rationed for the united nations relief and works agency matthias sure. well apparently while everyone's been talking about the inauguration of joe biden there's been aerial bombardment of gaza by israel armed by the united kingdom the european union the united states and tanks have invaded in some going to land invasion in gaza. so yes indeed we had a couple of nights ago. but that particular incident was triggered by rockets fired from here towards israel and then there was bombardment heavy bombing by the heavy bombardment in retaliation for those strikes and that i have to say happens regularly over the last couple of weeks i think there have been 3 such nights now for me to be perfectly honest you know no one go there was even injured in the area stopped the more serious incident was the tanks coming into gaza

a few days ago that's in the border area and the reason that's more serious is number one the israelis always claim that gaza runs itself they are not on the ground and as in the west bank you know it is a sovereign territory where you don't just send tanks into a sovereign territory that's point 1.2 it highlights it for me yet again that there is a border area on the gaza site that gazans are not supposed to go into you know and that makes gaza even smaller than it is and that is of serious concern and number 3 and perhaps the most important point the miss some of this border area including where the tanks went in is actually actually some of the most fertile agricultural land and so the people that get most affected by these are the small scale agriculturalists that produce the food for gaza and that that is just not acceptable and i am not aware of

a credible military or political reason for doing this. well arguably the world doesn't know about what you're talking about it certainly wasn't much reported in the apparent scores of people dying in syria in the past few days from israeli airstrikes let alone the ones in iraq when if donald trump is watching from florida he might even be surprised that your there the aim of the drug administration was to defund the united nations relief and works agency how come you are there and how is an ra even survive these past 4 years of a trump term. so indeed to the trump administration defunded us back at 2018 america and 2018 when we lost $300000000.00 from the drum ministration and i also think the political motivation behind this was to get rid of more than 40 countries from the international community stepped in and gave us $450000000.00 in addition

to what they had already pledged so there was phenomenal activity or solidarity in 2018 by the international community i think partly just in anger or protest against the way the trumpet ministration was behaving internationally now some of that has been kept up so europe the european union continues to be our biggest donor followed by germany the u.k. remains a big donor and that has meant that we've kept going here in gaza we run 278 schools and despite that the funding we've had enough funding from the rest of the international community to keep the basic services going having said that trending levels have been to funding levels have been dropping and we are worried about the future we think biden will come back with money from the american side but the arab world has been steadily reducing its funding and on even our store just supporters are saying we cannot count on rising income levels into the she would just so

things don't look all that bright on that front you mention hopes about a biden administration with the now is all him taking the oath of office he did issue an executive order is about a wall nothing about the the wall in the west bank. there was no mention of an era in any executive order in the hours of her he took the oath of office now because joe biden's a good friend of netanyahu who's on the record for calling your organization a perpetuator of refugees. so the sikh notes we are getting from the incoming biden that ministration is that they will return funding to us so that's the good news they haven't announced that publicly i think that the tone will change of discussions political dialogue and dialogue with the u.n. we i am skeptical that there will be a fundamental fundamental reorientation in terms of the position towards palestine

and by that i mean what is really needed is fresh momentum to get get back to the table and discuss a piece of the ocean and that i am not sure is going to happen we will have to wait and see i mean you are the director of open a operations for an ra a what do you make of the indicted israeli prime minister calling your agency a refugee perpetuation agency why would you say that you won't be surprised if i say that is from my perspective nonsense because as i think i indicated earlier we run 278 schools 285000 children in gaza more than 10 percent of gaza's population goes into united nations schools where they are taught about human rights about the basic values that underpin global society and i cannot understand how providing education to children instead of having them linger around at home or on the streets and becoming potential targets for much

more radical or extremist groups is is making the problem worse so anyone claiming we we perpetuate the problem is simply wrong. yeah because i was could drive as you know for educational materials the begin so that sentence says the dinner hour basically organization amounts to anti semitism have seconds of the attacks on bernie sanders the democratic contender he may even get a place in the biden cabinet and learn german corgan it was here in britain when he led what was western europe's largest socialist movement again i'm of course very well aware there's just in the last few days been another attack on on what happens in our school there's been a claim that the teaching materials we developed in call the times ourselves in to help children learn at home so we don't produce textbooks the textbooks are given to us by the p.t.a. by the palestinian authority but because children had to stay at home and didn't

have a teacher with them we produced materials to help them study the books and the claim is that these materials are full of anti semitism calls for jihad it cetera and that's simply nonsense we have identified ourselves a few places in these materials that are a bit problematic from a u.n. point of view but to escalate this and to on the basis of a few i think it was our education staff says it wasn't even one percent of the bay just that from our point if you were problematic so with less than perfect one percent of thousands of pages that were produced so then on that basis make the claim that we are an anti semitic organization is ludicrous well while britain and the european union may be giving money to an ra it obviously obviously supplies weapons to israel which are used and have been used maybe in the in the past few days you mention coronavirus i'm talking to you from the country with perhaps the

worst death rate on earth from coronavirus so you optimistic about coronavirus in gaza i mean some are saying that israel is violating the 4th geneva convention coronavirus. well i'll come back to comment on israel just in terms of the corona developments in gaza we've seen sort of 3 phases up to oldest we actually did not have a local outbreak you know and there were many people who were saying maybe the only positive aspect of the blockade is that it kept the virus on what we know the health system here is not up to speed it's been crumbling and we were very worried in my committee myself that if it really spreads very dramatically at some point the public health system would fall apart and simply not cold not in recent days we are seeing a 3rd phase the also artie's did take measures they did introduce curve for us they kept lockdowns over weekends they banned big gatherings they kept the most spoiled

and it seems to be working now concerning the role of israel that they'd issue at the moment is vaccines you know and i'm not a human rights lawyer or international humanitarian law lawyer but in my understanding an occupying power does have responsibility for the people it occupies. in public health terms so the expectation is very clear that the israeli authorities at you know there are up held israel is upheld as a model for rolling out a vaccination campaign but the palestinians are excluded and the appeal to israel clearly is on humanitarian grounds and on include the palestinians in the west bank and gaza in the vaccination campaign israel says it's not their business to vaccinate any palestinian in the holes no a cohens lending to the palestinian authority to organize things like. yeah that's why i'm saying i'm not a lawyer i don't know if that's legally correct i'm speaking to you as a as

a un representative and humanitarian i for me it's clear or israel is occupying palestine and i think it's a feeble i. you meant to say they have no responsibility i think they do and it is at the end of the day also in their interest to have all of the territory they control of 3 of corona and you know that means vaccinating also the palestinians from my point of view would neither from a legal basis nor you know from a humanitarian basis nor from as israeli self interest perspective does it make sense to exclude the better stadiums self-interest mases because of course if it proliferates in gaza it'll proliferate back in israel yes exactly and in the west bank you know very few people leave gaza at the moment to work and in israel quite a few people leave the west bank to work in israel so that yes yes that's what i mean now i'm not sure whether you are privy to the gaza government's problems

getting the vaccine to its people given that israel obviously doesn't want to vaccinate any palestinians what do you make of israel saying this might think 5 the russian vaccine has been delayed by a technical reason. yeah i don't know details of that i mean what i can tell you is that through the international cold facts mechanism that palestine also already has ordered some back scenes you know and i think palestine is one of the regions of the world that so far is not getting its fair share of the world health organization recently put out a statement expressing serious concern that there is not a fair and equitable distribution of all the vaccines being made available so that's one issue a 2nd issue that is if maxine's indeed is that that if they get through and that's where israel needs to help because nothing gets to the occupied territories without israel facilitating match so that will be the next hurdle and then the next the

final hurdle will be that between romola the p.a. and the old surratt is here as we know it's hamas controlled there also there needs to be an agreement that gaza gets its fair share i mean my understanding is there are reports of maybe 250 prisoners in israeli prisons. palestinians who are infected with covalent i mean back in back in gaza it is give us a picture of what i mean britain the united states the israel what is the say to the health infrastructure in gaza even if they get the vaccine into the distribution. so i think 58 all the 14 years of brocade 3 wars 3 major military escalations 2 years of the great marches of return let's not forget that all during those 2 years that went into last year 2020 more than 35000 people were injured at the fence by these releases in response to what

is was essentially a peaceful demonstration over 2 years and more than 200 people were killed including 13 ordinary children children going to order a schools the world doesn't talk about this but in gaza that's not forgotten there are still i think 150 people waiting for regenerative surgery as a result of the injuries they received during the great march as a return so that i could have public health system is not even coping with the with the load it had before corona came and that's why i said earlier we were very worried if corona really spread and became uncontrolled the point would have been reached very quickly where the public's health system would have fallen apart and people would have died in the streets basically because the hospitals would have had to turn them away. has fallen thank you thank you off to the break we'll speak

to an attendant colonel anthony shaffer a former u.s. intelligence officer who was on the 2020 trump advisory board. seemed wrong. to me. to shape out just because educated and engaged equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart. just to look for common ground.

my grandmother on the i'm not going to be more than welcome to get up. as. she was even. if you know your story i'm. joined from the. british pushback from the family. i mean.

welcome back to this lockdown edition of going underground donald trump said he was very proud of the fact he never started a new was during his administration so is joe biden going to start a new war is joining me now from fairfax county in virginia as you turn to colonel anthony shaffer a decorated intelligence official and an advisor on the trunk 2020 board tony thanks so much for coming back on the show we were hearing about geopolitical issues in the middle east and so on just tell me about your take on jake sullivan being national security advisor and the senate approved avril haynes as director of national intelligence arguably 2 very controversial appointment. yeah thanks for having me again and i think the controversial by the fact that it's a return to the obama focus on national security and world order.

part of the challenge is been is to try to think differently and i hate to use that term because other folks marketed that but one of the things that my palm peo did in full disclosure you know i had multiple conversations with mike when he was director of cia and most of those conversations really related to the middle east of how how should we do things to bring a focus of peace and prosperity over war and one of the things that i think needs to be continued is the abraham accords the idea of trying to find a path to create conditions for for the arab nations to essentially establish their own condominium of security. i'm not sure that the biden folks to include his national security advisor or others are going to embrace that and notably. there was no no new wars created by president trump and that was not

that's not an accident the people who i spoke to and advised. advise the president and i think again many people like my pompei or very focused on trying to lead from us from a position of strength but lead with diplomacy before any consideration was any good ever given for military force ok but abraham accords very controversial in the arab world in the so-called arab street who hearing from from gaza earlier about the effect of the funding of the united nations relief and works agency bent on the broader point you're making there about no noise i mean do you expect and i'm hearing way hearing reports of deployments being ordered in syria trump didn't want more oil do you expect. jake sullivan in the blink in to restart what some of that is defacto funding about either and i says they have in syria i honestly don't know i'm i'm not on the inside of their discussion loop with that

said the person who really informed my thinking on. staying out of syria was a guy named general joseph dunford term of the joint chiefs who was by the way selected by president obama who stayed over into president trumps time and general dunford said specifically in iran and direct conversation there's nothing there there's no real there for america to have troops on the ground and that's war he used his strategy of by with and through to essentially achieve the defeat of isis the caliphate with iraq the idea was we the united states should not be fighting a foreign war we should work with others to empower them i thought that was a brilliant strategy something that i continue to support and the idea is that we should not be the police force in the middle east we should not be there trying to to figure out what's best for the syrian people and unfortunately i don't think joe

biden or his current national guard team have that same level of thinking they are much more intrusive in your thinking and i think there's a good chance that we will see troops deployed to that region for peacekeeping which we think we've seen how trying to do nation building in a place like afghanistan has not worked out all that well after doing it for almost 20 years. name fanous trump said he wanted to get all the troops out of afghanistan he left and there are still 2 enough 1000 troops in afghanistan i actually worked with general tony zinni on this and the conclusion back 6 years ago when we did the survey was just sleep just. and you know we're still there he wants disturbing. is that the part of the hillary clinton or bit of advice as think tank type people yes and in fairness to clinton she herself recognized. the terrible

mistake of funding the mujahideen which led to $911.00 and i know you're something of an expert on that we started extent yes but would biden not be aware that a return to these kinds of policies of going into places the nation building may threaten the homeland i don't think they care i think so much of what the left the political left does in our country is much more about short term optics rather than long term understanding about facts the very thing you just said is key to understanding that certain mistakes were made during our support for certain elements in the the soviet occupation of afghanistan back in the late seventy's early eighty's we study that we try to learn from and again the people i work with people who i've i'm very proud of being able to advise tend to listen to the lessons. it to the your point they've brought in people who have tended to not listen to lessons they're more into projecting their ideas i mean look

a lot of us were against the so-called libya intervention because we knew the moment to remove gadhafi as much as you may not like adopt the the central government was able to essentially maintain stability for purposes of the libya functioning as a nation. at the moment that was removed we saw balkanization in the chaos we see now unfortunately i don't think they've learned lessons from that they've heard nothing from the destruction of africa's richest pick capita country. i don't think so i mean again. the proof going to be in the putting if. the by the administration decides to insinuate itself into a situation without understanding 2nd and 3rd order effects and allowing their political belief belief not evident there's no evidence there that us jumping into syria will do have any good i believe that the strategy of working through proxies trying to help them enable them one of the great lessons that we've seen not to

learn is a moment you take a side in any. war if you take a side with for example the mujahideen the moment there are they when you're going to responsible to help them govern otherwise things will go off the rails and that's what we've sort of continue to do we we tend to fund these revolutionary efforts and then not understanding once that's done what then what. so i don't necessarily believe that the abiding ministration has the wisdom to actually think through next steps of what happens i'm very quick story tony zinni told me a story that when he was working for bill clinton each time there was a policy difference. he would sit down with president clinton and he said many of those instances clinton would say i can you do x. can you do this militarily and then he would look at him say we can do that militarily but what is the follow on plan this is my concern is my concern from both sides by the way both democrats or republicans all too often because we have

a very strong military force they use it without thinking about secondary or 3rd order effects this is dangerous and this is one other reason i believe we ought to have our congress approve any long term deployment of forces because it forces a pause for people to think about what's going to happen and for better or for worse present trump did want that that that responsibility shared by congress other administrations have not wanted that pause to think about what they're doing. ok well leaving aside where there are the funding of proxies to overthrow governments is even legal aside from civilians who have died in these eternal wars on terror biden did say god bless the troops that was the end of his inauguration speech you're seriously saying that he's not thinking and i'm sure up to the blinking jake sullivan the whole raft of the people that have been brought in would deny they're not thinking one step ahead and are risking the lives of the very troops that biden

at his inauguration speech told us to pray for. so there's 2 issues where that 1st they started this process of trying purity which is very dangerous you probably wrote about this review that the pentagon did with the f.b.i. to look at loyalty this is a real issue i've worked in some form you may laugh at this i've worked in some form for every president since jimmy carter i actually was i went to high school in lisbon portugal i was on jimmy carter's personal detail helping his staff 2 things on the ground there when i was a teenager all the way up to president trump some sum and my political beliefs were completely separate from my commitment to the constitution and doing the right thing so there's some something happened this last few weeks regarding the military loyalty to the constitution being called into effect that's the 1st thing that i've seen as a problem secondly the democrats especially under obama seem to have little concern about deploying troops or the instate of what they're going to be asked to do. one

of the things i did as a member of trump 2020 was establish a sense of what i saw as the trump doctrine never deployed troops without a clear understanding of what you're going to ask them to do and if you ask me deploy deploy them in such a way to ensure they can win then be done with i thought those were very clear military objectives i'm not convinced that the team coming in to support joe biden has that same. focus on using troops as a last resort and if doing so when doing so you can you are concerned about what those troops are treated and what happens to them you know i think that actually we can take some solace from the fact that. with this 3 quarter of a trillion dollar pentagon budget they may be used for cronyism rather than for wars i mean by that says russia must pay for interfering with the elections i presume he doesn't mean involving the u.s. military and risking the the existence of the earth do you expect cronies. that was

part of the pentagon budget maybe an alliance with silicon valley and it has been a king supporter of course but yeah i know i've opposed pentagon spending i don't believe we have a cohesive strategy that's tied to the budget i'm a big reagan guy and not a lot of my friends and mentors are from the reagan administration one of the things the reagan administration did was essentially established a strategy and then funded it there was a point believe or not the reagan defense budget started going down because they had fun of the strategy i believe we should have a global essentially a global strategy of why we're doing what we do this unlimited funding helps no one again biden is a share of that and i would still fault president trump for not paying close enough attention to the budget as well i think it's it's bloated so i think there's a great possibility and i think that's why so much of industry supported by been because i think they want to go back to the days of complete cronyism regarding big

defense contracts going to people without any regard because those that contract actually add to the global security to your point regarding russia president trump was far stronger for more. willing to do restrictive things to russia than the obama administration expelled more diplomats than any other president. we did and then and on top of that we've actually moved forward with establishing a strong relationship with poland some of the troops that were deploying out of germany are coming home they're going to poland which is something the russians do not want so this is one of those things where i think the polish offered us to be there i think we should this should not be provocative but it will be to the russians in this is again something that i'm not sure biden will go along with because i fundamentally don't believe that biden wants to be all that hard on the russians and no one at this point in my eye that i know seriously believes the russians did anything the more than the russians always do the russians always try

to interfere with every democracy for purposes of destruction not trying to take a side ok the russians probably deny that the pentagon will ever need to have that but they do that. and that's it for the show will be back on the saturday until then even to you tube facebook instagram sound cloud and telegraph. oh look forward to talking to you all that technology should work for people. a robot must obey the orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the 1st law. we should be very careful about artificial intelligence the point is to create trust here. on theories not saying with artificial intelligence will summon the demon.

must protect its own existence as. the russian president calls out the power wilting tech giants during a wide ranging video address to this year's world economic forum. the vaccine supply round deepens between britain and the e.u. as brussels threatens to get tough on exports while accusing drug astra zeneca of not keeping its end of the bargain also ahead. the number of deaths reported from in the u.k. suppost 100.