Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/4/24 Will Porter on the Slaughter in Gaza

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Will Porter joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about Gaza. They discuss the scale of death and destruction so far, the World Central Kitchen convoy bombing, the IDF’s AI targeting tool and more. Discussed on the show: “Israeli Siege Causes Sharp Rise in Newborn Baby Deaths in Gaza” (Antiwar.com) “Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” (+972 Magazine) Will Porter is assistant news editor at the Libertarian Institute and a regular contributor at Antiwar.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheWillPorter This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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 Pacifica Radio, April the 4th, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm 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 more than six thousand of them now going back to 2003 at scott horton.org at youtube.com slash scott horton show and all your favorite podcast catchers and things out there and introducing today's first guest it's will porter he is assistant news editor at the institute and regular contributor as well to

antiwar dot com welcome the show will how you doing i'm doing great scott i'm doing great scott Thanks for having me back. How are you? I'm doing great. Appreciate you joining us today. First up for topics on the show is Israel and the slaughter in Gaza. I won't call it a war. It's more of a canned hunt, I guess. So can we start out with just give us an update on the latest casualty numbers? Yeah, sure. So a lot of these figures are coming, of course, from local health officials in Gaza. And, of course, there's all kinds of dispute about how accurate those are.

although i think in the past we've seen they do generally track with independent figures but i think some of the latest numbers they're putting out are over 33 000 Palestinians killed and that includes they don't distinguish distinguish between fighters but that's you know they say two-thirds are women and children so presumably non-combatants of those you know 33 000 and then not to mention there are you know untold thousands still buried under the rubble so i think no 33 000 is likely to be a under an underestimate not to mention all the people who are you know facing extreme deprivation deprivation and who may die related to that. So, you know, the excess death rate is almost certainly higher than 33,000. But that is basically the number that's being given by the health

figure, the health ministry in Gaza. Well, and, you know, after half a year of this, it's not just those directly bombed or shot or crushed under their falling apartment buildings. But we do have the excess deaths now that are directly attributable to deprivation. from the war as well. And I know it is kind of annoying. I heard a hawk complaining about this that, oh, everybody's always on the verge of famine, the verge of famine, but the famine never comes.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, the world's smallest violin playing or something. But then I'm reading headlines that say that people, particularly children, are starving to death there. What is the truth of that? Will, do you know? Yeah, I mean, I don't have any, like,

overall figures of how many people may have starved to death. But I've also seen just like, you know, steady reports trickling in. I know that in one of the recent ICJ cases, they were running down a lot of these statistics. And yes, indeed, people have like documented cases of people dying from, you know, starvation and malnutrition. So, you know, I don't think, and in fact, one of the lines they had said was, we are no longer on the brink of famine. We are in famine. It is happening now. People are actually starting to die from, you know, this kind of deprivation. So I don't think they are quite on the brink of famine anymore i think it is you know is actually begun in earnest well and there was a story on anti-war dot com yesterday about the increased number of stillbirths

because of the malnutrition of the mothers and of course you know they're all malnourished and uh can't produce breast milk in many cases for infants as well so yeah it's um which you know brings us to i guess the biggest story is the israeli slaughter of this aid groups i guess entire workforce there uh world central kitchen so i was wondering first of all can you give us a background of who is this group and then take us through what happened to them yeah sure so as you said this is a aid group called world central kitchen i believe they're i think they're based in dc they're founded by some like celebrity chef um and yeah effectively they just they deliver aid and supply throughout all kinds of war and conflict and crisis zones.

I think they're active in Ukraine, where they have also lost personnel. They were founded, I think, after the earthquake in Haiti back in 2010. But they have been one of the main aid groups in Gaza helping to distribute and, I think, actually provide the aid in conjunction with other aid groups. And in fact, they have been one of the major groups pushing to open this sea corridor, this maritime corridor between Cyprus and the Gaza coast. And so far, they have helped to organize, too, pretty huge age. shipments through that route. The first, I think, had like 200 tons of stuff that was like a dry

run. And then the more recent one had 400 tons. And we should note, too, that these are some of the major aid shipments that have come through the Gaza coast in like two decades, at least according to the aid group. So what they did, I think is kind of a big deal. They are a major, well-known humanitarian org. And they do closely coordinate just about everything they do with the IDF, including these latest aid deliveries from these ships. Okay. So take us through what happened to them. on April the first. Sure, yeah. So I guess just to, as you said, just to kind of cut to the chase, the Israelis bombed a convoy carrying these international aid workers in the Gaza Strip on Monday night. Most of them were foreign nationals. There were, I think, seven passengers in total on

the convoy that was hit. I think there was one dual U.S. Canadian citizen. There was three U.K. nationals, people from Australia and Poland, and then I think there was a local, like, Palestinian fixer. And so as far as I understand on Monday night, they were helping to offload, as I mentioned, that aid shipment from Cyprus, they were helping to offload supplies from those ships into a warehouse in central Gaza, this town called Dar al-Bala. And so as they're leaving that warehouse, they're traveling down one of Gaza's like main highways, their convoy was bombed by a series of Israeli airstrikes, reportedly three strikes. There were three vehicles in the group. There was two armored cars, I think just like a regular

SUV, and all of them were targeted one after another. At least one of those cars was very clearly marked with a huge logo on its roof. I guess in hopes of preventing exactly this kind of thing to make you visible from the air. This did happen at night though, so perhaps it wasn't extremely visible. But you can see this in footage too of the vehicles taken after the strike. You can see the logo. You can see this gigantic hole punched in the roof. Like it was clearly directly hit by some kind of munition. And according to what seems to me like pretty credible reporting by Ha'arets, these strikes were very like calculated and deliberate. Not to mention in their description of them, very brutal.

According to them, after the first car was hit, the passengers tried to grab their wounded and scrambled to the second car. It was some distance away. That one was hit. And then they tried to do the same thing, escaping into the third car, only to be bombed yet again, killing everybody. And not to mention it, in addition to driving in marked vehicles, the route for this convoy was coordinated with and approved by the IDF, every step along the way.

The aid workers apparently had even called in to say they were being attacked as it was happening, but I guess it was too late by then. I think it happened pretty quickly. So, yeah, effectively, I think that is the, you know, that's what happened to these guys. Yeah, all three cars. And now the Israelis said, oh, well, we're going to do an investigation because it was a huge accident. Well, I mean, they've been sort of tight-lipped about their public explanation about what might have happened. But in that Haaret's reporting in local Israeli media, the rationale that was given, the justification that was given by these military sources, anonymous.

you know, talking to Hot Ruts, they say that they think some kind of armed terrorists was spotted with the convoy. It was just, you know, one single guy. And then, so they decided he had to be killed right there on the spot. And it turns out that guy, whoever he was, the suspected terrorist, he never actually was, he never left the warehouse. He was never on the convoy. So this whole thing was, you know, pretty botched. So even if you believe that maybe there was a militant there, like on site somewhere, this was botched. He was not on the convoy. Yeah. You know, very little detail has been given about this. He's not been named this, like, alleged terrorist operative who they say they saw there who was quote unquote ostensibly armed per

hot ruts perhaps he was maybe he was a security guard guarding these supplies there have been like food riots in Gaza people are really desperate and so you might need an armed guard however it should be noted that the World Kitchen says that they do not use armed escorts and so that that's what they maintain so that would definitely be at odds with seeing some armed guy at the at the warehouse but yeah so far that's all pretty murky about exactly why the Israelis felt like they had to do this or what you know I I heard the term misidentification being given by one of the military officials. It sounds like that's basically in line with what's been reported about this terrorist guy.

But they're being pretty tight-lipped about like what may have actually happened so far. Yeah. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. make a deal with expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com.

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Terms apply. Well, it could just be that they've succeeded in marginalizing the UN aid groups there, and now this guy was trying to muscle in on that action, and now they've canceled that. Right. Maybe they just prefer that the Palestinians lay down and die. I mean, they have targeted. they've killed like 200 aid workers in both Gaza and the West Bank just since October.

So, like, this is not some kind of new or extremely rare thing. The way that Israelis, of course, make it sound like, oh, my God, this never happens. But, you know, hundreds of aid workers have been, has been killed in this conflict. And then do I have this right that Joe Biden, after this, atrocity, laid down the law and signed a deal to give Israel a bunch more American at 15 Eagles? Yeah, yeah. I mean, despite issuing, if you saw the White House statement, he's like, oh, I'm outraged. He used some language that he typically wouldn't use, but that never translates into any kind of, you know, like we have so much leverage over the Israelis willies weapons. We also recently just approved, I think, like, what, 1,800, 2,000 pound bombs for them, which, you know, part of the whole rationale of why we're giving them aid is, oh, we have the small bombs that would help them limit the destruction.

But then when you look at what we actually give them, it's like mostly 2,000 pound bombs, which if you go ahead and YouTube, throw that into YouTube, 2,000 pound J-dam, just to get a sense of how large these explosives are. like this is like you know blow up a large building type of explosive it's not a kassam rocket and now what about al-shefa hospital i didn't even know the thing was open for business they went back and had to destroy it again chase everybody out of there again or what happened yeah correct they said that uh that hamas had regrouped at the facility and said that they had to go through and do like a more because uh people probably know they they had previously raided it before they went through there they produced like a couple rusty AKs and we're like look Hamas command center is here. This is proof. And then they left for a while. And because

the area that Al-Shefa is located in northern Gaza, it is absolutely like Hiroshima. It is devastated. And so the fighting had moved south for quite a while, but the IDF now claims that Hamas had regrouped in Al-Shefa. And they went in there and they, they say, I forget what the number they gave. I think it was like 100, 200, quote-unquote terrorists they killed. And yet, they leveled a lot of the facility. And some of the healthcare workers there are saying that like, you know, Several people died as a result of being moved off of whatever their, you know, ICU equipment was, their ventilator or whatever they were on. So this caused several deaths. Another thing that seemed like just kind of depraved is the Israelis had apparently dug up some of the mass graves in the courtyard because the hospital was forced to bury some of their dead in the previous siege.

And I don't know for what reason the Israelis did that. I don't know if they're looking for hostages or trying to identify someone. But yeah, they apparently had unearthed all these corpses on the courtyard. And not to mention, ran over bodies as they left with their armored vehicles and stuff. Just, you know, really adding insult to injury, like every step along the way with that. Can you tell us about this article in 972 MAG and their report on this program, Lavender? Yeah, yeah. So this is just like we've had sort of, this is there's sort of a genre of these type of reports lately, of these new and different Israeli artificial intelligence systems used for generating target lists.

And if you've been following this for quite a while, they have had these. Israelis rely extensively on what they call these target banks, where they basically use their quote-unquote intelligence to build up a series of targets of things to bomb in time of conflict. They do it all the time. And so with the use of these programs like Lavender, they have grown their target banks like insanely to something. I think in the early stage of the current conflict, it was like 37,000 Palestinian targets. And forgive me, I'm not aware of like the exactly technical details of how they, you know, collate and. generate these target lists, but they are using this to feed a bunch of raw information into this program, and then it spits out a bunch of people to kill, basically. And one of the features of

this Lavender program is that it is now including much lower level Hamas operatives and sort of expanding, like, what is the, basically, like, loosening, the rules of engagement have been loosened quite a bit to where they are now much more willing and likely to target the homes of lower level, level militants. And in that 972 mag piece, they also mention another separate, like, ancillary AI program called Where's Daddy? And that one helps them to organize their strikes for when these militants are at home in their homes late at night, when their families are more likely to be around. And so, yeah, there have been quite a few of these. They're also, 972 had another great report about something called the gospel in their story about the mass assassination factory.

And I'm actually not aware of exactly what the distinction is, because it sounds like the gospel and lavender effectively do, they have a similar function, you know, in terms of like generating, these vast target lists, but they're doing it at a rate way faster than they ever could have done before just with humans. So it's just a, it is indeed a, you know, a huge kill list that they're generating. They're using this AI to consult. And a problem, too, is the humans on the ground aren't really consulting real intelligence. The machine spits out a name to kill and they go and kill them with very little, you know, consulting of outside information. And listen, everybody can find that at 972Mag.com, Lavender, the

AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza. And they have a link there to their previous article about the gospel. And in that one, they also talk about power targets by which they mean people have no power at all, women and children, families of people that they're after, and including, and especially the families of journalists, that'll teach you to be a reporter in Gaza. And then they blow up their whole family while the dad's out at work. It's the most sadistic thing going on in the world today by far Israel and America in their slaughter

in Gaza and that's Will Porter. He's assistant news editor at the Institute and also a regular contributor at anti-war dot com. Thank you very much for your time. Will appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Scott. All right y'all and that's it for the show. I'm Scott Horton. It's anti-war radio. I'm here

every Thursday afternoon from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.