the all arab arab hospital bombing and it's just grotesque and so what israel purposely tries to do with the human shield thing and beyond is just create... this fog of war and what they're best at is deflecting and projecting what they do onto palestinians and like you said palestinians bomb their own hospital ronya what idiots you know just like joe biden said hamas got to learn to shoot straight i just can't i mean wow i don't even know what to like you need to be prosecute i don't even i don't even know like what to do about joe biden and the fact that he can't speak and then when he does he says things like that i just um, it's beyond comprehension, this is like our president, our our reality is the beyond comprehension, and you know when it comes to the issue of international law, one thing i

will say is like at this point, i just can't get over people being like, israel has to conduct its war in the confines of international law, that's the most you'll hear, it's like just please carry out your genocide a little bit more politely. i'm not really sure how many more israeli leaders have. to go on international television and state explicitly that they are in fact deliberately targeting civilians because they don't see palestinians as human or civilians, they see them all as hamas animals, they have like repeatedly said that over and over again, yet still we're sitting here pretending like israel will ever care about anything related to it international law system that quite frankly was created by america, by the western countries, only to be applied when it's useful against their adversaries, that is all.

you see, it's not just about islam, it's not just about muslim leader. we cannot be

pan-african. if we can't associate with the oppressed nation, issuing immediate arrest warrant for key decision makers, including mr. netanyahu, who is responsible for violations of international criminal law.

headlines head to press tv, day 45 of the israeli war on gaza, some 13,000 palestinians have been killed in relentless attacks on the besieged territory and retaliation for israeli crime. in gaza, hezbollah hits israeli military positions, including a command base inside of the occupied territories. and hamas praises the recent seasure of an israeli vessel by the yemeni navy as victory for palestinians.