Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/27/24 Connor Freeman on the Scale of Human Suffering in Gaza

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Scott was joined by Connor Freeman this week on Antiwar Radio to discuss Gaza. They talk about the recent report from Seymour Hersh about how much the official Gaza Health Ministry is undercounting the number of Palestinian deaths. They also discuss the recent op-ed from Netanyahu’s predecessor that accuses the current Israeli Prime Minister of keeping Israel in a state of war to the detriment of its people. Discussed on the show: “The Suspect Body Count” (Substack) “I Accuse Netanyahu of Betrayal” (Haaretz) Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 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, June the 27th, 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 the 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 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at Scott Horton.org, at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show, and wherever they have podcatchers and video sites slash Scott Horton Show, you can find it.

By the way, today, I just finished a little while ago actually interviewing Gabriel Shepton, Julian Assange's brother. And so that'll be on the site at Scott Horton.org, as well as Eli Clifton on nuclear weapons. But for today's guest on the show, it's Connor Freeman. He is our assistant news editor at the Institute

and assistant editor at anti-war.com. And he's also the co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Kyle Anzalone. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Connor? I'm doing great, Scott. Thank you very much for having me back on. Very happy to have you here. So did you see the new Seymour, Hirsch? piece about the casualty numbers in Gaza? Yes, I did.

Okay. So my first question for you is, what was in there? Because this is a subject that you and I had been discussing anyway, which is, Jesus, seems like the casualty numbers have not really gone up in what, two months or something. We got to like low 30,000s or mid-30,000s, and then everything just kind of ground to a halt. It kind of reminds me of when it was only 10,000 killed in Yemen for years, even though it was already in the hundreds of thousands. But then again, I was asking you, well, maybe the tempo of the bombing really has slowed down or the targeting has become more narrow or something really has

changed. So now my question for you is, what did we learn from Seymour Hirsch yesterday? Sure. So he interviewed a spate of public health experts and people, you know, humanitarian officials as well as at least one unnamed U.S. official. And the consensus is that these are massive undercounts. what we're seeing from the Gaza Health Ministry, the U.N., the European Mediterranean humanitarian monitor, as well as other groups. And the message is, and we've also seen this in this latest IPC report, the integrated food security phase classification report, that's the top international watchdog on famine, that basically because of the Israeli operations, because they've dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which is only 25 miles long.

by five miles wide. And because of the unceasing pace of the bombing, they have not been able to get in there and define if, you know, the IPC has not been able to say if there actually is a famine taking place because they can't get in there to collect the data because of how, you know, the way the war is being carried out against the Palestinians. And the same goes for the actual death toll numbers. I mean, we're talking about he cites a story from Al Jazeera in February where they were interviewing an undertaker who said he's never buried this many bodies in his life. In all of his

years, I think says 30 years in the business, you know, he already said he's buried at least 17,000 people in Gaza by February. And a lot of these people are in mass grades. And he makes the point that there were no public health officials. There were no government officials involved. Nobody was taken names down. And so they have to dig a hole that's, you know, 30 feet deep and put as many bodies in there as possible. And in many cases, as he says, you know, because of the way the war is carried out, we can't even tell these people are. They're, they look like boiled potatoes in some cases. They're riddled with so many bullets. He said it looks like Israeli snipers are just shooting their bodies up for target practice. And one of the public health experts that he interviews says that

no clear and definite body count is possible given the continuing Israeli bombing. He says that it's there's no functioning fire department, no fire trucks, no water, no place to escape, no hospitals, no electricity, people living in tents and bodies stacked up all over being eaten by stray dogs. And of course, as everybody who's involved in this says, we need a ceasefire now, not only to prevent the mass starvation, which is taking place, because apparently, you know, more than one in five Palestinians in Gaza right now is at the catastrophic level, the worst level of starvation before death.

And they're saying that the famine is going to reach, or at least the starvation level, is about to reach over a million, you know, because just the way no food, especially since May 7th when they seized the Rafa border crossing and destroyed it. We've seen, you know, there was, I guess, an uptick in the delivery of aid in March and April, but all those gains have been reversed since they took, they decimated Rafa and expelled over a million people from that city near the border with Egypt, where about 1.5 or 1.7 million Palestinians who had already have been internally displaced throughout the earlier months of the war, now we're living in these tent cities that are routinely bombed with American supplied weapons.

Living in 10 cities with no aid, no medicine, you know, no infrastructure, they attack the field hospitals. And when they carry out maskers as they did in the Tal al-Satan camp in Western Rafa, where they, you know, burn 45 people alive, parents, you know, incinerating to death while their children are crying and children's heads being burned off. What happens is they'll be taken to a hospital, say, the next day. This actually happened. And then the Israelis attack that hospital.

So then they have to move to another tank camp as many people are able to actually get out of the hospital. Some are left behind. They go to another place like Almawesi, which has been routinely attacked, even though it was declared a safe zone by the Israeli forces. And then by the time they get there, the field hospital is destroyed or it hasn't been set up. So you have so many people dying just because of the absolute cruelty of the way the war, it's not a war, the way the genocide is being conducted against the Palestinians.

We've already seen half of all buildings, according to the UNE, more than half of all buildings in the strip, have been destroyed, not just damage, destroyed. And as I say, I mean, there was this recent report that came out from, UNICEF that says that 21,000 children are unaccounted for, missing, presumed dead or buried under rubble. And that adds, there's more adults in those numbers as well. And as you've said, I mean, the death toll right now is about 37,718, I believe, with more than 85,000 wounded. And so the consensus among the humanitarian orgs is that this is just, massively undercounted. And, you know, I've heard some estimates that people who have family

over there believe that over 100,000 people have been killed thus far. Man. Well, you never know exactly what it is at these kind of estimates. And I'm always a little wary of the high ones, but I know it's got to be steadily growing. And the fact that the numbers stopped growing while the war kept continuing is, you know, obviously very suspicious, you know, and when you talk about, I mean, did they say, by the way, their methodology there on the 21,000 missing children that is presumed buried alive or bulldozed already to oblivion? No, I mean, it's essentially the Gaza Health Ministry is saying that these people are unaccounted for. Some of them are missing because they can't find, I mean, their

parents can't locate them. I believe about 4,000 of them are estimated. you be dead. But again, because there's so much rubble and so much of the strip has been destroyed, these are just the children that we know can't be found. And excuse me, it was saved the children that carried out the study. They're, you know, they're presumed to be in mass graves or under the rubble or, as I said, separated from their parents. And many have been detained and taken into these prisons that the Israelis have. And they don't, the parents obviously have no way of contacting them. So these are just the ones that have been reported. And we've also gotten numerous stories out of these detainment centers of Palestinians being tortured,

including by being raped, waterboarded, burned. I mean, the callousness and macabre stories coming out of these prisons is really unspeakable. And so you can just imagine what's going through these parents' minds as they know that their children are being held hostage by the IDF with those kinds of stories. spread. I mean, we also, even the U.N. workers have been tortured by the Israelis already. We know that there was a report that UNRA put out saying that many of their own employees that said they have been tortured into, the Israelis were trying to get them to make false accusations against their own colleagues for having been involved in the October 7th attack,

which several Western countries just accepted at face value from an Israeli dossier that contain no evidence to prove those allegations and then cut funding to the primary UN agency for the strip, which just, you know, tighten the starvation siege because they have the most infrastructure and the most ability to distribute aid throughout the strip. All right, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with Connor Freeman from anti-war.com, and there's so much going on with this story here. It's such a nightmare what you described there. I want to reiterate, and I know I say this just about every week, but, um, for people who aren't familiar, the three most important newspapers in America, the posts, the Times, and the journal have all run stories where they made direct comparisons to the devastation of Dresden and Hamburg at the hands of the Americans and British in World War II with the fire bombing, the absolute destruction.

Now, in this case, it's important to clarify that they mostly chased everybody out of there with a bit lower level bombing than that, although still slow. laundering many people before completely leveling the place. So it's not kind of all in two nights and that many people dying kind of all at once in two nights. But then again, the totals are basically equivalent over six months and the devastation and essentially the erasure of entire neighborhoods and, you know, greenhouses and barns and farm equipment and all the things that, you know, are making their economy go and And just completely erasing city blocks, bombing them and then bulldozing them right out of there, cleaning the slate.

The way that they have done essentially deliberately made it impossible for people to come home at the same time that they're killing them by the tens of thousands. They're just completely demolishing the place. And this is all on America's time and all with America's protection. I don't know if Americans know that even England a lot of times votes against this stuff. It would be American Israel alone. And it ain't because we're the only good guys holding back the darkness. That ain't it. It's the other way around here.

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Of course, Roberts and Roberts can help you with platinum, palladium, and silver as well as gold. Don't let the Fed and the war party inflate all your savings away. Look up Roberts and Roberts at rrbi.co. That's rrbi.c.o. There's been a little bit of this going back, but I was really interested to see this new article in Harretz by Benjamin Netanyahu's predecessor, Aihud Olmert, who was the heir. of Ariel Sharon in the Kadima party. Sharon and Netanyahu had been in Lakshu together but were rivals, of course, over minor differences.

But when Sharon went into his coma, Reins got passed to Olmert and then he was in charge until Netanyahu came in, at the same time Obama came to power there in 2009. So, but he seems to be dissenting more and more, and especially very starkly here, Conner, against Benjamin Netanyahu's policy, which just on the face of it right there, and I'd like to hear all the details, but they make it seem in American media like this is just the way it has to be.

Remember, Donald Trump denounced Joe Biden for temporarily holding up delivery of 2,000-pound bombs that probably weren't even held up anyway. It's just a contest for how much worse they could make it between the two major party rivals for the president's, here again. But meanwhile, in Israel, the former prime minister, the most recent former prime minister, is harshly dissenting from the current policy. So please take us through that if you could. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Netanyahu is in a lot of trouble right now. He's facing all kinds of

political vulnerabilities that threaten to collapse his fragile ruling coalition, which is filled with these ultra-Orthodox and extremist factions. But Almert is piling on. I mean, this article that he wrote in Haretz, he's accusing him of deliberately prolonging the war in Gaza with no state, you know, no achievable objective and no deadline set so that he says the war can eventually fail and then he can just blame the military for that. He also says that he's looking to expand the war to Hezbollah for what he called an all-out. military confrontation, a direct war with Hezbole on the North, and he says that he's ignoring the efforts of the French and the Americans to try and prevent that war from spilling over.

He also talks about how, you know, and I was pretty, it was, you know, good to see this. He doesn't express hardly any concern for the civilians being slaughtered by the tens of thousands in Gaza, but he does say that the settlers, he's blaming the settlers, but if you look at the numbers, the IDF is responsible for most of the over 500 Palestinians who have been murdered in the West Bank since October 7th. But what he said was, I accused the Prime Minister of Israel taking deliberate actions meant to cause a widespread flare-up of violence in the West Bank, in the knowledge that this would trigger the expansion of war crimes against Palestinians who were not involved in terrorism in any way. Such crimes are already being committed by many

Israelis. Usually these are not military conscripts, but rather private militias made up of thugs carrying guns that in most cases were given to them in a questionable process that demands legal review in a move initiated by national security minister, Ibn Bengivir. These weapons serve many of them in their riots and protect them when they brutalize Palestinians burning their property and destroying the fields that are a resource of life and sustenance as well as directly killing innocent people. And we've already seen thousands of people have displaced. They've been carrying out ethnic cleansing in the Jordan Valley as well as rural areas

outside of Hebron, that began, you know, very early on in the war. We saw entire villages outside Hebron depopulated. And when the settlers go in there, they'll be burning houses down, torching vehicles, and causing, you know, millions of dollars of property destruction that the Palestinians obviously don't have. And so the settlers have been running wild. As soon as October, as soon as the attack, the Hamas attack on Israel, and then the ensuing war began the week after, you know, the less, when the war was only less than a week old, I always remember this story. It was so, I mean, it was so shocking. The Israeli settlers went and killed three Palestinian olive farmers. And then the Palestinians held a funeral the next day. So the settlers showed up

and shot a father and a son to death in the funeral procession. And so it's been open season this entire time. And UNICEF declared last year to be the deadliest year on record for children in the West Bank. At this point, I believe it's roughly 150 or between 130 and 150 Palestinian children that have been killed so far. And those are, it's 137. And those are just the numbers that we know of. 553 people have been killed overall. And the other thing that Almert discusses is that, you know, that Netanyahu is deliberately avoiding

any kind of a ceasefire deal that would bring all the hostages home from Gaza because he says it would prevent a total victory, but as I said, he wants the war. He's saying that Netanyahu wants the war to go on indefinitely and blame any failures on the military. But of course, you know, he's also saying that it's destroying their economy. The war has already cost Israel $60 billion. The U.S., the estimates are, is sent over $6.5 billion worth of weapons, including $3 billion just last month after the, you know, and that last month was when they invaded Rafa and displaced over a million people, as I mentioned earlier, which that was supposed to be the red line, attacks on populated areas in Rafa, which they've been doing ever since. And of course, the Washington

has done nothing about that. He also accused Netanyahu of destroying the relationship, the political military security relationship with the United States. And he emphasizes that our entire Air Force relies completely on American aircraft, fighter planes, transport planes, refueler planes, and helicopters. All of Israel's air power is based on America's commitment to defend Israel. And I think he's exaggerating. I mean, Yoav Galant just visited Washington and met with Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin. And they all were, you know, prostrating themselves and saying we have an ironclad commitment to Israel. And, you know, we're just basically saying that we're, in this to the end. And so there hasn't been, and he, you know, Yoav Galan, along with Benjamin Netanyahu,

the ICC is seeking warrants for, uh, to put these men on trial for war crimes. So it's just, again, we're continuing with, you know, creating our own diplomatic isolation by standing behind Israel as they genocide the Palestinians. And, uh, you know, it doesn't appear that, uh, really the, uh, the Joe Biden administration is clearly taking all this, these attacks from Netanyahu about, oh, you're holding up weapons, they're taking it on the chin and going, we don't know what he's talking about. You know, they're apparently, basically what happened is we had sent over almost 250 shipments of weapons to the Israelis since the war began.

But as the pace of operations has slowed down, because Netanyahu is saying the intense, you know, the more intense operations in Gaza are going to wind down soon and he's going to to relocate some of the forces to the north to prepare for war with Hezbollah. We've been hearing Israeli officials and American officials warning about this for months now, but it looks more and more like they're going to escalate against Hezbollah and open up a whole new front in earnest with Lebanon. And so basically, the pace of weapons shipments has now reverted to the way American officials describe it as a normal pace.

The only shipment that has been held up is this one ship. of 2,000-pound bombs. And we've already sent thousands of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which even the New York Times is reported in the early days of the war. They were routinely dropping 2,000-pound bombs on Palestinian civilians in the so-called safe zones. So, you know, Biden did this as basically a political stunt, the same way he did when he, you know, claimed that Israel had put forward this ceasefire proposal that was really his, which

has completely fallen apart, again, because of Netanyahu's obstinence and for the same priorities that Olmert is laying out here. This was just Biden's attempt to try and look like he was doing something to reign in Israel because, you know, more than half of the people that voted for Biden in 2020 believe he's committed, he's complicit in genocide right now. And so this is obviously going to devastate him in the election. And as you mentioned tonight, the first presidential debate or maybe the only one that we're going to see in this season is taking place on CNN, and we're going to watch both Trump and Biden try and prove who can be more subservient to Benjamin Netanyahu. And Netanyahu is using Trump's rhetoric about finishing the job, which is genocidal in the rhetoric.

Obviously, we can see what they're talking. The job is slaughtering the Palestinians, making the strip completely uninhabitable and ethnically cleansing them to Egypt, the other Arab states, or anywhere else they can go. we've already seen Lakut officials and even members of Netanyahu's opposition saying, you know, writing in the Wall Street Journal that Western countries, if you're so concerned about humanitarian, you know, if you're such humanitarians and you care about these people, why don't you take them? And so basically, I mean, Omerd is saying that, you know, all the things that most analysts, you know, who are paying attention to this are saying that Netanyahu is making sure that the war goes on indefinitely. And this comes as. Even Shaki Hanigbee, Netanyahu's national security advisor, is saying what Daniel Hagarri, Rearadmiral Daniel Higari, the IDF spokesman said recently, which is that this stuff about eradicating Hamas is impossible. Hamas is an idea.

It's a concept. It lives in the hearts of the people. You cannot defeat them. You cannot destroy their military capabilities. And we've already heard those same arguments made by U.S. and Israeli intelligence and even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charles Q. Brown, has made the, you know, the, you know, the, it reminds me of McChrystal's insurgent mass, saying that all these civilians you're killing, all you're doing is increasing Hamas's ranks. So, you know, basically more and more people,

including within the Israeli political spectrum, are coming to the realization, led by the IDF, that this, the way the war is being carried out is impractical at best. Well, and think about that. I mean, from the very beginning, The idea was, well, we're not going to hunt down the leadership and get them or bargain for them. No, we're going to eradicate Hamas entirely by doing this massive movement of the Palestinian people, all them to the south of the Gaza Strip, and then we're going to force him back north again, and we're going to root them out of their tunnels, and we're going to do this and that until they're all gone. And since that was the premise that no Hamas must be left standing, this is the war that they fought.

in the name of that goal and that that strategy which of course was always bankrupt it of course was always a lie just as much as the IDF is now accusing it of being uh and accusing Netanyahu of telling it that that's where this is headed that we're going to be Hamas free no so instead what do we got again nobody knows how many tens of thousands but north of 40 thousand dead people mostly innocent civilians little kids buried alive and for nothing and at the end of the day they're right back where they started from again which is you know torturing these people that they can't quite get rid of after stealing their country from them it's really incredible benjahou's wife is now accusing the military of fomenting a coup against him as is his son in shahla netanyahu is accusing itmar Ben-Gavir of leaking state secrets. And so now there's a fight between Jewish power and Lekud. They made a point, I guess there's this move to try and make ministers take lie detector tests. And they said, we'll do that if it applies to people with pacemakers

referring to Netanyahu. You know, they just, the high court this week just passed, they just ruled unanimously all nine justices that the Haradim, the ultra-Orthodox community, are no longer exempt from the mass enlistment policy, the mandatory mass enlistment, and they're now going to be subject to conscription. So that's going to cause major problems for Netanyahu's coalition. He relies on those ultra-Orthodox parties. I mean, not just the most extremist ones like Jewish power and religious Zionism led by Itmar, Bangavir, and Bezal Smotrich, respectively. But, I mean, the Shah's party and the United Torah Judaism Party are completely up in arms about this. And Lekud says they're going to introduce a bill to try and reverse this, but it's not clear Netanyahu has enough time to pull that off.

One of his opposition parties, it's a real oxymoron, movement for quality government. That's the name of a party in Israel. They led the petition to the high court for this, and now they're demanding, they're saying this is a huge achievement for justice and equality that everybody is subject to military slavery in the society, and they're demanding the gallant. begin drafting the ultra-Orthodox immediately. And they've been living on the dole from the rest of the citizens this whole time, and they've been exempt from the draft. And so it's caused major protests over the last several months and a lot of political upheaval in Israel.

And so again, Netanyahu is just facing a lot of problems right now. As Bezalel Smote Rich, the financial minister, has been making some moves. And his speech was recently reported on that got leaked by CNN in the New York Times. actually, about how they are moving forward with plans to annex Area C of the West Bank. And basically what he's done is he runs the, he's got civilians working for him as in his special position in the defense ministry where he acts as a de facto governor of the West Bank. And now it's called the, the settlements administration. So now he has civilians working for him who agree with, you know, they're like him.

they're for full annexation of the of judean samaria as they call it and they're going to take the whole west bank maybe the silver lining is we'll get that military coup over there and it'll be way better than the democracy in israel which is so horrible but uh we can only joke and hope but uh we're out of time thank you so much for your time again on the show connor great stuff absolutely thank you scott aren't you guys that's connor freeman you can see why i got them covering is for palestine for us over at antiwar dot com and the institute right Ain't you great? All right. That's it for the show. I'm Scott Horton. This is anti-war radio. Find the full interview archive, including my brand new interview with Julian Assange's brother

and a bunch more stuff at Scott Horton.org and YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And please donate and support KPFK 90.7FM in L.A. That's at KPFK.org. Or call 8189852711. And I'll see you guys next Thursday. We're going to be able to do. I'm going to be.