Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson has been covering the war in Gaza for months. He has seen so many horrifying acts of war go unpunished and uninvestigated, that he was hardly surprised by the killing of 15 aid workers at the end of March that shocked the world.

The IDF first said the paramedics who were killed were suspicious, and claimed the vehicles they were in did not have their emergency lights on. Then a video of the incident was exposed to the world in the New York Times, showing clearly marked ambulances.  

“There is no accountability when it comes to commanders and soldiers killing innocents or even medical personnel,” Hasson said on the Haaretz Podcast. 

In his coverage of the army’s operations in Gaza and their effect on the Palestinian population, he regularly sends the IDF spokesperson questions about all kinds of incidents in Gaza. “I ask them: ‘You killed a family; You bombarded a school - what happened there?’ And I have received thousands of replies saying that it will be looked into in an internal investigation unit. But there are no results of any investigations. I don't know of any trial of any soldier who paid any price for killing innocents in Gaza.”

Alongside these disturbing military procedures regarding civilian killings, Hasson said, a “really terrifying humanitarian disaster” is brewing. 

“I sometimes find it hard to get to sleep because I'm thinking about the families and the kids in Gaza and the despair,” he told podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, in a conversation about his coverage of Gaza as well as the West Bank, where, he says, a new level of cooperation and coordination between the Israeli military and violent settlers is a “severe and frightening” development. 

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For Haaretz columnist Amir Tibon, the renewed fighting in Israel with hostages still in captivity, as scandal unfolds around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, represents a “nightmare scenario.”

Speaking on the Haaretz Podcast, Tibon reviewed the turbulent events of the past week with host Allison Kaplan Sommer – from the arrest of two of Netanyahu’s top aides in the deepening Qatargate affair and the questioning of the prime minister himself, to the botched attempt to replace embattled Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar. 

Tibon pointed to the fact after the two-month reprieve of a cease-fire and hostage release in the first stage of the deal that Netanyahu subsequently abandoned, “we now find ourselves with 59 Israeli hostages held by Hamas in the tunnels of Gaza; Israeli troops on the ground; rockets are being fired at northern, southern and central Israel. And instead of dealing with the security needs of the country, we have a prime minister who is running from court to the police investigation. If I had written this three years ago in Haaretz as a scenario of what will happen under Netanyahu, everybody would have dismissed it as hateful anti-Bibi material – a nightmare scenario that will never come true. But this is what is happening right now."

Tibon added that Netanyahu’s lightning-quick reversal of his decision to appoint former naval commander Eli Sharvit as Shin Bet director was driven by “dissatisfaction” with his choice by the far-right wing of his own Likud party. The Prime Minister attributing the flip-flop to pressure from the Trump administration, he said, was “an absolute lie.” 

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Alongside the threats of the Gaza war and the troubling Qatargate scandal, Israelis should be paying attention to a renewed direct threat to their democracy, according to law professor Meital Pinto. 

Speaking on the Haaretz Podcast, Pinto explains the implications of the newly passed law politicizing the Judicial Appointments Committee, compromising judicial independence and removing the most powerful check on the ruling coalition.  

But her greatest worry regarding the new push to revive the Netanyahu government’s 2023 judicial coup is its intention to amend the Basic Law on the Knesset, banning any political party determined by the Central Elections Committee – which is controlled by the ruling coalition – to be supporting terrorism. 

“It will be very easy for politicians to say ‘this expression of an Arab Knesset member is supporting terrorism, and their political party will be out of the democratic game.” 

If this happens, she warns, there will be no way for the current opposition to win an election, “and that’s very dangerous. I am very afraid that there will not be a free election in 2026.” 

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Like the Watergate affair that brought down President Richard Nixon, the details of the latest scandal to rock the Prime Minister’s Office and the whole of the Netanyahu government have emerged gradually over the past six months. 

Mounting evidence shows that close aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have, unbeknownst to the Israeli public, been working directly or indirectly for Qatar, the country that funded Hamas as it was planning the murderous rampage of October 7.

Bar Peleg, the Haaretz journalist who broke the story that began Qatargate, reviews the fast-moving developments and details of the unfolding story with Haaretz Podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, and explains why it matters.

Netanyahu’s desire to disrupt law enforcement’s investigation into Qatargate has been frequently cited as a reason for his recent intensive efforts to fire both Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and Shin Bet Head Ronen Bar.  

Moreover, because of the Israeli government’s policy of “buying quiet” from Hamas with Qatari cash in the years leading up to October 7, and the decision to put Doha at the center of hostage negotiations, Peleg stresses that “we need to know if close Netanyahu advisors have had Qatari interests on their mind. They whisper in his ear, he listens to these people - and that affects our lives in Israel.”

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It was supposed to be a “coming out party” for the newly cozy relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Europe’s burgeoning far-right politicians. But the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, planned for Thursday, turned into a “fiasco” and an “embarrassment” due to its controversial guest list, Haaretz English Editor-in-Chief Esther Solomon said on the Haaretz Podcast.

The invitations to numerous illiberal populist European politicians with xenophobic, anti-immigrant ideologies led a long and growing list of mainstream Jewish leaders and other participants from Europe and North America to pull out. 

They were “shocked that Israel a state founded as a sanctuary for the Jewish people after the Holocaust, would be inviting representatives of far-right parties, many of whom have neo-Nazi roots and neo-Nazi activists to a conference that is supposed to be about protecting the Jews of the world,” Solomon noted in her conversation with podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer.

Also on the podcast, Haaretz correspondent Rachel Fink reports on the resurgence and intensification of the protest movement against the current government that has brought hundreds of thousands to the streets and the expectation that in the coming weeks, they may escalate to mass strikes and shutdowns. 

The ultimate effectiveness of the protests is still to be determined, Fink said, but their importance in projecting the voice of the majority of Israelis to the wider world has been crucial. “It's a very powerful reminder that we are not our government,” she said.

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Israel’s decision to return to full-scale war in Gaza was a devastating and tragic turn of events for the families of hostages still being held there, Ruby Chen, father of Itay Chen, an Israeli-American IDF soldier, said on the Haaretz Podcast. 

“It feels as if the hostages and their families are being viewed now as collateral damage,” said Chen, who has not taken a day off from the families’ struggle in over 530 days. “The current government has not done everything in its power to prioritize the release of all the hostages.”

That hostage families feel they must direct their appeals to President Donald Trump is a “testament against the current Israeli government. The newly released hostages didn’t get on a minibus and go to Jerusalem to meet the prime minister. They got on a plane and went to the White House.” 

Last year, the Chen family was told by the IDF that Itay was killed on October 7, and his body is held in Gaza, but Ruby Chen stresses that Hamas has not provided any evidence regarding his son’s condition, and the family won’t sit Shiva and mourn Itay until he is back in Israel. 

For the families of the 59 remaining hostages - dead and alive - the current situation is “a game of Russian roulette,” he said. “We don't know who is coming out and when. And we don't know who's going to hug and kiss their loved one, and who will need to prepare a funeral and a Shiva.”

 

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Haaretz Jewish World editor Judy Maltz joins this episode of the Haaretz Podcast to discuss the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists in America. According to Maltz, the Trump administration’s targeting of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil for deportation as punishment for leading disruptive anti-Israel protests is “pulling the American Jewish community apart.”

Khalil is “no Mother Teresa or Righteous Among the Nations” and is “probably pro-Hamas,” said Maltz, but there is “no evidence” Khalil has committed crimes that justify deportation. 

“It’s a very complicated place to be a liberal Jew today in America,” she noted. “Whose side are you on? Do you come out against attempts to combat antisemitism on campus? What are you supposed to do?”

Also on the podcast, Haaretz columnist and Israeli intelligence expert Yossi Melman explains why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to wait until this week to fire the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, and why it is so worrying.

 

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Ruth Patir had been, in her own words, an “artist without art” over the past year. Until this week. 

Patir’s inventive feminist video installation "(M)otherland" was set to debut in the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last April - under the shadow of protests against the Gaza War and efforts to oust her from the festival. 

Ultimately, she made a controversial decision to keep the exhibit intact but shuttered behind closed doors, with a note on the door saying: “The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.” That never happened throughout the seven months of the Biennale, and, as a result, her work was never seen. 

As (M)otherland finally meets the public at the Tel Aviv Museum this week, Patir joined Haaretz Podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer to talk about the firestorm in Venice, the challenges for Israeli artists creating during war, and innovative use of motion capture technology and Judean fertility figurines to tell a deeply personal story.

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What if former U.S. President Joe Biden’s envoys had negotiated directly with Hamas behind Israel’s back? Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would surely have cried betrayal and called it de facto recognition of a terrorist group.

But it was President Donald Trump’s White House that made such a move, and therefore no criticism or condemnation was uttered from Jerusalem after it was revealed that the direct talks were taking place. 

The fact that the U.S. president took that step, Harel noted, points to the fact that “Trump is quite frustrated” with the “never-ending” talks to move the hostage release and cease-fire deal into its second stage, which is why “the Trump administration took matters into its own hands and decided to push forward through a back channel with Hamas.” 

As both Israel and Hamas prepare for a possible return to war, Harel told podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer, it appears that Trump’s “instinct is to reach for a deal and not another war.” 

On the podcast, Harel also discussed the resignation last week of IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari, probably the most popular high-ranking officer among Israelis, but not so much among Netanyahu’s government ministers; the findings of the official IDF probe into the failures of October 7, and the growing fury of hostage families.

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Peter Beinart’s new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” confronts his “horror” - even as a long-time harsh critic of Israeli policies - at the devastation that has taken place over the past 15 months. 

“In 2023, I wrote about my concerns about the possibility of ethnic cleansing on a large scale, as opposed to the small scale ethnic cleansing that has been going on for years,” Beinart said, speaking on the Haaretz Podcast. “But I really could not imagine what we've seen in Gaza - which is basically the destruction of an entire society, most of the buildings destroyed, most of the hospitals, schools, universities, agriculture, the necessities of life.” 

But even worse, he explained, was the “widespread embrace of mass expulsion, not just by people on the Israeli and American right, but by people who were considered moderate, centrist, reasonable, and thoughtful. That's the catastrophe, the horror - and I would even say the evil - that I could not imagine.”

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