Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight.

Over 63,000 Palestinians have been killed by US bombs and missiles, almost twenty thousand of them children. Tens of thousands more lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble.

Over 80% of the Gazans Israel has killed were civilians, its own data reveals. Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, and forced starvation — may bring that number to 200,000.

Last week, Israel launched a full-scale assault on northern Gaza, home to an estimated million Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim — to drive them and the remainder of the estimated 2.1 million Gazans who’ve managed to survive Israel’s biblical onslaught into a vast concentration camp on the southern end of the enclave, there to be bombed, to perish from starvation and disease, or to pack up and get out.

Israel is reportedly in negotiations with South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Libya, and Indonesia to accept Palestinian deportees.

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Meanwhile, a slew of Western leaders have vowed to recognize Palestinian statehood at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, scheduled to convene on September 8, in NYC (or Geneva, if that’s where the UNGA moves its proceedings, following US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s refusal to grant visas to Palestinian delegates).

Recognizing Palestinian statehood is their best way to secure what they call ‘peace’.

Palestinian statehood — with conditions.

Only Western-approved Palestinian parties and candidates will be allowed to run (Hamas excluded, of course), and Palestine will need to be demilitarized, therefore defenseless in the face of certain Israeli assault. Hardly a day goes by when Israel doesn’t violate the territorial integrity of Lebanon and Syria, both of them UN member states.

Of course, Palestinians will be obliged to guarantee Israeli security.

The GPM spoke about Israel-USA’s war on Gaza, and the future of the Palestinian people, with American-Palestinian journalist and author, Ramzy Baroud. Baroud is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera Online.

Baroud is also the author of six books, and a contributor to many others. His latest volume, co-edited with British-Israeli author Ilan Pappé — Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out — has just been published by Clarity Press.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on.

Sixty-one thousand have been killed by US bombs and missiles. Some German and British ordnance in there.

Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic disorders that can no longer be treated (due to Israel-USA’s blockade), and malnutrition — may bring that number to 200,000. Over 150,000 have been injured.

Israel-USA’s wanton destruction of Gaza’s health care system — infrastructure and personnel — has given rise to a new term: ‘medicide’.

The most recent figures from the World Health Organization tell the story:

Half of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 7, 2023 have been destroyed. The other half are partially functional, overwhelmed with the injured and refugees.

Two-thirds of little Gaza’s primary health care facilities have been demolished. In North Gaza, home to an estimated million souls at this moment (people Israel-USA wants to forcible expel), one partially functional hospital remains.

As if the situation in Gaza weren’t sufficiently appalling – two years into a war widely described as genocidal, by people who know what genocide is and have the honesty to use the word (too many to cite here) — Gaza is now swept by infectious pathogens few if any drugs can treat.

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In a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a half-dozen strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria have been described, isolated from 1300 tissue specimens gathered at one of Gaza’s sole surviving microbiology units, at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in Gaza City, between November 2023 and the end of August, 2024.

Among the strains of drug-resistant bacteria the researchers identified, notorious wound pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella, and E. coli.

Two-thirds of all isolates were resistant to multiple antibiotics, from different drug classes (a benchmark for establishing ‘multidrug resistance’), indicating “sustained selection pressure.”

In other words, prevailing conditions in Gaza are ‘selecting for’, and therefore driving the emergence of resistant strains of virulent bacteria few if any drugs will treat.

Conditions are also ripe for the spread of these diseases.

Crowded field hospital wards, squalid tent encampments, and the almost complete destruction of Gaza’s sewage and freshwater systems are a perfect storm for the spread of diseases no drug will treat.

To make the situation even more acute, antibiotics are in short supply in Gaza. So are wound irrigation fluids and sterile dressings, and the materials needed to culture bacteria, in order to establish the best antibiotics to treat them.

Sixteen percent of Pseudomonas samples examined by the Lancet study’s authors were resistant to the drug colistin, the drug of last resort when all others fail. The last remaining bullet.

“The international medical community has a duty to act and respond to this crisis,” the authors of the Lancet piece write.

“First and foremost, healthcare workers and governments worldwide must advocate for the cessation of the Israeli military invasion that has resulted in a surge of trauma injuries and the widespread deliberate targeting of hospitals, laboratories, and water desalination plants; without this ceasefire, the infection burden will escalate further.”

The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the Lancet report.

Bilal Irfan is a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, and a researcher at the medical school’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, specializing in conflict health. Irfan has been collaborating with Palestinian medical students and physicians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the documentation of Israeli medicide.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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And here’s another Lancet piece, released on August 18, 2025, lead author Bilal Irfan, entitled “Is Gaza still a place for newborn life?”

Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the official death toll now topping 60,000 (possibly approaching 200,000), famine has now been formally declared by the UN agency that declares such things – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC.

It’s a “worst case scenario,” the IPC declared at the end of July.

No news for those who follow the media.

Skeletal toddlers and non-lactating Gazan mothers crowd TV screens and online news platforms day after day.

All “blood lies,” says criminal fugitive Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, under arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

Still, Israel’s fast friends seem moved, and are now declaring the horror show has to stop.

“Dangerous,” a couple of dozen Western officials recently declared. “Inhumane,” “unacceptable,” “egregious.”

Outrageously unlawful? No. No Western state has gone that far. No mention of the G-word, nor the A-word.

But a sea change seems to be underway, in places you’d least expect – the UK, the Netherlands … Germany.

And Canada — rock-solid Israeli Bro when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister.

Justin Trudeau vowed a more nuanced, Palestine-friendly policy. Displaying true Liberal colours, however, Trudeau’s Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, vowed Canada would be Israel’s “asset” at the UN Security Council — should it win a seat.

It didn’t.

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Now, in the Red Chamber of the Canadian Parliament, the Senate, sturdier voices are calling for justice and action.

In late June, then again in late July, Canadian Senators called on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to uphold international law, urging the Canadian government to implement a half dozen punitive measures against Israel. The GPM spoke with one of them, Canadian Senator from the Province of Manitoba, the Honorable Marilou McPhedran.

Marilou McPhedran is a Canadian lawyer and human rights advocate. She was the Dean of the University of Winnipeg’s Global College, in Manitoba, between 2008 and 2012, and has been a member of the Senate of Canada since October 2016.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

War and police repression — land and climate destruction: flip sides of the same coin.

Twenty-two months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, US bombs and missiles have reportedly generated about 40 million tonnes of concrete rubble, liberally seasoned with the toxic residues of US, British and German munitions.

Cleaning up Israel-USA’s mountain of poisonous detritus, reducing it to a finer grade of carcinogenic rubble, trucking it all off (underlying terrain to be replaced by Trump/Witkoff real estate?), will generate an estimated 90,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

By some estimates, rebuilding Gaza (if this can be imagined) will generate thirty million tonnes of Earth-warming gases — and a shit-load of cash.

Meanwhile, in Israel-USA — intellectual co-author/perpetrator of Israeli mass murder and destruction — Donald Trump’s “Big Ugly Billionaire Bailout Bill” pulverizes America’s fledgling renewable energy industry. Wind turbines and solar panel farms have been slashed. They kill birds and mar the landscape, the NYC/Florida-based sociopath says.

Buried in his ten-thousand-word pile of vicious legislative rubble, a $150 billion allocation to ICE – US Immigration Control & Enforcement. Trump’s Brown Shirts are now terrorizing black, brown and Latino communities coast to coast.

The GPM talked about all this with Aaron Kirshenbaum, War is Not Green organizer for the US antiwar and justice organization CODEPINK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

You have to laugh to keep from crying sometimes. Two years into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza — bloody slaughter and mass starvation live streamed on TV screens — the old blues lyric rings true.

For tears of joy, not rage, friends of Palestine should consider visiting Bethlehem.

Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the loveliest of holy towns, hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers, checkpoints, and a string of mega-Jewish settler-colonies, a biologist named Mazin Qumsiyeh, his partner Jessie and friends are planting native Palestinian seeds, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, and offering up habitat for insects, birds, bats, and other small mammals.

Rescuing their beloved landscape from Euro-North American land thieves and eco-vandals.

The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, their oasis is called. Perched above the Palestine Institute’s splendid gardens, a 1200-square meter museum is now nearing completion.

For an update on the Palestine Institute’s new museum, and gardens beneath, we reached out to Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist, scholar, author, and environmental justice advocate. Together with his partner Jessie Chang, Mazin founded the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, and the Palestine Museum of Natural History. Mazin has published over 150 scientific papers and books on topics ranging from cultural heritage to biodiversity.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Learn how to volunteer here.

Watch a complete conversation of ours here, recorded in the Palestine Institute garden back in April 2024. Thanks to Paul Tekenbroek for video production. 

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on, with no end in sight.

Mainstream commentators with some degree of sympathy for the Palestinian people argue that Israel needs to be ‘pressured’ to end the war.

Others say Israel will have to be forced to withdraw from Gaza. Indeed, to terminate its unlawful occupation of all Palestinian territories.

Unlawful is how the International Court of Justice described Israel’s 58-year-old occupation, in a UN-solicited Advisory Opinion issued over a year ago. In the wake of the ICJ’s ruling, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to end its occupation within a year. That would be this coming September.

Israel will certainly not do so. The US won’t pressure it, let alone force it. The US and Israel are blood-brothers; conjoined twins.

So, hope turns to European capitals. Last week, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron announced that France would formally recognize the State of Palestine.

The UK may follow, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is much more weak-kneed that Macron, and anxious to please Donald Trump, who thinks Gaza should be completely bulldozed, then turned into a real estate paradise for people like himself and his wealthy friends.

Last May, speaking to a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide in Sarajevo, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé offered his own thoughts on the troubling situation.

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Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter’s College of Social Sciences and International Studies, where he directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies.

He’s also the author of various foundational works on Palestine. Among these, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Ten Myths About Israel. His most recent work — Lobbying For Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic — was released last year.

Listen to Ilan Pappé in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

It’s been seven months since the start of Donald Trump’s second administration. A hundred and eighty days. Feels like years.

With lightning speed, razor-sharp precision, and the ferocity of junkyard dogs, Trump and his minions have slashed thousands of federal jobs, gutted departments responsible for health, education, environmental protection; for international development assistance; for the funding of medical and climate research.

War has been declared on free speech, transgender people, and the media — corporate and public.

“Fake News,” Trump calls them. “Enemies of the People.”

Central mission of Trump’s second regime: driving millions of undocumented migrants out of the country; pursuing them with militarized savagery; spiriting them off to gulag jails stretching from Florida, Louisiana and Texas down to El Salvador; shipping them off to remote African locations; people who’ve lived and worked in America for years; who’ve never committed a crime; who’ve paid taxes; raised kids – kids born in America.

Strip them of their citizenship,  Trump and his ‘Homeland Security’ capos cry.

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Aside from migrant black, brown and Hispanic folks who just want to earn a living in a country they believe is great, nothing fills Donald Trump’s craw with more bile than those three normative nouns – diversity, equity and inclusiveness.

Trump and his White-America-First czars are now rooting out DEI programs with the zealousness of medieval crusaders.

Dorothy Roberts

American scholar and writer Dorothy Roberts spoke with the GPM about Trump’s first 180 days, examining Trump’s policies through the lens of race, class and gender.

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society – and a prolific writer.

Among Dorothy Roberts’ works: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century; Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty; and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.

Roberts’ latest book — The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family — will be available in February 2026.

Listen to our conversation with Dorothy Roberts in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Criminal kingpins defend themselves. Cross them at your own risk.

White Rose activists resisting the Nazis; Italian journalists and prosecutors pursuing the mafia; dissident Russian politicians challenging Vladimir Putin – and getting too popular … they all paid the price: guillotined, gunned down, poisoned, or starved to death in gulag dungeons.

White Rose activist Sophie Scholl

Now, condemning the US government and its foreign policies, or pursuing its beloved partner in crime in court, probably won’t get you killed. Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, will just ruin your life.

Ask Andrew Cayley. Together with American lawyer Brenda Hollis, Cayley, a British barrister, steered the International Criminal Court investigation leading to arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his war minister, Yoav Gallant, back in November 2024.

“It was the worst few months of my life,” Cayley told the Observer.

US Senator Lindsey Graham screamed and yelled at Cayley and his colleagues, vowing sanctions against them and the court, in his cranky redneck drawl.

Scary phone threats followed. Then, the kicker: Watch your back, Dutch police warned Cayley.

“They said we need to look at your flat and we need to put alarms on all the French windows, bars across the skylights and you need a reinforced bulletproof door,” Cayley recounted to the Observer.

Terrorized, Cayley quit last fall. Others have too.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, flanked by prosecutors Brenda Hollis and Andrew Cayley

Meanwhile, ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and four judges now face crushing US sanctions; bank accounts have been frozen; email accounts blocked. The entire court’s IT system – its very existence – is under threat. (in flagrant breach of Article 70 of the ICC’s Rome Statute.)

In the midst of it all, Benjamin Netanyahu travels back and forth between Tel Aviv and Washington, through European airspace, fearing nothing from Greek, Italian, French, or British authorities.

The GPM spoke with British barrister Toby Cadman about ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, where they stand, anticipated warrants against other Israeli leaders, and crippling US sanctions against the ICC.

Toby Cadman is an international human rights lawyer, and the co-founder and joint head of Guernica 37 Chambers, a London-based law firm specializing in international criminal and humanitarian law.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

Then, there’s Italian human rights lawyer Francesca Albanese.

In her role as Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Occupied Palestine, Albanese has submitted a host of damning reports to the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council.

Israel and its conjoined twin have not been amused.

Albanese’s latest report has really pissed off the Americans.

 “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” it’s called.

Albanese’s report lists dozens of mega-corporations that have been aiding, abetting, and profiting from Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide. Among these, US-based Lockheed-Martin, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar … the list goes on and on.

Infuriated, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has struck back.

“Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” Rubio wrote in a statement released on July 9, slapping sanctions on Albanese.

Little Marco was just warming up.

Albanese, Donald Trump’s poker-faced Secretary of State declared, has written “threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

The GPM spoke to Albanese last January.

At the time, Israeli Occupation Forces were in the midst of demolishing Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank. Since then, some 70,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps.

Since October 7, 2023, about a thousand Palestinians have been killed up and down the West Bank by Jewish settler-terrorists and their soldier friends.

Since May, almost 800 starving Gazans have been gunned down by Israeli military snipers and US mercenaries, while seeking out food at US/Israeli “humanitarian aid” centers.

Most recently, Israeli war minister Israel Katz has floated the idea of building a concentration camp on the ruins of southern Rafah, into which Gaza’s surviving two million woe begotten residents would be forced — presumably by a fleet of weaponized, heavily armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, provided by Israel-USA.

Listen to our conversation with Francesca Albanese. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

We’ve been sharing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024.

Faced with a “total failure of the organised international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal “aims to legitimize an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.”

The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe and North America.

The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October. That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.

In today’s GPM podcast — voices from a tribunal session about corporate media reporting on the Gaza genocide, chaired by Turkish attorney Mehmet Karli.

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Participants include: Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel bureau chief for the Middle East Eye; British journalist Victoria Brittain; Ezgi Basaran, Oxford University scholar on Turkish and Middle East politics; Assal Rad, Middle East history scholar and non-resident Fellow at DAWN, a group founded by murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and British broadcaster and journalist, Lauren Booth.

Listen to the panel in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

“Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which includes mass killing, arbitrary detention, torture, and the imposition of a legal regime that provides far less due process than that provided to Israelis living in the same territory, meets the legal definition of apartheid.”

So say four American human rights lawyers and scholars in a report released on May 15, entitled “An Analysis of Israel’s Laws and Policies and the Responsibilities of US Academic and Other Institutions.”

Sandra Babcock is director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School. Thomas Becker is the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights, and teaches human rights at Columbia Law School. James Cavallaro is the executive director of the University Network for Human Rights, and a visiting professor at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Susan M Akram is director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law.

The GPM spoke about the report with Susan Akram.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Flag Woman in Rotterdam, October 2023 (David Kattenburg)

We’ve been playing extracts from a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide, that took place in Sarajevo at the end of May. Inspired by the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US war on Iraq, the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024.

Faced with a “total failure of the organized international community to implement international law in the most severe, visible case of genocide in real time,” the Gaza Tribunal’s website states, it “aims to legitimize “an alternative paradigm of international law, one that derives its authority from people and their sense of justice rather than relying solely on governments and their institutions.”

The Gaza Tribunal is governed by an eight-member Steering Committee headed by Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, assisted by a 29-member Advisory Policy Council of civil society leaders and public intellectuals from Palestine, Europe, and North America.

Among these: Diana Buttu, Susan Abulhawa, Mouin Rabbani, Raja Shehadeh, Ghassan Abu Sittah, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Yanis Varoufakis, Tariq Ali, Mary Kaldor, Naomi Klein, and Jeremy Corbyn.

The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October.

That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.

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Here’s a presentation from the third day of the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo.

Saree Makdisi is an American literary critic and professor, of Palestinian and Lebanese descent. He also writes on contemporary Arab politics and culture. Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Listen to Saree Makdisi in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000.

According to a pair of reports in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher.

Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000? Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble.

Another 150,000 would have died from profound injuries that couldn’t be treated, or from wound infection, infectious disease, chronic diseases that can no longer be treated — because Israel has blocked entry of medicines and vital equipment — and from starvation.

As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza.

Nearly half of its population are children. Those who physically survive, deeply traumatized, will carry scars for the rest of their lives, both physical and psychological. Many now face a life of disability, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending.

If they bear children, their children will too. A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this.

In late May, a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, featuring scores of witness accounts and testimony, was held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Tribunal’s final judgement will be rendered by a ‘Jury of Conscience’ composed of a half dozen judges, following closing hearings in Istanbul in late October.

That judgement, together with personal testimony, civil society submissions, and closing reports from each of the Tribunal’s three Chambers, will be incorporated into a set of public archives that will remain open for continuing submissions.

Last week, the GPM featured a presentation to the Gaza Tribunal by British scholar Penny Green, speaking about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. We reached out to Penny Green, for a more in-depth conversation.

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click play above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

GPM # 98

Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza has just entered its 21st month.

According to Gaza health officials, almost 55,000 have been killed since the war began (the actual number may be two or three times higher), and 125,000 have been injured, with fewer and fewer places to seek care.

Gaza’s health system — among the region’s most functional, before the war — has been laid to waste. Hospitals, clinics, emergency rescue vehicles and health care personnel are perfectly legitimate targets, Israel says, insisting that it’s operating squarely within the bounds of international law.

Of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 2023, seventeen are now in partial operation. Seven out of fifteen field hospitals, 61 out of 160 primary health centres, and 127 out of 353 mobile clinics are partially functional.

Gaza’s kids are suffering the most. The tiny enclave, under comprehensive Israeli siege since 2007, is now reportedly home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world.

“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said, at the end of October 2023. In late May, UNICEF reported that fifteen thousand Gazan kids have been killed, over 34,000 injured, and nearly a million deprived of their right to basic services.

Last week, the GPM reported on a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide, held in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The three-day hearing featured scores of witness accounts and testimony. Among the most gripping, accounts from two physicians who’ve worked in Gaza hospitals.

Dr. Mimi Syed is an American board-certified emergency medicine physician. She served in Gaza from August to September 2024, and in December 2024, at both Al-Aqsa and Nasser Hospitals.

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency medicine physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Chicago, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois.  He spent time at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, just north of Rafah, the last remaining referral hospital in south Gaza.

Listen to Mimi Syed and Thaer Ahmad in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 55,000.

According to a pair of reports last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, the number may be much higher.

Before the war, Gaza’s population was pegged at 2.3 million. These days, mainstream media talk about 2.1 million Gazans. What happened to the remaining 200,000?

Fifty to seventy-five thousand have likely been blown to bits by US bombs and missiles, many of them now buried under vast piles of rubble.

Another 150,000 have presumably died from grave injuries, or from wound infection, infectious disease in fetid refugee encampments (that Israel incessantly bombs), chronic ailments that can no longer be treated, due to Israel’s blockade on drugs and vital equipment, and from starvation.

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As awful as these figures are, worse is surely in store for little Gaza.

Nearly half of Gaza’s population are children. Those who survive, deeply traumatized, will carry both physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Many now face a life of disability, without social or economic supports, under permanent military occupation and siege the international community has shown no interest in ending.

If they bear children, their children will too, and their children’s children. 

A “pandemic of disabilities,” the Commissioner General of UNRWA, the UN Relief & Works Agency, called this.

Late last month, at the Gaza Tribunal, in Sarajevo, British scholar Penny Green spoke about the “disabling” tactics Israeli Occupation Forces have deployed over the course of the last 21 months in Gaza. Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, and the acting chair of the Gaza Tribunal.

Listen to Penny Green in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.