Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Is a Gaza/Israeli Hostage Deal in the Works?

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Max Blumenthal : Is a Gaza/Israeli Hostage Deal in the Works?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash john. That's mintmobile.com slash john. Use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all of your existing contacts. Up front payment of $45 required equivalent to $15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow about 35 gigabyte on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 20th, 2025. Max Blumenthal, joins us now. Max, thank you very much for your time. I have many things to ask you about, much of which have been generated by your own work, your terrific work on the gray zone. You recently had a captivating, fascinating interview with a very articulate. very courageous whistleblower by the name of Anthony Aguilar.

Can you tell us who Mr. Aguilar is and what you learned from interviewing him about what's truly going on on the ground in Gaza? Well, I think you should interview Anthony Aguilar, and I think he'd be up for it. Sure. We're going to make that happen after this episode is over. Anthony Aguilar is a 25-year Green Beret Special Forces veteran who has done four tours in combat zones, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, believe Somalia as well. He was then in a high-level position within the structure of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the criminal operation, linked to Donald

Trump and to the Israeli government, which has replaced the UN aid structure in Gaza, contributing to a man-made famine. And he was working with UG Solutions on site in Gaza. UG Solutions is one of the two mercenary firms that manages the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation account on the ground and saw the horror firsthand. He helped a young boy named Amir get some food one day and the boy kissed his hand and he learned that two days later, he learned two days later that the Israelis had shot the boy and killed him as they had killed over 1,000 people at GHF aid distribution sites. I asked Aguilar about the personal price he's paid for blowing the whistle, describing how Israeli soldiers just mowed down. down, aid seekers right in front of him. And he told me that hours before our interview,

he had been removed or banned from participation in a club he belonged to, the Special Forces Paratroopers Club because of his criticism of Israel, that criticizing a foreign military is somehow off limits. He also described to me, After I asked him about plans, future plans for Gaza, how the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was basically laying the basis for a major concentration camp in Gaza, once Israel destroys Gaza City, an operation that's underway now, and forcibly transfers, in other words, ethnically cleanses the population to the south. They're building something called Humanitarian Transit Site 1, which is a literal biometric concentration camp. And the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, has already indicated that he aims to push 500,000 people there in the Mawesi area of Gaza and force them there to stay there unless they agree to leave, presumably to Egypt. and this is just the crime of the century. And he laid this out in clinical detail to me.

This is someone who should be testifying to Congress. Unfortunately, the GOP-controlled Congress is completely controlled by the Zionist movement and the Israeli government and would never host him. So he's only met with a small assortment of senators. And he said the reception was very positive. But this is someone the American public and the world needs to urgently hear from. I mean, how many times have we heard? heard from a U.S. combat veteran who actually personally witnessed Israeli atrocities and

the enforced starvation in the Gaza Strip. It is unprecedented. And he's an incredibly charismatic, articulate individual who I think would be able to communicate what you and I know and what much of this audience knows to people who may not have been receptive. Is this the boy, Chris, can you put the photos back up? Is this the boy kissing? Anthony's hand. Can you see the pictures, Max? Yeah, that's him. That's Amir, and Anthony took those pictures.

And now this boy is dead. He's been murdered by the IDF. He's a baby. He's dead. He's one of the tens of thousands of children who are dead in Gaza. And Israel can't say, oh, he had a pre-existing condition. He deserved to die as they've been doing with all the children that are starving to death, including one child that was just medevaced out to Turkey, but taken out

too late and died. How do they justify the murder of a baby? They have a thing called the neighbor policy, and they say this is the terrorist's non-dangerous neighbor. That's actually the exact language that the Israeli army's in-house ethicist named Asakashir, who was a Tel Aviv University professor, used to justify the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, which is to stretch the Geneva Convention's rules on distinction between combatant and civilian to the point where they no longer mattered and to invoke the completely subjective term of terrorism, which Benjamin Netanyahu began to popularize first through his Jonathan Institute talks in the late

1970s, early 80s, with influential people in Washington to popularize the concept of terrorism, which is anyone who resists Israel, particularly Arabs and Muslims, or exclusively Arabs and Muslims. So Israel, what it's doing is textbook terrorism. It's state terrorism under a doctrine designed to use the civilian population's fear and terror to try to move governments to negotiate along their lines. That's exactly what they're doing. Gaza right now. If you read the Israeli press, you'll see quotes from Israeli officials saying, are operation in Gaza's working? We're threatening to destroy the entire city and Hamas is becoming more flexible at the negotiating table. That's the definition of terrorism. It is state terror

right in our face. It's also genocide, but it is state terror. But because Jews are doing it, who are allied with the United States, it doesn't fit the definition of terror that's been marketed to us for decades. What is the status? You may know this independently. You may have learned it from Anthony Aguilar of the aid distribution sites. In other words, how many of them are there? And do they actually work or do people line up and get killed?

Yeah, I mean, if I remember correctly, there's really only one that's functional. And to get there, many people have to cross something, called the Marag Corridor, which is a heavily militarized de facto is really base inside Gaza. And they get shot on their way there. I mean, if there's just one place where you can get a box of food and food is blocked everywhere else and your economy is destroyed and your cities are destroyed and you have no employment possibilities, then you have to walk kilometers and kilometers to get there and it's likely you'll be hit with drones on the way, shot.

then they just throw the boxes on the ground and humiliate people and force them to fight over whatever box they can grab, which means only the strongest men of every family are going to be sent there. I mean, a 60-year-old, 70-year-old woman who has grandchildren and children in her home isn't going to be able to make that trek and then fight for the boxes. One person who was recently killed is one of the most famous athletes to ever come out of Gaza. His name is Suleiman Obed, and he was known as the Pele of Gaza, the most prolific soccer player. And he was killed in a humiliating fashion trying to grab a box of food. It's like a Holocaust story.

And so what Israel is doing, along with GHF, and I asked this to Aguilar, is by attracting the strongest males of military age, they have established this biometric security dragnet, and they will force them in the early morning to line up and pass through a narrow corridor, which is lined with cameras, and their faces are then entered into a database. So this is really also about surveilling the Gaza population and ultimately placing them even deeper into a digital prison. This isn't about aid. Wow. Why did you call the Gaza humanitarian group criminal. And what is its relationship to Trump?

Well, it's run by someone named Reverend Johnny Moore, who is a Christian Zionist snake handling fraud, who is a crony of the Trump administration. One of the pastors who lays hands on Trump and prays for him is very close to Mike Huckabee, another Christian Zionist, and we can't tell if he, which country he's representing, Israel or the US. But Huckabee has been very prominent in defending the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and even mocking starvation to the point where he said that the people in Gaza should get some Ozempic because they're so fat, which is ironic.

I mean, if you look at past pictures of Huckabee and his family when they were governor or his daughter, I don't think they ever missed a meal until the OZempa came along. but it really highlights how interlinked the Christian Zionist Trump network is to GHF and what GHF is. They've been bringing ultra-Zionist influencers, Brooke Goldstein, Colonel Richard Kemp, all of these figures are on the payroll of Zionist organizations or the Israeli movement directly to propagandize for GHF. These are anti-Muslim figures who hate the people of Gaza. and they're there to say, oh, they're feeding everyone, it's such an altruistic operation.

But the point of GHF was to replace UNRWA, the United Nations operation, which had 400 various aid sites in Gaza and delivery points and was successful in feeding the population, even during the war. The point is to starve the population, so they have to move south to the one aid site so then they can be concentrated in a biometric camp and then transited out ethnically cleansed. So that's why this is a crime. In addition, it is not, there's no concern for the safety of the population of Gaza. It's unprecedented for people to be forced after being starved deliberately to walk kilometer after kilometer to get aid through an active war zone occupied by an army that has been shooting children in the head one week and shooting them in the pelvis the next week according to

scores of Western doctors who have come out of Gaza. This is unprecedented. So this is really a criminal is almost an understatement. You have recently either written or spoken. I'm not sure which, at the gray zone, about how deep the Israelis have reached into American law enforcement, and you have revealed a scandalous, scurrilous story about somebody named Tom Alexandrovich and an acting U.S. attorney by the name of Seagal Shattah. Can you please tell us how Mr. Alexandrovich escaped prosecution for attempting to have sexual relations with a child? Yeah, to be sure, I haven't revealed anything, but I've helped, I think, put the pieces together

so people can understand what a scandal this is, along with many others. And this really does deserve mainstream attention. I'm actually surprised that mainstream media hasn't picked up on it more, because it highlights the complete lack of professionalism and corruption of the Trump Department of Justice, and specifically one U.S. attorney who's been named acting U.S. attorney by Donald Trump, Seagal Chata, because over 100 lawyers and judges have declared her to be completely unprofessional and unqualified. She would not make it through a confirmation process. And when she was campaigned, she is the U.S. attorney in Nevada handling Las Vegas. When she was campaigning,

In 2021, for Attorney General as a Republican, a Trump Republican, her ad, her one ad was called Israeli-born, touting the fact that she was born in Israel and lived there until she was a teenager and trafficked in anti-Muslim hatred, promising that she will essentially prosecute Ilhan Omar, one of the few Muslims in Congress, when she gets in, which is something she would have no power to do, but which is kind of ironic, given what appears to have happened. There was a cyber security conference in Las Vegas that's just filled with spooks from around the world. FBI agents are there, NSA, hackers from around the world, especially Israel. And one of the directors of Israel's national cyber intelligence directorate,

who works directly under the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Tom Alexandrovich, was at that conference. He held meetings around the conference with FBI agents. Is this an American or an Israeli? With NSA agents. He is an Israeli citizen who works for Benjamin Netanyahu actually won an award last year, according to the Jerusalem Post,

for playing some role in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah through some technology he helped create. So we're talking to, him at a high level official, an important figure in Israel. His name had never, was not known to the public before he went on an adult dating app, was caught in a sting by a police officer posing as a 15-year-old who said, will you take me to Cirque du Soleil and bring a condom? In other words, we're going to have sexual relations, and I'm 15. So he goes and does that. Many others are caught in a sting, in the same sting. It was a federal sting, meaning,

Sigal Chata's office should have been involved in it and he is interviewed by the police after being caught by agents and he said I'm desperate to get back to Israel. I am very embarrassed and I miss

my family. So he declares that he's a flight risk and they do not take his passport they allow him to go and Sigal Chata, the U.S. attorney kicks the case down to Clark County. The Clark County district attorney, which is local prosecutors.

So she basically punted on the case, and now she's blaming local liberal politicians and the local liberal DA for letting this go. But she had no interest in the case and punted on it. And she is in Israeli who has repeatedly called for genocide in Gaza on her personal Twitter account. Is she the U.S. attorney in Nevada? Yes. She's the one who would be in charge of this if it was.

a federal case and it was a federal sting. But so she's, she's done something I've never seen a U.S. attorney do, which is she deleted her entire personal Twitter account because it was so infested with anti-Palestinian hatred, highlighting her Israeli background and her political sympathy for someone like Tom Alexandrovich. Now, the State Department under Mark Rubio has had, Marco Rubio has had to issue. issue a statement claiming it had no role in helping Alexandrovich abscond from the United States, but we don't, we still haven't been told how this happened.

And Segal Chata is really on the hook here. It really suggests that, I should mention one other element here. Sigal Chata is part of the Israeli American Council, which is a Israel lobbying organization, funded by Miriam Adelson, funded to the Hilt by Miriam Adelson, Donald Trump's largest donor. And where is Miriam Adelson from? Las Vegas. She owns Las Vegas Sands, which her late husband, Sheldon owned. She is paying tons of local politicians to, you know, make sure that they have free reign

on gambling rights and gambling licenses. She basically owns Las Vegas. So what was her role here? I know that Miriam Adelson can call Donald Trump. and he'll do whatever she wants. And she's speaking on behalf of Netanyahu. What we're seeing here is sort of Epstein 2.0, and it really demands more public attention. There's no way that this guy could have left the country without the feds failing to inform

the State Department and DHS that he was out on bail for a felony and did not have the right to leave the country. that would have set off warning bells when he presented his Israeli passport at whatever airport he used to fly out of the country. Has Chabin called on the carpet for this? Probably not. Who would call her on the carpet, her boss, Pam Bondi? I mean, you know, is the White House Press Corps asking about this at White House press

conferences? Is Bondi's office being bombarded with calls? What's happening here? I'm not seeing that. And, you know, in the streets of Washington, D.C., the ICE agents are bursting in and out of restaurants looking for any undocumented person. They're tackling Venezuelan door-dashers, just biking down the street. They are running up in court hearings for asylum seekers and grabbing people. They're busting up people's trucks and pulling them out of their vehicles, suspecting them of being undocumented.

but an Israeli accused sex predator and spy who is in the United States, apparently at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, top Israeli official, ICE shows no interest in him. Customs and Border Patrol showed no interest in him when he was leaving the country. So clearly, somebody gave the green light for this figure to escape, and we have a two-tiered justice system sitting right in public, view, and it's also a two-tiered immigration enforcement system, which favors Israeli pedo-spies. Is Israel and the Gazans, are Israel and the Gazans close to some sort of a ceasefire and hostage exchange?

They should be because Hamas has accepted the same ceasefire proposal. that it accepted, I think, a couple months ago. It keeps accepting different versions of it, and Israel continues to violate it. And then Bezal Smotrick, the finance minister, goes out in public and issues Nazi-like proclamations calling for Gaza City to be completely burned down and everyone in it to be slaughtered.

If he leaves the coalition, Netanyahu's toast. So they are not picking up what Hamas is putting down. which is acceptance of a deal for an exchange of captives, Palestinian captives, including all child prisoners, and what would essentially be a 60-day pause and a pullback of Israeli forces. I mean, they've even compromised on their initial demand for Israel to pull all of its troops out. We're looking at Israeli rejectionism and intransigence in order to advance, in order to preserve the career of Benjamin Netanyahu, and this is even leading to the largest protests we've seen against this war in two years inside Israel. Hundreds of thousands of people have protested

for an end to this war in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem this past week. Think about how large that would be in the United States, given the differential in population between Jewish Israelis and the U.S. I mean, this is in a society with like six or seven million people, 300,000. people came out. It's certainly not a majority in many Israelis favor continuing the war, but the pressure continues to build on Netanyahu, and he will not budge. Here's the comment you referenced from Smotrich. The date is Sunday, August 17. The time has come to fully apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria at the West Bank to forever remove from the table the idea of dividing the land and to make sure that by

September, Europe's hypocrite leaders will simply have nothing to recognize. Europe's leaders will have nothing to recognize. What is he talking about there? He's talking about the final solution and the full occupation of Gaza, which is what the religious nationalist camp that is ascendant in Israeli politics wants. And it's nice that PBS News Hour actually showed and translated that, you know, there's a joke that the most anti-Semitic mechanism in the world today is Google translate for any statement in Hebrew by an Israeli leader because what they say is so disgusting and repulsive. It provokes a deep resentment by the global public. Even though they're truthfully translating it. Yeah. Well, I mean,

and that's just a small slice of what Smotrix said there. I mean, he calls for extermination of the population of Gaza City. Just to kind of put it in general terms, what Israel's doing right now, there's still a part of Gaza that is intact where there are some municipal services being provided and the municipal authority is technically Hamas and Hamas resistance fighters are still active in these areas,

but there are also just an entire population there that is not able, that they can't control, confine and ultimately purge out of the area which Smotrick wants to make Jewish and build settlements in. That's Gaza City, Darabala, and the Nuserat camp. The whole city of Rafa, for example, has been destroyed. There's also Khan Yunus. They want to destroy that too. So what Smotrick wants is to start with Gaza City. And Netanyahu is authorized this plan. His chief of staff and the Israeli military, A.L. Zemir is going with it. Their plan is to start the destruction of Gaza's city, push the entire population out into camps,

and then move on to the other populated areas until the whole of Gaza's destroyed. Then they will begin to demolish all those buildings, and then they'll sort through the public and expel as many of them as possible. And if Smotrk has his way, they will begin to put new Jews-only settlements across northern Gaza. That's sort of the master plan. it's the final solution of the crime of the century. And it's happening right before our eyes. And Donald Trump is green-lit it as well.

The EU is standing by. I mean, the proportion, the actions of the so-called international community does not fit the titanic nature of this crime. Here's, this will give you heartburn, Max. So warnings and apologies. Netanyahu praising himself. Cut number 13. Today I visited Offra, which is celebrating its Jubilee, 50 years since the establishment of the settlement. 25 years ago, I planted a cedar tree here and promised to return on the day the settlement celebrates its Jubilee.

Today I returned. I stood here half a Jubilee ago and said that we would do everything to ensure the continuation of our hold on the land of Israel, that we would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and that we would thwart all attempts to uproot us from here. Blessed be God, what we promised we fulfilled. It was not easy. We faced heavy pressures from within and without from American administrations that tried to impose the establishment of a Palestinian state on us.

Together we stood firm. Together, we fulfilled the promise of the generations. The tree I planted then has grown and strengthened, just like our settlement, deep roots in the homeland, and treetops reaching for the skies. You, the people of Ophra, are the spearhead of our continued existence in the land of Israel. Now, where is Ophra? Where was he when he was saying that? Ophra is an important settlement for the religious nationalist camp.

It's just below Shiloh, which to them is religiously significant. It is east of Ramallah, which is the capital of a future palace. It's sort of the administrative center of a future Palestinian. So it breaks up the contiguity of any Palestinian state. And it also separates Jerusalem from Nablus, which are, which Jerusalem, East Jerusalem would presumably be the capital of the Palestinian state. And Nablus is the largest city in the West Bank. So it's strategically situated there. And Netanyahu announces his intention to shatter a Palestinian state just as the EU leadership, Macron, Starmor, announced their support for one. That's their pathetic,

symbolic response to the Holocaust Israel's committing in Gaza. This, Netanyahu's intentions could not be more clear. And just several days before, he announced, or he proclaimed his support for greater Israel and its spiritual significance. Greater Israel extends into the Sinai Desert all the way through Jordan into Iraq, according to the original. plans for quote-unquote Eretz Israel. So Netanyahu is letting it all hang out right now. No Palestinian state, total Jewish exclusivist control from the river to the sea, ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the encirclement of the Palestinian population in the West Bank,

and the expansion of Israel, which is happening before our eyes in Syria, where they have occupied the Golan and are moving into the Damascus suburbs. who, and no one is stopping this. What we're seeing right now is what happens when Israel is granted total impunity, and it is horrifying to most people in the world. And yesterday, President Donald Trump referred to Prime Minister Netanyahu as a war hero. Yes. On the Mark Levins show.

And when Trump goes on Mark Levine, it's because, you know, Miriam Adelson and Netanyahu's cutouts in the United States, he's trying to send us a citizen. signal to them that he's on their side and they can continue to fund his campaigns and support the Republicans for the midterm. So Donald Trump has claimed to have obliterated Iran's nuclear stockpile 11 times on his truth social account. And I think the last month, he always uses the term obliterated. So it's clear what he's doing here. He is catering to his masters in Tel Aviv. Max, thank you very much.

It's such unpleasant stuff that we're talking about, but you shed a light on it. So you're 100% correct. This needs to be covered by mainstream media. We do our best here, as I know you do. Well, you're groundbreaking on the gray zone. So what are you and I and Anya and Aaron doing together on Saturday? So we're almost sold out. We got 10 tickets left for Icarus Fest.

Judge Andrew Napolitano will be on the scene hosting a panel with me, Anya Parampil, Aaron Mate, and Jeremy Lafredo, who you've previously hosted on judging freedom to discuss this issue of Israel, Palestine, and where it goes. And we will be live streaming that panel and a full day of panels, including on Ukraine and other. issues from the Icarus Fest in Rutherford, New Jersey at the Williams Center, the William Center in downtown Rutherford, New Jersey on August 23rd, which is this Saturday. We got 10 tickets left. Maybe we can make some other exceptions. There's a VIP dinner. And there's comedy by Jimmy Dor that night, and I might get up and tell a few jokes.

That's worth waiting for it. Max, thank you very much for your time, no matter what we talk about. As I said, you shine a light on it. All the best. I'll see you Saturday. And we'll look forward to seeing you here again next week. Looking forward to seeing you, Judge. Take care.

Thank you. And coming up later today at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Ian Proud, at 2 o'clock from wherever he is on the planet, Pepe Escobar, at 3 o'clock our old pal, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for judging for you. Thank you.