Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/16/23 Dave DeCamp on the Gaza Hospital Explosion and the Risk of a Wider War

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Dave DeCamp was back on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss what’s going on in Gaza. They started with the explosion at a hospital in Gaza City that kicked off protests around the region, despite debate over the cause. They then took a step back and talked about the broader geopolitical forces at work before finishing with a quick mention of Biden’s provocative policy towards North Korea.  Discussed on the show: “The Plan to Wipe Out Hamas” (Seymour Hersh) Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com and the host of Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp. Follow him on Twitter @decampdave This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacific Radio, October the 18th, 2003, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, Joe, welcome to the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive,

almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you'll follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing our first guest today. It's anti-war.com's news editor, Dave DeCamp. Welcome to the show. Dave, how you doing? I'm good, Scott. Thanks for having me back.

Very good to have you here. All right. So so much going on. Let's start with, I guess, the hospital attack, but I want to switch pretty quickly to the repercussions of it. But something exploded at the hospital in Gaza the other day. And from reading your latest take on anti-war.com, I gather that you and I are not exactly on the same page on this, but I wonder what you'd take. yeah so obviously something exploded in the parking lot of that hospital so when the news first broke you know the story was Israeli airstrikes hit the hospital at least uh 500 dead which 500 is you know a huge i think first they said three and then they embellished even more yeah it you know climbed up pretty quick um and you know that's how i reported it assuming that the hospital was leveled like most people assumed. And the next morning, it became pretty clear that that's not what happened because the aftermath showed that there was an explosion in the parking lot in the hospital

was still standing. And Israel's side of the stories that it was a Palestinian Islamic jihad rocket that misfired and fell on the parking lot and exploded. Now, 500 people is a huge death toll. I know Israel and others are now questioning, you know, how many were killed. The authorities in Gaza are now saying 471 people were killed, which is still huge. And it's pretty clear to me just from reading all the interviews with people that were on the ground. And the director of the nearby Schiffa Hospital, which is the largest hospital in Gaza, said that 200 bodies were brought to his hospital and about 300 people that were injured were taken to his hospital. So, you know, it sounds like a huge casualty rate. And the reason why it was so high was because people were sheltering

at hospitals. This was in Gaza city in the area of North Gaza that Israel told to evacuate, which is home to 1.1 million people. So I still think that maybe it's not quite as high as they're saying 471, but I think it's pretty clear that hundreds of people were killed. So, you know, and I'm not a munitions expert. I don't really want to get into the whole, you know, look at the explosion. I think the biggest case for the Israeli side is the fact that there's not a crater that the hospital is standing. But, you know, there's been some inconsistencies in what Israel's been saying. They released a recording that they said was two Hamas guys talking about it, saying that it was an Islamic Jihad rocket. There's a report in Channel 4, which is a British news channel saying,

quoting experts in Arabic saying that it sounded like a fake recording because of the dialect of the two people that were talking. And there's also conflicting things. Some Israeli military spokesman have said it was fired from a cemetery that's nearby. They also showed a map that said the launch point was five kilometers away. So there's reasons to be suspicious of the Israeli story. A big thing on the Palestinian side that, you know, makes Israel the suspect, is the fact that the hospital was hit on October 14th by some sort of rocket. And according to the New York Times, they said they verified a video of the aftermath, and it showed artillery shells from howitzers that Palestinians are not known to have, that Israel does fire into Gaza. And the hospital

owners and people at work there said it was an Israeli strike. It injured four people and actually hit the hospital. And then they were warned after that three times by the Israeli military to evacuate the hospital. And this has actually been confirmed by the Israeli side that they did give them warnings, but they say, no, you know, this was part of the overall evacuation order for North Gaza. We weren't warning that we would bomb them. So, you know, there's reason to think that Israel might have targeted the hospital. Again, the, who knows, the casualty figure I still think is in the hundreds. So it's just not clear. So right now, you know, all the Western media is saying it's, you know, neither side's story is verified. So we'll see what they start to say in the

few days as they're doing these investigations. They've spoke with experts who say it's inconclusive. Some say it's more likely, an Islamic jihad rocket. That's what the U.S. is saying. You know, maybe it'll become more clear in the coming days. But, you know, the idea that it's totally disproven that it was Israel is just not true at this point. Yes, so here's the thing that you didn't mention is there's footage from what, three or four different cameras of a rocket failing and falling right over the hospital and then it explodes. So you'd have to have a to have an Israeli fighter jet flying by, dropping a bomb on the same parking lot at the same time. And meanwhile, next morning, Toss and others showed up in the daylight, and they showed there

is a small crater, and there's a bunch of burned up cars, which would explain the giant explosion from the gasoline and the tanks of those cars being ignited when the rocket hit, apparently a pretty big rocket. But I just don't see any reason to require other intervention when we have a rocket falling out of the sky, and we have a bunch of burned-up cars, and we have a fiery explosion. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, I guess, I mean, like I said, I don't know. I think there's evidence on both sides. Give me just a minute here.

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of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org, so keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Here's the thing about it though. It's Dave DeCamp from antiwar.com. I'm Scott from antiwar.com. And listen, I mean, the thing of it is, this is, as Hillary Clinton might say, in the end, what difference does it make? Because what happened was that night all across the Middle East, massive protests broke out. And I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name, Dave, but it was a think tank weeny from the CSIS, a very hawkish think tank.

that said, hey, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi, and UAE have all contacted Netanyahu and told him enough. You can't go further here. And possibly that's the explanation for why they have not launched the ground invasion. And in fact, this CSIS weenie was saying that one of the reasons was because he didn't say this much, but this is what he was talking about, because Iran is independent from the American Empire. can posture all they want and even intervene in a way that all the Saudi sock puppets and a Gulf sock puppet Sunni kings cannot. And so if the Israelis go forward with the full scale invasion, that makes the Sunni sock puppet kings look really bad, even worse than they already do. And as he put it in the tweet, it cedes the field basically to the Ayatollah, to the Shiite

militias of Iraq, the Syrians and Hezbollah to claimed to be the champions of the Palestinians while all the Sunnis stay silent. And so that's one of the, it's only for their own good, for their own cynical good, that they have apparently contacted Netanyahu and begged him please not to do it. On the other hand, Seymour Hershey's saying he's hearing from Israeli intelligence officials that they're prepared to carpet bomb the place to smithereens with bunker buster bombs to get at those tunnels and a full-scale invasion with armor and infantry. And so what do you know about what's going to happen here as we record this on Thursday morning, Dave? Yeah. So when President Biden was just over in Israel on

Wednesday, he gave Netanyahu, you know, his full support essentially saying, yeah, you know, according to reports, he said he would back, you know, gave his support for an Israeli invasion of Gaza. And you're right, it has been delayed. You know, it's sort of seemed like a ground invasion was imminent last week, especially after they gave that evacuation order, but we still haven't seen it. According to some Israeli media, the Israelis are really worried that Hezbollah will really join the fight if they go for the invasion. And there's been kind of an exchange of rocket fire between Hezbollah and Israel for a while now, but Hezbollah hasn't really gotten into the fight. So that seems to be one of Israel's big concerns.

So Biden goes over there, gets the full support, you know, agrees with their side of the story about the hospital bombing, which is something that maybe could have affected U.S. support if it was clearly, you know, an Israeli missile strike that did that. So I think right now, and the Israelis, Netanyahu's national security advisor, said publicly, if Hezbollah intervenes, you know, the Americans are on our side. They deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups, fighter jets, more marines to the region. That's kind of the thing I think we really have to worry about, is if they go for the invasion and Hezbollah intervenes, that could mean direct U.S. intervention in this war. And then who knows what that could escalate into. It could turn into a war with Iran. And McCall, who's the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he says he's drawing up an authorization for the use of military force. in the event that, you know, these outside forces intervene.

There's been some rocket attacks in Iraq and Syria targeting U.S. bases. You know, nothing significant yet. But that's something, you know, we can guarantee will really start happening at a larger scale if the U.S. directly intervenes, is those bases will really come under attack from the Shia militias that operate in those countries. So there's a big risk here of this thing really exploding. And as far as on, you know, it's Thursday. October 19th, what I'm thinking right now, based on Biden's visit, the fact that he's going to

ask Congress for about $10 billion for Israel, I think the U.S. is saying, you know, go for it when it comes to the ground invasion. So, yeah, it's just not looking good. And the reaction of what, you know, what will Egypt and the Saudis, what will they do is a good question. Of course, you know, when we're talking about this hospital bombing, I think I saw somebody I'll say, you know, it's kind of irrelevant at this point because everything's moving. All these Arab countries are blaming Israel that's kind of settled, from their perspective, at least. So things definitely did change with that whole situation. And another thing, I think it's kind of distracted, you know, it's distracted me trying to figure out what happened there.

And the fact that Israel is still just pounding Gaza with these airstrikes, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, over 3,500 people have been killed in less than two weeks. Yeah, Wall Street Journal says 6,000 bombs in six days. Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, if you look at previous wars in Gaza, I mean, this is brutal what's happening here. So, but and it's with full U.S. support. Yeah, man. All right.

Well, all right, we're almost out of time. I'm sorry, but Dave DeCamp, anti-war.com. Talk to me about North Korea for a second. what is Joe Biden doing? Is this guy going to blow up the whole world or what? Yeah. So, you know, North Korea, it's an area that I think has been neglected. You know, it's just tough to keep a focus on it, especially now with this Gaza war. But essentially what's been going on there since 2022 is North Korea started launching some missiles as the U.S. and South Korea started doing big war games again. And basically since then, it's just been building up.

South Korea's new president, Yun, who came in in 2022. He came in basically on a platform of escalating tensions with the north. His predecessor, Moon, J.N., was the pro-unification, and that didn't go anywhere. So he wants the U.S. to deploy all these big assets to the Korean Peninsula. This week, there's going to be some B-52 bombers landing there for the first time in 30 years. Pretty recently, Biden sent a nuclear-armed.

submarine to dock in South Korea, which was just a huge provocation for the sake of provocation. I mean, the nature of these submarines is that they could be anywhere in the world and they have very long range of missiles so they could hit their targets. They don't need to dock like that. It's just... Well, so what's the DPRK been doing? Is there any kind of so-called provocation here? This is just America trying to pick a fight. They've been doing a lot of their missile tests. I mean, you know, nothing really new. They did a lot in 2020.

I believe it was like a record number. But that's really at firing missiles. And the rhetoric is pretty fiery. And the U.S. and South Korea are doing these huge war games. And, you know, this is about North Korea, but I think it's also really part of the U.S. kind of military buildup in East Asia that's aimed at China. You kind of get two for the price of one here.

They get to flex their muscle very close to China and placate U.N. And they're also working. to on the South Korea, Japan, you know, getting them to settle their previous issues to form this trilateral military alliance and, you know, kind of Northeast Asia there. So I think it's a big benefit for the U.S. plans to build up around China. Yeah. Well, as ever, North Korea is the excuse to really be there for the Chinese as our strategic planners have so often admitted. All right. Well, listen, I'm sorry we're out of time, but every buddy you want to know what's going on in the world you want to know how i know what's going on in the world

you go to news dot antiwar dot com and read the great dave to camp thank you sir thanks god all right y'all and that is anti-war radio for today thank you very much for listening i'm your host scott horton you can find the full interview archive at scott horton dot org and i'm here every thursday from two 30 to three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a l a see you next week I'm going to be able to be able to be.