Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 32: Hunger and the Gaza war

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

There is now hunger in Gaza, widespread and dangerous. It's less dire than Western media claims, but could reach those proportions if it isn't reversed through an aid surge.How did we get to this point? What were Israeli officials thinking?And what does the current crisis tell us about the state of the war?This episode was sponsored by an anonymous sponsor who dedicated it to the bravery of our friend Shaked Haran, whose story is told in episode 5 of this podcast. On October 7, Shaked's father, uncle and aunt were killed in the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be'eri, and seven members of her family, including her mother and two cousins aged 3 and 7 were taken hostage, launching a long and grueling fight for their liberation that Shaked helped lead for the family.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to one of the more frustrating episodes of Ask Aviv Anything. It actually took me a few days to turn this around. I wrote and thought and read and threw it all out and thought again and read again and rethought it again. What the heck is happening in Gaza? What's happening in the Israeli leadership? What can we learn from the last two weeks in the hunger crisis in Gaza about the strategy in this war, about the management of this war, about the next steps, the future of this war, about whether Israelis understand at a strategic level, the nature of the enemy. I'm going to argue that Israeli officials have still failed to understand Hamas. I'm going to argue, I'm going to

try and present what I think Israeli officials were thinking as we daryled into this situation. everybody has already talked a great deal about the morality of the hunger crisis in Gaza right now, and there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. Not everywhere, there's also a upper middle class that is eating well. But in a great many places, especially among the poor, and most of Gaza is working class poor. At the same time, there isn't starvation, with the exception of small pockets having to do with specific problems of distribution, which have to be solved urgently. But there isn't masturbation in Gaza, as many of the news reports around the world are saying. But there could be. Israel is now surging aid.

But it's doing it in ways that teach us a great deal about what it was thinking before, about the mistakes that were made coming to this point, and also about how the war is being run and whether or not we have a strategy. No Israeli official has been able to really counter the international discussion about this, because Israel has no information war strategy of any kind to the point where the prime minister doesn't bother having an English language spokesperson humanitarian aid is foundational to the war strategy Hamas intends to survive by forcing a scale of civilian suffering

that Israel can't afford to have imposed on Ghazan civilians meaning Hamas was going to win a game of chicken over aid So what's the strategy of aid? How does it fit into the larger context and thinking of the war? How is it that a leadership that could give us the astonishing competence of the 12-day Iran War stumbled this badly for months?

How is it that he can't explain to us what the actual strategy is in Gaza? All of that in this episode. I hope by the end of it you don't just hear my frustration, which is obvious. I'm usually calmer. I promise the next episode will be calmer. But I hope also that this gives you a sense of what went wrong, where the war stands as a snapshot of the war, and what are the paths for fixing the things that have gone wrong. Before we go any further, I want to tell you that this episode was sponsored very, very appropriately by an anonymous sponsor who asked to dedicate it to our friend Shakambi.

Haran. Shaked's story is told in episode five of this podcast when I interview her. So many of you may know. On October 7, she began a long, long fight to rescue her family. Her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law, her aunt, her cousin, her niece and nephew. The niece and nephew were just three and seven at the time. We're all kidnapped from Kibbutz Be'ri by Hamas terrorists who had come into the Kibbutz. on the morning of October 7. And this episode is dedicated to the memory of members of her family who were murdered that day. Her father, Avshal, Avshalom Haran, her uncle Tari, or Eviatar Kipnis, her aunt Lilaq Kipnis.

Avshal was an entrepreneur, a loving grandfather, among many other positions. He also ran the Be'eri Press, which is a very significant, well-known Israeli printing press. he was a skipper. He was a manager in various businesses of the kibbutz. Lelah herself was a trauma psychologist who worked with children. Tari and Lelah were also peace activists

deeply involved in coexistence programs with Palestinians. And also and crucially Paul Vincent Kastelvi Tari's Filipino caretaker, who was also a

beloved part of the family. and was also murdered on October 7. He is survived by his parents who live in the Philippines, and his wife Jovel Belle Santiago, who lived in Israel and actually gave birth to their firstborn child, less than a month after Paul was murdered. Let's get into it. Israel and Gaza is fighting three wars,

three distinct wars, which are all deeply interconnected. It's fighting a ground war, a kinetic war, a war with infantry, tanks and Air Force support. It's fighting a humanitarian aid war. And what do I mean by humanitarian aid war? Those are not usually words that are mashed together. I'll explain in very short order because it's really fundamental to understanding the failure of Israel's policies up until now in Gaza over the last, probably since March. And it is fighting an

information war, a war that Israel is culturally allergic to and has difficulty understanding, but which is foundational to Hamas' strategy and which Israel has almost entirely neglected. These are all intertwined. And we have discovered over the last, I would say, two weeks it's really come home in really damaging ways that two of the three arenas of this war are beyond the grasp of Israeli decision makers. We're about to talk about the hunger war, the humanitarian aid war. I talk about it as a war because everyone is maneuvering. There is a deep crisis of hunger.

It is not starvation. It has not yet reached starvation. Starvation has an actual definition. Starvation is a specific kind of problem. Hunger is a different problem. But the mass hunger was tilting into starvation in some places and threatened to become starvation everywhere. Not as a pinpoint place specific to some specific problem of supply,

but throughout the strip. Would it have been another two weeks, another five weeks? I don't know. But it was there. It was coming. That's what the system was leading toward if the policy wasn't fundamentally changed. And Israeli policymakers, for some good and important reasons that are also entirely incorrect, didn't think that it was coming.

So there's the real problem of hunger. And then there's the way Hamas thinks of it, the way the Israeli leadership has thought of it, and the way everybody's trying to maneuver around it. I want to adjust both those things. They're fundamental to understanding how we get out of this. And all three, or the interconnectedness of them, seems to be beyond the grasp of Israeli decision makers. Let's get into the ground war. The IDF now holds 75% of the strip.

It controls it. It holds it. There's soldiers on the ground, and they have total control of those areas. There's a little bit of pockets of guerrilla resistance in some places, not significant. There's some areas the idea of it's still trying to go to, but it's not going to be able to expand much more than it currently holds without instituting civilian, just governance over the civilians of Gaza. Because there's not much more left of Gaza in which civilians can be without the army ending up taking over if it continues to expand its control over the strip. Now, that might be what happens. That might be what happens for two years, while Gaza is.

the guerrilla forces of Hamas are pacified. But that's a massive decision Israel has to make. It has not made that decision. There's nowhere to send the civilians out of harm's way. There's nowhere to advance without losing hostages. And that brings me to the second war, the humanitarian aid war. I call it a humanitarian war because Hamas' fundamental plan for survival, their main strategic weapon is Gaza's humanitarian suffering.

Israel took a calculated risk after the last ceasefire in January, February, beginning in March, Israel stopped aid going into Gaza. I'll explain why that's a calculated risk and not just cruelty. In the ceasefire in January, February, so much aid was pushed into Gaza that the U.N. data on the aid that counted just the sheer amount that went in, said that it should have lasted six months in Gaza to feed Gazans properly for six months. So when Israel imposed a siege in March, which six weeks, maybe seven weeks later, was already significantly lifted, it was a show. It was pressure. It was an attempt to play a kind of game of chicken with Hamas that said that you have to give us our hostages in exchange for this aid. It was taking the gloves off because it had already been a year and a half, and they still held hostages. And so this was seen as a pressure. And it was a calculated pressure because it was calculated not to cause hunger. Decalculations of the IDF and Israeli officials were that there were months of leeway. They were leaving a safety margin of months of food before the population actually had any kind of fear of food emergency. Professor Yanaj Spitzer, who I cited in the free press live stream a week ago that set a ball rolling that I hope had some effect on the change in Israel.

policy. Amit Segal, my colleague and Israeli journalist, a well-known Israeli journalist, cited my comments and cited my citing of Yanai Spitzel, ran with it, it ran in the free press, it ran in the Israeli press. Professor Spitzel was interviewed on CNN. He believes that the Israeli officials thought that famine should not have occurred, and he argues that they were not unreasonable to believe that. UN data itself showed that there was enough food in Gaza. But the food ran out faster than expected. Sometime last month, the stockpiles were brought down. Many families, many clans, many crime organizations possibly were stockpiling. In a time where food scarcity is a genuine threat, you stockpile.

That makes sense. And here's the thing. That means that there's a lot of food sitting in cabinets or backpacks or tents in some families and therefore far too little food in other places in Gaza because you don't stockpile perfectly evenly throughout the population. These are the details for how the Israelis allowed themselves to reach a point where they had to blink. It turned into a game of chicken on humanitarian aid and Israel can't afford to have Gaza and starve to death. Hamas can. So the details don't matter. The whole point was just to understand the mechanism that got Israel there finding itself with the entire strategy of trying to redirect aid away from Hamas control or the capacity of Hamas to steal it, collapsing before our eyes.

For the first time in 22 months of dishonesty, of artificial moral panics, of pretend famines by organizations that deliberately skewed data or ignored data or just shot the notices out there because they knew a lot of journalists would pick them up. For the first time in this war, Yanai Spitzer explained to us that we were actually potentially reaching a point of real hunger. And he told us, don't look at the quantity metrics that the army was looking at, the amount of aid that had gone in. Because those metrics tell you there's enough food. Look at the prices in the markets. Look at the prices in Gaza of flour and sugar.

And you'll discover that the prices are soaring. They're soaring threefold and then fivefold. that we've seen throughout the war that you see generally in wars. But then they started soaring 30-fold and 80-fold, and that's already a sign of real emergency. There are still images coming out of Gaza, of markets full of food. There are parts of the Ghazan upper classes and middle classes that are still eating well. Not everybody belongs to those classes.

Most Ghazans don't belong to those classes. Most Gazans are poor. And the young, the sick, the elderly. elderly are vulnerable to real hunger. A situation of real hunger not in small pockets in some places because of a specific operation that caused supply problems for very limited time, which we had seen throughout the war. But sustained and systemic and widespread actually was taking hold. Spitzel's numbers triggered my amygdala, my fight or flight response. It kind of convinced me there's a real emergency.

I'd a little bit been dulled into complacency by being told there's an emergency when no emergency ever materialized for over a year. And now it looked like there really was an emergency. And when I said those words on the free press, the free press itself, who were a wonderful group of people,

and I don't know if you know, I've announced it on the podcast. I have joined the free press as a Middle East analyst. I'm very proud to be part of that world, that operation. Barry Weiss built there something truly extraordinary. They were triggered just like me. They actually took that clip about the hunger and put it out on social media to make sure the whole world saw it. And that's when the Israeli government, I think, also noticed in a serious way and began a serious maneuver to change the whole concept that you can withhold the aid. You can

try and maneuver the aid around Hamas and supply it to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, for example. Switching from thinking about aid in quantitative data terms, where the UN data for quantities going in is still good to trying to actually trace the demand side, what are cousins actually getting their hands on? And that's a whole other story. Food was going in. Food wasn't getting to the people.

The problem was distribution. The Israelis did not understand that. They now do. In the meantime, hunger took hold. Hunger is a chronic. or periodic lack of food. It's undernutrition. Not starvation, which is life-threatening emergency at a large scale, but hunger. And hunger turns very quickly into starvation if it isn't headed off.

I'm not justifying Israel driving the aid question to the place it was this week. I'm describing incompetence that had the potential to become catastrophic. and that will still take efforts to reverse and prevent any kind of disaster and here's the thing dear leaders of israel the whole concept of the strategy that you could use aid as pressure and cleverly think that you have a month two months three months wiggle room was flawed at the very core why would hamas ever blink first Have you met Hamas, dear Israeli government? Why did you think this was going to work? The humanitarian arena, the humanitarian question, besides the really deep and profound moral questions

which everyone is asking and I encourage them to. And because everyone is asking, I don't have to. I want to say something fundamental about strategy. That humanitarian peace of the war has just won for Hamas, day-long positive, in fighting, something they only ever got in the past for hostage releases. And it got it for them a week after they refused a ceasefire and refused a hostage release because global attention was crashing down on Israel.

So they can wait this out, let Israel stew. This was a military setback. And it was a military setback because at no point could Israel in any way not just control the narrative, but respond to the narrative. clarify in international media. And no, it isn't just that they're against us. They're absolutely set against us. But even those who aren't said against us

had no answers from Israel for days and days. I didn't have answers from Israel. Israel has largely succeeded in the ground war and is utterly failed in the information war and in the humanitarian war and failed so severely that Hamas has been propped up at every turn its resilience assured and all the gains in the battlefield

jeopardized. The last two weeks where Hamas got the opening of not just aid but actually a ceasefire, a kind of limited ceasefire. Because we had made a terrible mistake, not because they

had given a single hostage. Months wasted playing a game the enemy couldn't lose. And that if you miscalculate the dire consequences, are justifiably on you, on your head. Professor John Spencer from West Point, who has been on this podcast,

and who I have learned a great deal from in the last 22 months, he has pointed out that Israeli aid supplies to Gaza, the Israeli military supply of aid to Gaza, has been at a scale unprecedented in the history of warfare. It's not ordinary for armies to supply the enemy population or, frankly, the enemy military through the enemy population. he's by the way not against it he thinks it's necessary now he says it's a moral necessity i don't want to misrepresent him but he does also point out that it's never happened at this scale in this way in the history of warfare but there's another side to that point this is the kind of war unlike any ever fought in the history of warfare chamas transformed gaza into a battlefield nobody has ever faced before into this vast underground fortress

500 kilometers of tunnels under a 25-kilometer territory, a tunnel warfare strategy no one has seen. Tunnels that criss-gross every Palestinian city and every Palestinian neighborhood with thousands of entrances and exits that they use for their guerrilla fighting at this moment. Soldiers have died just in the last two weeks from Khamas fight popping out of these tunnel entrances and attacking them. And the purpose of these tunnels, the purpose of these tunnels is to allow that to, kind of guerrilla warfare and to allow and to force an enemy who comes into Gaza to essentially demolish Gaza in pursuit

of the destruction of those tunnels and the enemy that lies within those tunnels. I used to say this and be a lone voice eight months ago. Palestinian activists understand it now and are saying it now. There's a Christian

Palestinian activist named Dihab Hassan I only know of him from Twitter who talks about about how Hamas is willing to watch every last child in Gaza die. And he's criticized Hamas a lot. Not everyone is willing to do that in the activist diaspora. But just that sense and understanding that Hamas' basic strategy is to leverage Gaza's suffering

and therefore also to drive Gaza's suffering. And that that tunnel project, which is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built, Hamas bent 17 years of Gaza's economy to that project, It is what Hamas is, more than any other thing Hamas has ever done. That tunnel project is enormous, immense. It's actually an astonishing achievement. And its purpose is that when the enemy comes for Hamas, the only way to get to Hamas is to cut through cities.

And Hamas built that tunnel system and then launched October 7th. Just the scale of Hamas's willingness to oversee Gaza's destruction. if you think i'm exonerating israel it's almost the opposite if you think we're monsters and evil people and callous and cruel chamas's strategy becomes doubly monstrous because how could they have expected anything but total destruction worse destruction this is a military problem of a sort that may be in the history of warfare japan posed and the u s response to the sense of japanese ideological intransigence and willingness to tolerate untold losses was to drop nukes on Japanese cities. What's Israel supposed to do right now to get Hamas to end the war? Assuming that it can't end the war with Hamas in power, because then there'll be another war in five years, because then Gaza will suffer every day, because then every enemy of Israel will know that all you have to do

is be willing to have your own people die. And Israel is, you know, you know, you know, you can't win. So if Israel can't leave that message intact, what's it supposed to do? Humanitarian aid, if you understand Hamas, in that sense, in that way, is foundational to the strategy, not letting Gazan suffer more than necessary, showing that you are providing humanitarian aid. If the problem is that Hamas deals the aid and sells it and therefore supports it, supports the war effort, flood Gaza with so much aid that the prices crash. This was a point made a thousand times by Israel's critics, by Israel's supporters, by me. Ordinary stupid people, holding the aid away from Gazans as a game of chicken with a Hamas

whose foundational strategy is Gaza's destruction is about as dumb a strategy as you can get. and the information war. British Prime Minister Kier Starmar and French President Emmanuel Macron have warned Israel that they're going to recognize a state of Palestine in September at the UN General Assembly. The concern isn't that they're going to recognize or not recognize a great many states recognize a state of Palestine. The concern is that they're going to do it for Hamas.

They're going to hand Hamas the victory. And Kier Starrmer did it in an especially hamfisted in stupid way. Forgive the blunt language. This hasn't been a week for calm and beating around the bush. He said that if there isn't a ceasefire by September, he'll declare that he recognizes a Palestinian state. What he essentially explained was that if Hamas holds out and refuses a ceasefire, as it did last week, until September, Hamas will get a Palestinian state recognition from the United Kingdom. And if Israel does achieve, a ceasefire. If Hamas hands Israel a ceasefire, it won't get that recognition. So a ceasefire, Israel

agreed to when Hamas turned down, and mediators have said it's Hamas's fault, Hamas is the rejectionist party here. Quietly, that's been heard from Arab mediators, but very publicly from Whitkoff. The British Prime Minister has just decided to massively incentivize Hamas to continue avoiding a ceasefire. I don't know what you do with that level of incompetence. I wish the British luck. These are incompetent, frightened politicians. If they were trying to take a moral stand,

they would already have taken that moral stand long ago. Or they would have just made the announcement this week and pulled off that band-aid quickly. But now they managed to incentivize Hamas to stay, the corps, stick to their guns, and avoid the ceasefire, and have a victory to crow about. the thing is that when you go to French analysts or politicians or diplomats or British analyst politicians or diplomats and you say to them what's the logic never mind the political discourse you all have large Muslim minorities

you've all had marches against Israel and against the Gaza war maybe you're just caving to some backbench pressure fine but what's the actual logic of doing it this way doing it in a way that actually incentivizes the exact opposite of the thing you claim you want to be achieving. You invariably hear the same thing. We think the war against Hamas is legitimate, but it just keeps looking like that's not what the war is about. Israeli officials insist, Bitzal al-Smotritch, the finance minister, who's also a minister and the defense minister, Itamar Ben-Gvier, the public security minister, Amichai Eliyahu, various lawmakers from Likud. They keep arguing. that the goal is to empty Gaza.

And so if we don't believe your intentions are good, everything said and everything done falls into that lens. They are responding stupidly. To their own politics, sure. To global disinformation campaigns and information ops. We've seen that. The New York Times running a picture of a Gazan child who looks emaciated and claiming that that's hunger

and cropping out of the picture, the healthy sibling next to, and putting that picture on the front page of the New York Times where it sets the West on fire, the entirety of Western civilization on fire. And it's a lie. Why is it a lie? That child absolutely exists,

and that child is probably suffering of hunger. And that child is very sensitive to even very light levels of hunger. Everyone else around him is healthy. not because he has that pre-existing condition. But that's not how he was presented. He wasn't presented as the vulnerable in Gaza. The few unique pre-existing genetic conditions are suffering more.

That's not what was told. That's not what that image was about. That is what Gaza children are now. That was the claim. That was the picture. That was the narrative. And it is simply untrue. and these politicians are responding to all of that, yes.

But they're also responding to the fact that Israel has no other voice. They're responding to Israel's total disappearance, total refusal, blanket refusal to engage in the information war. An information space from which Hamas draws a tremendous amount of its resilience. Watching the international discourse on Gaza, drove Hamas' decision to walk away from the ceasefire table this time around. And the Israelis aren't there. How much aren't they there?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu literally does not have an English-language spokesperson. Never mind, a serious information, war operation that can get reliable information from the battlefield to respond to accusations quickly and efficiently, and after being fact-checked several times by various outlets, turns out to actually be telling the truth. Never mind that kind of competent, basic kind of military operation to tell the narrative of the war

as it's progressing. Initiating, a system to initiate information ahead of time, before an operation, before a story comes out, before a new narrative takes hold, or as it's taking hold, so that there is this response.

The head of UN relief said, I believe, on the BBC, that 14,000 babies were going to die 48 hours. That's a claim so preposterously, ridiculously impossible that somebody should have noticed. But there was a firm that counted social media impressions of that claim. It got to $4 billion. By the time the firm published its findings sometime after the UN Relief Chief said it last month. The outlets that ran the story, because they all saw the other outlets running the story, didn't actually have any easy contact in the Israeli government to turn to,

who could tell them this is preposterous. These are not meaningful numbers, not by three orders of magnitude. It would be a horrifying claim and possibly completely untrue if it was a thousandth of that. What are we talking about? There literally isn't just a spokesperson. Never mind all of that. Israel is totally absent from the information space and it gets worse

every single military statement about the aid distribution that is now surging into Gaza every single one and I have carefully followed every single one to make sure begins with the words on the instruction of the state leaders the derogamidini the state echelon which in Hebrew is how you say the elected leadership

the political echelon. And the instructions of the political leadership, the prime minister of the government, we are air-dropping large amounts of aid in this area. On the instructions of the political leadership, we are sending in vast, more new convoys of trucks. On the instruction of the political leadership, the army has begun to speak in every single statement,

meaning it's an order from above. It's a blanket order. order about government responsibility for the aid decision. It's using that terminology because it expects politicians to blame the army for the aid surge when they have to explain it to their base, to Netanyahu's base, to Benkvier's base, to Smotrich's base. Aid is going into Gaza. Oh, that was a military thing. The military demanded it. They're expecting the politicians to save and they're heading it off in every single statement. by pointing out that every single one of the aid operations

is under the instruction of the political leadership. That is a signal, a very clear and very sharp signal of the politics underway right now. Much like Netanyahu's decision to surge the aid, which was taken on a Saturday at a special meeting of ministers, to which Smotrich and Ben-Vir were not invited so that they wouldn't leak from the meeting and start the campaign against the dissonation.

decision before the decision could be actually passed down and carried out. Netanyahu would later, his office would give the excuse that he didn't invite Ben-Gvir and Smuthrich because he didn't want them to violate the Sabbath to come to the meeting. Folks in Judaism, Smotrich and Ben-Vir are both observant Jews. If it involves saving lives, making decisions about a war, you are required to violate the Sabbath. When Netanyahu didn't want was them leaking from the meeting and mounting a campaign again. him. Netanyahu has told the world, usually in English, that a lot of aid is going in. And in Hebrew, his people have said that the minimum necessary is going in.

My point is not that there are lies coming from politicians. My point is that these are signals of the kinds of politics that they feel constrained by, and signals of how conscious they are of those politics as they make these decisions, and signals of the incentives they're living in. the army and nittanyahu are now trying to quickly surge aid while carefully managing their rhetoric to be able to blame the other side for doing so the army feels defensive in the face of political pressure to look tough in gaza tough in air quotes and if that's true that might explain some of what we're seeing it's not hard to imagine the high command simply not being all that psychologically primed to find hunger not being all that keenly looking for it because there would be a headache to find it. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm saying that's what the politics around this have incentivized. Smaltrich has said again and again that if aid goes in, he'll resign. Aid just went in. He did not resign. What do I make of that?

That he's faking it? That he's just helping us lose the information war? Or also that he's sticking around to try and minimize how much aid goes in, or that there's simply no serious conversation about strategy shared by a serious group of people who are trying to come up with the best solution. But it's all politicking around imagery of toughness to abase. If the circumventing of Hamas in aid terms trying to deliver the aid without Hamas, the Gaza humanitarian foundation, for example, if that is unachievable at the scale required to prevent hunger and Gaza? What now? What are these politicians and these political incentive structures now going to do? When do they sit down and come up with a serious strategy that understands the failure of the

information war? Again, it's not that the campaign against us is going to stop campaigning. It's not that a great deal of what's said about Israel, which is simply fictional and wrong and bigoted, is going to change. But there isn't in Israel. ally out there that isn't uncomfortable because they cannot get information. There's no doubt that Israel has made mistakes. Big ones. I've talked about them. But nobody knows what it's even trying to do.

How it got to those mistakes. Israelis don't have a clear picture. The army believes it has reached the end of military capabilities in Gaza, what military capabilities alone can accomplish. It needs a fundamental, dramatic change in strategy to take the achievements the army has delivered. Hundreds of battles, mostly successfully fought and won,

and turned them into a strategic success. Is Netanyahu avoiding that very thing, building out that very strategy, incorporating aid in a strategic way? A year and a half ago, I made a ridiculous suggestion. The Arab world won't let the Gazans out. We want the civilians out of harm's way so we can prosecute the war against Hamas better. Well, what if we let them in?

What if we create refugee camps, basically? In the Negev, adjacent to Gaza, in Israeli territory. They're not being kicked out of Palestine, that's Palestine. We say, it's temporary, we say, we have no designs on Gaza. We say it out loud. We provide massive amounts of aid. And we deploy intelligence assets and AI cameras to try and suss out the a mouse people from those civilians.

Meanwhile, Gaza itself is safe for the war. For civilians. It's safe for civilians while Israel prosecutes the war, however it needs to, with no limits on force. Because the civilians are out. And being taken care of, seriously, systemically.

Somebody out there in the world is going to call it a concentration camps, but they call everything Israel does anyway with Holocaust imagery. Let's do it right. Let's make sure they don't die. Let's make sure they're out of harm's way. Let's make sure their suffering is minimal. Because humanitarian aid is part of the strategy. Because Hamas will win the game of chicken for Palestinian suffering. It's willing to tolerate much more Palestinian suffering than Israel can tolerate. Now, this was a ridiculous suggestion, obviously. I don't know how to do such a thing. I've never run a war.

But at least I understood this was an arena of the war. something that the military leadership did not understand. A great many Israelis, more than half, argue that politics are a fundamental driver of Netanyahu's decisions in this war. His political standing, his need to win the next election, even though he oversaw October 7. It's getting harder and harder for his defenders to explain what part of that suspicion is incorrect. You look at his behavior with Smotritsch with Ben-Gvir. What part of that is wrong? What's the Gaza strategy? If not simply political maneuvering around all the different traps that he sees around him

and the desperate need to survive at all costs in office. He's in a race between his own election prospects and Gaza's collapse. And those are politics that leave Israel telling the world constantly, only what these politicians want to tell their base, namely that Israel is a villain. I think our government has massively failed us. and I think that us now granting Hamas this great boon, this

basically ceasefire because we failed to deliver aid to Gazans to understand the state that Gazans were in not because of anything clever Hamas did that level of incompetence and misunderstanding the fact that a prime minister 22 months into a board doesn't think he needs to have a spokesperson

and who's serious about constantly being able to engage and respond on the international stage. These are signs of profound incompetence, and it matters. And by the way, an incompetence rooted entirely, I believe, I've come to believe, in those politics. The generals who are now failing in Gaza, strategically to understand, aid, information, are the same generals who gave us the astonishing 12-day war in Iran. Gaza is a different kind of war. It is less about seeing the future of the battlefield and building astonishingly innovative technologies,

and more about understanding the mechanisms that sustain Hamas' rule. International concern sustains Hamas' rule. Gaza's suffering sustains Hamas' rule. It's time to begin to understand that and have a real strategy for Gaza. We failed to understand our enemy on October 7. We thought our enemy was deterred by our firepower. We learned on October 7 that we had been deterred by our own firepower. That's what those tunnels were for.

They created a battlefield in which us going after Hamas would cause disastrous damage to Gaza. There was no way to go into Gaza and extricate Hamas without this catastrophe being the result. We could never imagine any threat they could pose to us that would make it worthwhile. We fundamentally misunderstood that they intended to bring us into Gaza, that they carried out October 7 specifically engineered to trigger us actually having to get them out. That Gaza's destruction is the strategy. because they believe that in the long arc, that's the beginning of the end of Israel.

The great tragedy for Palestinians is that that is what Hamas has always believed, and it has never been true. And it won't be true this time. And it was all a waste. And then we continued to fail to understand our enemy in this game of humanitarian aid chicken. Of course we'd blink first, you idiots.

And then we fail to understand that when Israel literally does not choose to speak to the world while people die, then Hamas is strengthened. Its hand is strengthened. Its resilience is enhanced. This is a strange commentary for me. I'm usually calmer. I'm usually faster in getting it out.

I'm usually more optimistic. It's still very much our war to lose. If Hamas remains in Gaza, we're back at this in five years. years. And Gaza can't be rebuilt, and there's no better future. So it's a war we're going to be stuck in until our leadership begins to understand the kind of war it is and gets competent about fighting it. Bibi, for God's sake, get the aid in fast, keep it coming consistently.

This is a game of chicken that Hamas is the only one who can win. And Bibi, for God's sake, hire a spokesperson who can tell the BBC that 14,000 babies. didn't die in 48 hours? Who can explain mistakes reliably with integrity. Who can push back not just against our haters, but against your own coalition partners when they insist to the world that we are evil,

each in their inimitable way. Who can connect with our allies? And just literally tell them what the hell's happening. It's time to end this war, which means it's time to win. this war, which means it's time to get serious about what it'll actually take to win this war, which means the time for politics are passed. Too many soldiers have died. Too many gossans have died. Too many families have sacrificed. Too much has been spent to be pussyfooting

around your politics. Do this right and finish it. And forgive me. Dear listeners, the next episode, I'll be calm again. We're going to learn history again. Thank you for joining me.