The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa - Author of Controversial NY Times Article - Reports on Children Shot in Gaza

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

Dr. Feroze Sidwha is interviewed about his NY Times article: "65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza".

Hi. Hey, how are you? All right. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table. We're doing a special episode tonight with a guy who wrote an article which has kind of turned the Israel-Palestine war world upside down. His name is Feroz Sidwa, a general trauma and critical care surgeon in California.

He's also a humanitarian surgeon, having worked most extensively in Palestine, but also in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. I don't know where that is. It's north of Ghana. He most recently volunteered at the European Hospital in Kan Yunis, Gaza, from March 25th to April 8th, 2024, with the World Health Organization. Feroz has written and spoken extensively about surgical humanitarian work,

the United States' role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the political consequences of medical relief work. He approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a secular American and a humanitarian physician. Welcome to the show, sir. Thanks for having me. And before we... Come a little closer to the mic if you can.

Before we, God forbid, fight, I want to tell you, first of all, it's very impressive to me that you came here, and I really appreciate it. What did you think? Had you ever heard of our show before? I've seen your interview with Ami Aylan before, yeah. And you thought...

Just on YouTube, I don't know. Right, so you thought i know just just on youtube i don't know right so so so you you thought i i behaved myself well enough that you could that you could allow me interview you like you you thought i was a credible interviewer i i you seem to interview i'm just fine yeah yeah i mean i if you want my group i didn't come here to give a critique of that you can watch a long time ago but the um i thought the way you started the interview off was a little strange. I remember you said, I can't remember the exact words, obviously, but it was something like... Shalom.

Shalom. You said something like, I have a friend who's really critical of Israel, and he said that I should ask you about a particular, I think Israeli special forces unit that he said they're bad-ass. And I just, I thought that was, I thought Ilan thought that was weird. You know who that was by the way? No. That was actually a Daryl Cooper, Martyr Maid,

the guy who got in all the trouble recently with Tucker Carlson. You don't know who he is? I, sorry, I don't watch the news or I don't pay much. So he was in a huge news story a few weeks ago. Is he okay? Is he what? You said he's gotten in a lot of trouble? Well, he got in a lot of controversy.

Oh, okay, yeah. But he does this, you'd probably find it worth listening to. He did this long podcast series called Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem, which is a kind of, I would say, anti-Israeli, long, deep dive into the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But anyway, so, all right, so you spent 14 days? Yeah, yeah, March 25th april 8th i was in konyun yeah and before we get to the article uh what how did how did that come about i'm just curious like how does a doctor say i want to go help in gaza yeah i mean i've been doing humanitarian work since medical school um uh you know i've heard i started in southern zimbabwe then i went and worked in the west bank that was both of those were my first year of med school and then um so i've been around i've been to ukraine three times in the past year

or not the past year now but since the russian invasion started mostly in 2023 and um so yeah so i've been doing this work for a long time uh i actually got uh uh interested in humanitarian surgical work through the israelPalestine conflict, actually. I went, so after I graduated, you know, I was a freshman in 2000 at Hopkins, and that was the year the second Intifada broke out. I didn't know anything about the Israel-Palestine conflict, never heard of it before then. I grew up in a very apolitical household. And so I, you know, I learned a lot about the conflict in college.

Afterwards, you know, my dad's a doctor, so I thought I'll go to medical school when I got to college. But after that, or after the second Dafada broke out and then after 9-11 especially, I thought, well, maybe medicine isn't the right thing to do. So I went and lived in Israel for a year. I lived in Haifa, worked with an Arab-Jewish cooperative there. They didn't do anything with the conflict. They just tried to solve intercommunal conflict. You lived in Haifa for how long? Yeah, I lived in Haifa for about a year, yeah.

The group tried to deal with intercommunal problems between not just the Arab and the Jewish, because Haifa is Israel's only a mixed city, you know, dealt with problems between them, but also between problems within the Arab community, like between Palestinians and Druze, for example, and sometimes even between the different parts of the Jewish community. So it was kind of like a peacemaking organization. Now, I was just a fundraiser. I just interacted with the European Union to get them fundraising. I think mostly from Norway, if I remember right.

But then how do you get on a plane and get out? Well, right, right. So, yeah, so when I was there, I would tour around in the West Bank, and I still remember I went to, I'm pretty sure it was Ahli Hospital in Hebron. That's where I went back later. But I went to Ahli Hospital, and there was a delegation from Physicians for Human Rights Israel there. And I remember there was this big, burly Israeli dude.

I think he was an orthopedic surgeon. But I remember he took me aside, and he said, I just graduated from college. I was like 22. I hadn't gone to med school yet. And he said, if you would be a doctor the way these, he called them Arabs. He's like, the way these Arabs have to be doctors, then you should go to med school. If you look at them and they have to deal with the same shit that everybody else in the society deals with they don't get special privileges you know maybe they have enough money to buy a used car or something but it's not like their lives

are great you know they're not like u.s and israeli doctors where we're privileged we've got money we can do whatever we want and he said you know if you would live like them and be a doctor then be a doctor and you know when i when i thought about it later when i was deciding whether or not to go to med school i i didn't you know for me i'm never going to have to live like that because i'm not palestine not in the third world country you know but he was really i really wish i could remember his name but um he was really an inspiration for me because he gave up a lot of social prestige a lot of um probably a lot of money i couldn't tell you but probably a lot of money, I couldn't tell you, but probably a lot of money to go and, because he could criticize Israeli policy

of the occupation from his room if he wanted to, and he wouldn't get in trouble for it. But going into the territories, working with Palestinian doctors and surgeons, for an Israeli guy or an Israeli physician, I should say, to do that, it's going to be difficult it's going to impose costs on his life but he did it anyway so uh so i've always done the same thing and you know i i haven't uh i can't say i have any negative consequences on my life maybe other than a free

time from doing the work i do uh you know obviously nobody criticizes me when i go to ukraine uh or or anywhere else but um but in the situation of uh of uh israel palestine things are always controversial for some reason so um but i still don't understand how you how how you were able to get into gaza like oh so so we so i got a call for that i got an email from the society for critical care medicine they sent uh out a call for volunteers from the Palestinian American Medical Association. And so they, or they, it's like, what humanitarian sector stuff works is ridiculous. They liaised with the World Health Organization and organized a trip. So at that time, Rafah hadn't been taken by the Israeli military. So we flew to Cairo, went across the Sinai with all the stuff that we brought with us, in through the rafa crossing um when we left we left on march 25th and then the next team came in or sorry we arrived on march

25th we left on april 8th the next team came in i think two or three weeks later uh that's when the rafa crossing was taken so then after that everybody goes anybody who's allowed to go into israel flies to amman jordan first and then goes over the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank, into Israel, and then over to, I think they pass through Karim Shalom. So, and you risked your life in some way to do this, right? Yeah, in some ways. I mean, you know, I think the Israeli military, or not the Israeli military, but the Israeli government probably tries not to kill American doctors while they're there. I think that would look pretty bad. They have killed.

They killed. Relief workers have killed. Journalists have been killed. Not because they're targeted. I mean, you could say a worse case is worse, but at minimum, you're in a war zone, and they're not going to stop the war because there's an American doctor there. No, they won't.

So that's for sure. You know, there have been hospitals that have been attacked while americans have been there and blah blah blah no that there's no doubt about that um and it's scary while you're there i mean like the bombardment was like i was there during the battle of conunis so the the um uh the bombardment of conunis was constant the shooting was constant uh you know it was kind of wild actually because i thought i i got to leave the hospital and drive through rafa and Canyunas and the Moasi area probably on like April 5th or so, just one or two days before we left. And. I had just thought because the whole hospital is shaking constantly, like windows would break on the third floor, sometimes instruments would fall off our table, you know, I was like was like geez i thought the bombs were like right outside in other words they were like a mile and a half away there's no real buildings near um near uh uh near the hospital and you're like when i lived in the west bank i lived

with a palestinian family uh across from fawar refugee camp you're like route six goes up and down the west bank i lived across the street from there and there was an israeli military base on the other side of the hill that they their house was on and sometimes they would shell the hill it was just war games like they weren't uh they weren't shooting at anybody um but the you know the house would sway but like this was a different like yeah these are like aerial these are these are bombs that are dropped out of airplanes you know so pretty different uh yeah no it's you you it's it's a there's a sense of insecurity for sure i mean it's it's you said, it's a war zone. And just before we get into Israel,

I'm just curious, because I have somebody here and I've always wondered this. Did you see war crimes in Ukraine? So the work I did in Ukraine was mostly educational. I definitely, so most of our translators, no, actually, that's not true. Some of our translators were from the Donbass region. I remember one in particular. That's where mostly Russian speakers are.

Mostly Russian speakers, but more importantly, that's where the Russian occupation is right now. The eastern edge of the country, or the eastern mountainous region of the country. And, you know, one of the translators, I remember, he told us, you know, several members of his family were killed. Several, yeah, the rest of them had to flee. Some of them, their family members were trapped in the Donbass, and they couldn't really communicate with them. It was difficult. I actually had a friend who I can't –

I've tried a thousand times to learn how to pronounce the name of the children's hospital in Kiev that was bombed. I just can't commit it to my cranium. It's very hard to speak. But I had a friend who was there with his son when that bombing, they were fine, thankfully, but they were there with his son when the bombing happened. So, yeah.

So, no, did I witness them? No, but they're very real. The war in the Donbass is very brutal. It's not a joke you know I know there's a lot of uh uh you could talk about the which I don't know much about so I wouldn't be comfortable talking about it but you could certainly talk about the political uh background and the political whatever about the Ukraine the war in Ukraine the Russian invasion of Ukraine who's right who's wrong I don't know. That's not the role of a humanitarian surgeon to figure out

when you, when you go somewhere. But it's, but the brutality of it is unmistakable. It's, it's very extreme. Brutality against civilians as well. You know, I mean, that guy, I'm pretty sure his, I don't think his parents were uh were um were combatants i don't think his siblings were he didn't say my my dad got killed on the battlefield he said soldiers came into my house and uh you know that's um uh so you know yeah i i mean there's of course you know there's a lot of apparently there's a lot of hand to hand or like close quarters fighting in Ukraine. It's like urban, I don't know if urban warfare is the right term, but, you know, close quarters combat. And that's always going to be very brutal.

You know, it's not dropping a bomb out of a plane or shooting a tank shell or something. It's two people fighting, shooting each other, seeing each other. But so there's that brutality, but then there's certainly a level of brutality towards civilians. I think, I don't know if maybe somebody knows better than I do, but I think the latest estimate of civilians killed during the invasion is like 10,000 people. It's not some small number.

And that's almost certainly some kind of undercount because there's no, you know, it's not like, you know, armies don't usually kill somebody and then say, hey, count hey count this guy you know it's not how it works so i mean our perception of putin is the last thing is that he wouldn't um think twice about how it is that civilians are killed collaterally no no i i seriously doubt it i mean it's uh states are brutal institutions in general they don't really think about how human beings fit into their designs if they don't have to. All right, let's get to your article. So the article is very, as a, you know,

is not Israeli, but my parents are both Israeli. And as a Jewish person, the article is very, very disturbing to me. I know you've taken a lot of hits from people who are trying to debunk it, but I have an open mind about it because I don't want to assume that something horrible can't be true. And the evidence that I'm telling you, that what I'm telling you is true, is that when there was a story in Haaretz about Palestinian prisoners being shackled

and then having to have their limbs amputated, I immediately called the reporter from that story on, Israeli, to find out what was true. You might be interested to listen to that interview. The end of the story is that the interview went much better for the Israel side than I ever imagined in terms of the overall picture. But I didn't know that going into the interview. My interest was in finding out the

truth yeah so i i think everybody you know it's there sometimes we don't know what's going on somewhere and like you said just having there's there's no nobody has to assume that what's true is true because i said it i mean that's ridiculous um at least i hope people realize that's ridiculous but the if we can't ask a question and seriously consider where it leads us then we're kind of lost so yeah no that's exactly right so you get to you get to um conunis is that it's it's european hospital and um immediately you start to see well what what did you start to see yeah well so the the first day you're you know the first day you get to any hospital you just kind of take a tour and uh the first day so we're we're going through and there were gosh you can't even know i think there were there there were originally two

icus in this hospital but i think four or five wards had been converted into ICUs. But me and Mark Perlmutter, we wrote an article in Politico together. You probably might have read it. He and I went into one of the ICUs, and there were two little kids there. And the nurse that was showing us around barely spoke English, but she just pointed to her head and said, shot, shot. And I was like, I probably weren't shot. That's ridiculous um kids don't get shot in the head that often but you know i kind of looked at them and they were both neither one of them had any other wounds they just had their heads bandaged up so i was like that's weird so we um and they they'd both come into the

the i think one had come in the day before and the other two days before i can't remember two kids shot in the head and they were and they were bandaged they were both bandaged up they were both on a ventilator and they were in beds next to each other so as a doctor just i don't want to stop you i want to let you know but just how do you get shot in the head and not die so this is a common misunderstanding i think this this so what you see on tv i know trump got shot in the head, but... Oh, God. I'm definitely not prepared to discuss that. No. The, um...

Jeez. But the, um... The... Everything... I'm sure the vast majority of what you know about gunshot wounds is from television. It's literally 100% wrong. There are...

It's almost invariable which is fine because tv is not like but these are bullets in the brain yes these are bullets that penetrated the skull and or so i'm sorry um these are bullets that penetrated the skull and injured the brain parenchyma so um it's okay i gotta i gotta take my phone no i just had to put it on dude i want to get some screenshots i did but go ahead um so uh so yeah so when a uh uh there are plenty of people that get shot in the head and don't die i take care of them all the time actually i can tell you but i won't say his last name obviously but there was a 19 year old kid named angel when i was a um i thought it was on hell but his mom insisted no it's angel um when he when i was a, I thought it was on hell, but his mom insisted, no, it's Angel. When he, when I was a fellow, he was actually, he actually had a transcranial gunshot wound, which means it went from the right all the way through his brain to the left.

That's widely considered to be a non-survivable injury. I actually told his mother at his bedside that he was going to die. She's, you know, of course starts crying, you know, which is totally understandable. Of course um i finished my rotation in the icu we had kept him alive he wasn't brain dead meaning he still had brain stem reflexes uh but we did not suspect we we were quite sure that at some point his brain would swell too much it would die there was nothing we could do about it like that's what we call a non-survivable injury uh a few months later i was rotating in the medical icu and i looked over and i was like that angel that can't possibly be him so i walked in i was like hey what's your name he's like it just looks at me perfectly normal english oh my name's angel sir and i was like

did you get shot in the head three months ago he's yeah really and so it turned now he just gets abscesses infections in his brain he has to come in they do a surgery drain the head then the neurosurgeon it's not me drain the abscess out and he goes about now that's a totally exceptional situation a transcranial gunshot wound that didn't die but this is a total misconception on tv everyone who gets shot in the head is just dead instantly that's not the real world at all so these two children were shot and they survived they did not survive oh they didn't die the next day oh the next day. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no. They were alive at the moment I saw them, but they went on to die.

The deal, in order to survive a significant gunshot wound to the head, you need a neurosurgeon available, which we did have at European Hospital, thankfully. And you need a huge variety of critical care facilities. And that's what European Hospital what uh european hospital lacked at the time so uh but anyway so the so this is your first day there you see two kids yeah this is my first day in the icu or i walk into the icu just again like i said just taking a tour of the hospital and i just i couldn't believe they'd been shot i just i just you know just because it's again it's unusual to see that many kids shot in there in that case was two but it's unusual to see two kids shot in the head next to each other so i just i was just i was sure they were injured in a bombing it was just shrapnel but

i looked at their scans and no sure enough both of them had bullets in their head and i was just like that is the bullets were still in the head yeah both of them there still had the bullets they're not taking so they're not taken out so that's no so that so it depends if you're um if you and again i'm not a neurosurgeon so i I don't, some poor neurosurgeon is going to scream into the screen while they're watching this. But in a, bullets are removed from ventricles. So there's these two fluid, well, there's four, but there's fluid-filled spaces right in the middle of your brain. If the bullet gets into that, they're usually removed from what I understand of neurosurgery, which is minimal, because I don't do it. Other than that, though, when a bullet traverses the brain, the main problem that it causes is, you know, it causes a skull fracture,

but that's not lethal. When the bullet traverses the brain, it causes parenchymal damage. Doctors call the meat of any organ the parenchyma. So it causes parenchymal damage. It causes a lot of vascular injury, because the brain's very well vascularized, lots of small arteries, lots of small veins. In addition to that, what it can cause is what's called a subdural hematoma a a large collection of blood between the brain and the skull it's a little more complicated than that it doesn't matter um and uh so those are the two problems that you have the brain injury uh is focused because it's a bullet right it's not a you know if you get a bowling ball to the head you get a kind of a different situation but so the uh so when you're over the next several

days the brain can swell you can develop what are called pseudoaneurysms of the brain where basically an artery has like if this is the artery with the blood people can see but if there's if this is an artery running like this there'll be a hole on the side of the artery and so there's the blood flow is still intact but blood is leaking out and it kind of goes around and comes back into the artery but that space will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger causing more brain damage um and sometimes they die from the swelling right exactly and eventually you can die you can you can do what's called a craniectomy you can relieve pressure on the skull but oftentimes even that won't be successful it's because i want to end and um you know we know john f kennedy the bullet went inside in one side and out the other yeah um that's not normal these high velocities oh yeah

yeah no no so just remember there's plenty of people that get shot in the head that i never see because they're just dead on scene like i I'm talking about in the United States, right? Like I live in. But what's more ordinary for the bullet to go through the head or for the bullet to be lodged in? What's more common with all gunshot wounds to the head? I honestly couldn't tell you. Well, the kind of guns that they're using in the army. So again, it kind of, it depends. I mean, like if you're, if you're, again, I'm no kind of weapon or ballistics expert, but if you're far enough away from a target that the bullet can lose enough velocity, meaning enough kinetic energy, that it's all it has enough is left enough.

The only kinetic energy it has left is enough to penetrate the skull and stop in the brain. Then that's what it's going to do. But how common is that with all gunshot wounds in a war zone i really know but if you're if you're that far i want to i don't want to no no there's so many little pathways and i really wanted to get to the timeline but this is common sense speaking not uh and common sense can be you know wrong if you're that far away that the bullet peters out as it were you, in the middle of the skull. Aren't you pretty far away in terms of somebody interpreting the fact that this was a precisely aimed shot? You're at the limit.

You're at the limit of the range of the gun. That's entirely – again, like I said, I don't know much about weapon earing. And I have a pistol license, but I don't – I certainly can't say I a an expert sniper or something i shoot you a point blank range it's going through your head most almost certainly but now again like think about with a 22 it actually might not with a 22 million but these aren't 20 no no of course not of course what you're saying you're just you're you asked if i shoot you a point bang my point is it depends it really depends um it depends on the gun that was used it depends on what think about it this way what if it went through a cinder block beforehand well and now obviously you couldn't talk about it being a deliberate thing because it went through a wall uh or at least you know you can't it's hard to imagine how it could have still been deliberate

uh or or would stay on stay trajectory true right exactly yeah so you just wouldn't you can't make such claims of obviously but the um but with uh but yeah no i mean like sniper rifles are sniper rifles are designed to be used at distance uh drones shoot things at distance uh so um you know i mean like i saw plenty of people with uh with bullets still in their chest and abdomen as well it's you know the chest and abdomen are much softer than the the skull yeah uh they have less stopping power at least i would imagine i do again i'm not not some expert in that area but let's um other reason i want to move on because i don't know really what i'm

talking about it's just uh you know so so that's the first day then take us through the next few days uh so you know i couldn't tell you day by day uh i did keep a journal when i was there but i couldn't tell you day by day but they uh off the top of my head um but yeah so over the next few days on average so i thought i saw 13 kids who had been shot in the head while i was there um when i uh uh ended that so you know about one a day on average uh and but it's important to remember i'm not actually the person i assume this is what you're asking about right like this specifically or do you want me to tell you what well you can answer i mean you can answer whatever you think is the best most relevant answer even if it's not exactly what i'm asking you know because i want to get the information

out there you know you may you may know that something is relevant that i'm not even asking you so you can answer it with some flexibility oh sure so but yeah so on average i saw one kid shot in the head every day um i uh the the thing to realize with me being uh like just having that record 13 is that i am not actually the person in gaza that they call when the kid gets shot in the head i'm actually they don't really understand what a trauma surgeon is over there because in, in, they, they work more in like a British style system. And in Britain, the, the orthopedic surgeon is actually the trauma surgeon, not like my, my role in the United States is to stop someone from bleeding to death and then to manage all critical care issues that arise with a trauma

patient. So brain injuries, cardiac problems, whatever it might be. Uh, so they, but they don't, they don't really get that over there. So I only found these kids if i happened to be in the er when they came in or when i walked through the icu the next day there that means that basically anybody who came into the er when i wasn't there uh and was dead because you know again like you said like you know lots of bullets might have traversed the entire brain uh very often i'm sure these kids died who were dead on arrival or dead before they even got to the hospital um they would have just been sent directly to the morgue and i never would have seen them right so on average i want one a day that's what i personally saw i certainly can't attest that that's universal all right so this is listen i'll be very honest as i'm meeting you

you seem seem to me as about as credible a person as I can meet and yet I have questions I'd ask him and maybe there's perfectly good explanations so I was doing research on this

and so this is April 8th this is right after you left. You tweeted, I just left Gaza, driving across the Sinai now. The horrors I saw at Gaza European Hospital are nearly indescribable. And I want to emphasize that I was in the safer and better off area of the strip. I have seen teenagers who look like they came out of Auschwitz, young children. You know what?

I didn't take the rest of this tweet, but you didn't mention the kids shot in the head here, 13 kids shot in the head. And you posted a picture of a kid who looks like he's starving, a picture that you took. Yeah. That's Rafiq Hariri yeah yeah so my first the first question is if you saw 13 kids shot in the head why is he tweeting about the starving kid and if he's taking pictures of the war crimes why are no pictures of the kids that you saw shot in the head that would you know why aren't you documenting the war crimes and announcing them to the world? We know the kids were starving.

We'd seen that many places. Actually, we don't know the kids were starving. But we'd seen many pictures like this of children who looked like they were starving. But we never knew that kids were being shot in the head. You didn't mention it. Yeah, why I tweeted that while driving across the Sinai, I couldn't tell you why I specifically didn't choose to point out that I'd seen kids shot in the head. I'd also seen a lot of kids burned to death.

Yeah, but not set on fire. What do you mean? Meaning they burned because there were fires, but you were accusing the Israeli soldiers of murdering these kids by shooting them in the head intentionally, right? That's your accusation. Well, so I can't attest that every... Like, I'm a doctor, right?

I'm sitting in the hospital waiting for people... Not every, but a good amount. Yeah, right. So on... Sorry, let me just finish. So'm i'm a doctor i'm sitting in the hospital right i am not a war crimes investigator uh you know and even if i had been outside and saw a kid get shot i would have no idea how it happened that's not within my ability to i can't judge any individual instance and say obviously this uh child was shot on purpose that but when so this is and this is

why i wanted to investigate what other physicians saw in gaza i can't remember the exact number of how many people in the uh it's in the article how many of the 65 that we talked to actually saw kids shot in the head on the regular well i i want i don't want to get to the people you spoke to yet because the people you spoke to i can't cross people you spoke to, I can't cross-examine them. No, no, no. That's what they saw. But this is what I'm saying. The reason that I put this information together is precisely because maybe, like when I, I think I mentioned at the beginning of the article, when I left a European hospital, I thought that, like in my mind, the way I just conceived this was that there must just be some particularly sadistic soldier near the hospital.

That's why I'm seeing all these kids um and then i went to a conference and i sat next to a another doctor an emergency room doctor who had been at nasa medical clinics on the other side so if it's a sadistic soldier then you are presuming it was on purpose my that was my way of seeing how i saw this many kids shot in the head because that just didn't it was it was right it was definitely like in my mind it was sticking in my it was like how did this happen so it's it is tough for me to understand that if you saw 13 kids shot by a soldier that when you were tweeting and then you also wrote an article about it uh like a couple days later and you only mentioned two kids, one shot in the head and one shot in the chest. You didn't mention the other 11 kids.

Is that the Common Dreams article? Is that the what? Is that the article on Common Dreams or what? Yeah. Okay. I looked tooth and nail to find this number. You did an interview with Amy Goodman. You wrote the Common Dreams article.

You tweeted no evidence of this 13 kids shot. Well, if you'd like to reach out to Louisa Lovelock, she's a Washington Post journalist. You can ask her for the journal that I gave her so you don't think I'm making it up or something. So Feroz did send me a letter that was written to Miss Louisa Lovelock at the Washington Post, which purports to be a version of his journal rewritten in layman's terms. The journal describes his first day at the ICU in Gaza where he witnessed four children shot in the head. And the journal does indeed notate 13 children in all that he saw shot in the head. Feroz also calls my attention to a letter to CBS on July 6th, where he said he couldn't believe the number of children who were shot in the head.

And August 3rd, Ralph Nader Radio Hour, where he mentioned seeing 13 children shot in the head. And two other YouTube interviews that he did, where he said, quite literally, every day I was there i saw a child shot in the head and for us um called my attention to the fact that it's a slight exaggeration it was 13 kids in 14 days but i'm just saying it's it's if i saw 13 kids shot so let me put it so let me if you write an article and say you saw two kids shot, but you saw 13, that's, I don't understand that.

Why would you say two? Why did you leave the other 11 out? So I, can you show me the Common Dreams article? I don't know if you can. But the, but yeah, so I'm pretty sure. Common dreams. We walked through the wards, immediately found evidence of horrifying violence, deliberately directed at civilians. Deliberately directed at civilians.

So this is, you know, you immediately. Yeah, that's a clear statement. Yeah, but earlier you said you couldn't draw any conclusions from what you saw. No, no, no, hold on, hold on, Norm. Do you go by Norm or Norman? Norm, yeah. Norm?

So Norm, I try to be be i want to be clear i don't want people to think that i'm being loose with facts or the truth or whatever um when i what i said is that in an individual particular case i cannot i'm not a war crimes investigator i can't say today a war crime happened this child is sitting in front of me in my trauma bay because of a war crime that's not with that's not not something I can do. But what we saw was- That's what the article says. No, that is not what the article says. What you just read to me is evidence of violence being deliberately directed at children. That is true. A pattern emerged of seeing this many kids shot

in the head. It is hard for me to believe that a pattern, and again, this is, like I was trying to say before, this is why I tried to get information from other people, because when I talked to that doctor, and he also said that he had seen a kid shot in the head almost every day, what I wanted to say, what I wanted to figure out was, was this something that was widely seen, or was it just two people? I don't know the vast majority of the people in that article,

and that's why I investigated further. But, Nour, I get what you're saying. So let me read it. Yeah, go for it. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest. An ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world.

Now, I don't know why you think the reservists called up in Israel, in Gaza, the best-tra trained marksman in the world, but every square inch of the hospital floor is taken away by makeshifts. So that's about the people who were shot there. Then Amy Goodman, also late for 11, just said, it's not believable the best trained marksman in the world accidentally shot a three-year-old boy in the head and a two-year-old girl twice in the head so that's a little different than the i think that's mark perlmutter talking to me but no it's you and then i i'm oh no you're right you're right it's you yeah that's and then in the in the open letter that you and perlmutter wrote you also me and 98 other of human health care workers wrote yes oh i thought it was just you guys okay well i okay well i guess i've written a lot of open letters the it says on march 25th the two of us an orthopedic surgeon and trauma surgeon traveled to gaza strip oh okay is that

on is that the common dreams letter this is uh i don't know where it's. It's on, he tweeted it and you retweeted it, I believe. Okay. And it also talks about seeing two children, not 13. Yeah, I don't know that we were trying to summarize our experience. I think we were trying to, so again, it's kind of hard for me to respond. These are things I wrote like six months ago. But if you would like me to... You can if you want, because I don't want to be unfair to you, God forbid. Yeah, no, but I mean, like, you know, Mark and I were in Gaza together. And when we left, you know, and what we had seen was pretty shocking.

We walked through the wars and immediately found out, yeah, this is the same thing. Yeah, that's a letter that we wrote to Common Dreams. It was a cri de coeur. It wasn't meant to be a – A what? I don't know the phrase. It's a cry of the heart. It wasn't meant to be a comprehensive cataloging of what we saw.

That's what the Times article is. But so if you – again, you know what? Call Louisa lovelock she's the she works in jerusalem i'm pretty sure as the as the um as the washington post uh or some some sort of washington post journalist in jerusalem uh she emailed me but wouldn't you on that amy goodman interview with all that time say no amy it was 13 kids we saw we didn't just see the one kid i'm describing and one kid shot in the chest We saw more than a dozen kids shot through the head. Okay, I've done lots of

interviews where I'm pretty sure I've said that I've seen it, that I saw a kid shot in the head every day. Okay, well, you know what? Before I post this, I'll give you the chance to send me that, because I... If you did, then you're right, right? If you did, then you're right, and we can do it. You know, you can send it to me

tomorrow or tonight. I made a good faith. No, no, I don't, Norman, I don't think anything you're saying is in bad faith. There are... You gotta talk in the mic. Oh, sorry. Sorry, I was getting paper.

Just because I want to write it down. I don't know how much... Oh, good. All right, so i'll let you do that so but the uh but no but what i want to point out is there are uh it's important to establish these things like i i just i don't want you to think that i'm like going to be offended by you asking like can you show that this is consistent with what you've said before because that's what you're asking right so yeah no no problem let me send you uh send uh interviews where i said number of kids i don't think i've said it anywhere until after

luisa asked me how many kids exactly did you see shot in the head and i said i don't know so i went through my journal and it turned out to be 13 i know now next question that comes to mind i'm trying to let's take for the sake of argument that you did see 13 uh i'm gonna accept it you know first question that comes to my mind is all right this is a war zone what would be the number of it's horrific to talk about this stuff in a matter-of-fact way. I feel myself even having a little emotional response. God forbid anybody thinks that I, you know. The question you're going to ask is what would be the expected number of children to see God in the end?

I get that. Especially in a country or a territory where half the kids are children, right? And they're fighting a war. So, for instance, I looked up in Chicago. That's not a war zone. That's just a bad neighborhood. In one year, this is from CBS News, 43 children younger than 13, I'm sorry,

276 children 16 or younger, and 43 preteens were killed, were shot. I'm not sure killed or shot. I don't know, but have been shot. So that immediately makes a little difference. Well, if 43 kids are shot in a bad neighborhood in Chicago, how many, obviously, kids are going to get shot in a bad neighborhood in Chicago, how many, obviously, kids are going to get shot in a war. Nobody doubts that. Nobody doubts that. But to understand how,

to understand whether it's evidence, as you say, a pattern of not just misbehavior, but of murder, of criminal murder, you have to start with some estimation of what the control group would be. This is what we would expect. I agree with you. So did you give some thought to that? Yeah. So like I said, I want to emphasize that you keep saying that it's because I saw 13 kids. That's not the issue at all.

Like I said, one person's observations in one limited space, in one limited period of time. And then you spoke to other doctors. Right. That's the issue so combined yeah that we spent 254 weeks in gaza then not not the people in the times article but the 99 health care workers that uh that signed the open letter that i wrote to the administration um 254 weeks everybody that worked in the appropriate setting meeting meaning the ER, the ICU, or the operating room, regularly saw children who had been shot in the head or the chest. Like an ER in Chicago.

Well, I don't know if 43 in an entire year is saying every day. That's one a week. Not every day, but Chicago has 2 million people. I don't know how many people in- Chicago is not a city of 2 million people. Actually, you might be right. But that's not the point. The point is-

Let me just clarify. Chicago is a huge city, but the neighborhoods where this is going on is not the entire city of Chicago or the entire state of- No, I totally agree with you. It's a small area, which I don't think has 2 million people. But even if it does, it's just a bad neighborhood. You're talking about a war. Mm-hmm. So-

So, yeah. So this is a really good question. Yeah. So what is, in other words, what would the- Chicago's 2.6 million okay there you go so uh the question is how do we know that this is unusual or not even unusual not that's not accurate the question is how do we know that this is evidence of um intentionality or criminality right is that okay yeah so how many kids is it normal to get shot in a war i don't really know

i have to be honest i have no way of estimating that and i'm pretty sure every war zone would be totally different based on the circumstances but to my mind and and if somebody wanted to disagree with me with about this based on some rational uh criteria i'm perfectly open to hearing it but to my mind if kids are getting shot on a regular or daily basis in the catchment area of every hospital in gaza for a year straight it is unlike that seems quite unlikely to me to be uh to be accidental well some percentage you would say some percentage certainly there is there like if anybody were to say that every kid who's ever been shot in gaza was deliberate that's crazy i mean that that's just how could that possibly be the case bullets fly the um that's like saying everyone who was killed

by a bombing it was killed no that's absurd like that's not the way bombs work uh you know once you once a bullet leaves the gun it can go anywhere but this is but this is where go ahead i mean well so but that's that's the point so you you you have to there's there's two ways to to and again the if you're if you're there's a with intentionality there's always a question of the like whose intention right are you talking about the government of israel ordering this i seriously doubt that you off galant gets on the phone with his generals and says 10 kids dead today at least that's totally i've i've had to be sure that's not that's definitely no i completely agree i think that is completely ludicrous i think that's beyond absurd uh just like the police chief is not ordering their the officers to kill innocent people no no exactly and this is that that's it's just silly right so i i don't i i hope nobody thinks

that that's what i'm arguing because it's just transparently stupid but uh nevertheless when something happens like like suppose suppose it was october 14th today 2023 and i said norm every day i saw a kid shot in the head in gaza it would be reasonable for you to say well froze you Froze, you know, October 7th just happened, people are furious, that maybe just, it's possible that people are acting sadistic and crazy because they're in a rage. That's a perfectly reasonable, that would make perfect sense. I'll go further than that. I actually said this at the time, although, believe me, I don't mean to co-sign your story here, but just to be perfectly honest, I said at the time I was worried that there was such anger

that I was... that there would be some horrible behavior. Major criminal act. Yeah, no, that's understandable. But when it goes on for a year, that's a different matter. I mean, it's not, like, you's understandable. But when it goes on for a year, that's a different matter. I mean, it's not like you can't claim that. I mean, of course, Israelis are still traumatized by October 7th.

But if that's the case, then. No, over the course of the year, you have brand new things like shooting six hostages or however many hostages were shot in the head. I mean, there's various things that go on which fill people with rage. And just the fighting of war on both sides is such a psychologically traumatic, mental breaking experience. As we know that people go rogue, right? Yeah, yeah. So some number is going to be that. Right. No, I totally agree with you.

Some number is going to be crossfire. Yeah. And some number will be murders. And now you say you're a non-partisan, non-agenda guy, but that would be the... I've used this word a lot lately that would be the soulful deliberation that I would want from somebody to write about who experienced what you experienced to try to really get to say okay some of this is murder, some of this is crossfire

some of this is people who've snapped yeah so again as a physician I can't possibly tell you who can I add one other thing into the mix because you've also written is people who've snapped. Yeah, so again, as a physician, I can't possibly tell you who's snapped. But can I add one other thing into the mix? Yeah. Because you've also written,

and this is very important to me, that Hamas is not maximizing, has no, to quote, as far as Hamas, quote, maximizing civilian deaths as a strategy, that is absolutely false. Now, the Wall Street Journal had excerpts of Sinwar talking about how he was happy to have all the martyrs,

and it doesn't matter if 10,000 or 100,000, he's okay with it. And the only way we get in the headlines is through blood. Yeah, he's not wrong about that. And then, of course, we know this famous video, I can play it, I should play it, of him saying, we don't build bomb shelters. We have, the tunnels are for us.

Actually, can you play that? I don't know if you've ever seen it. I've seen it. Let's play it anyway. Go for it, it's fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can just play it, go ahead. Short.

On the bottom left, there's a play. Oh, yeah, sorry. Can't hear it, John. No volume. That's subtitled. John? Start it over, okay? Okay.

Many people are asking Since you have built 500 kilometers of tunnels Why haven't you built bomb shelters Where civilians can hide during bombardments We have built the tunnels Because we have no other way of protecting ourselves From being targeted and killed These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes.

We are fighting from inside the tunnels. Everybody knows that 75% of the people on the Gaza Strip are refugees. And it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them. According to the Geneva Convention, it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them. According to the Geneva Convention, it is the responsibility of the occupation to provide them with all the services as long as they are under occupation. All right, leaving aside the, we can debate whether they're occupied or not. So you have a very, I think, a very, very clear picture in Sinoir's own words, this guy's words, that having that having their own people die i mean what else is there well he did oh well okay so if we're going to be if we're going to analyze yahya sin war which i think is a waste of everyone's time but well so but hold on if you're going to be if you and i i certainly don't like you just said you don't want to co-sign the piece i certainly do not want to be put in the position of defending hamas hamas is but you are defending

them when you say no no it's absolutely false that they target civilians, that they maximize civilian deaths. So the question is, is it true? Yeah. Yeah, the question is, is it true? So that's a question that has to actually be asked and answered. That is not actually what he said there. What he said is, he didn't say, I want all the people in Gaza to die so that Israel looks bad, or so that Feroz will write a New York Times article. That's not what he said at all. He said, it is the responsibility of the occupation not to kill them and to provide them with services, and it's the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them as refugees. Okay, dude, that's disingenuous. Am I not quoting him exactly? You're quoting him exactly, but obviously to say we have 300 miles of tunnels.

We use them to protect ourselves. Meaning to fight the Israelis, yes. No, he actually says it. He says to protect ourselves from the airplanes, which means to fight the Israelis, yes. It means to protect ourselves from the airplanes. Okay. And the reason we don't put our citizens in them, our brothers and sisters and children, is because that's the United Nations to do. Yeah, no, I agree with you that it's disgusting. Is he so low IQ that he doesn't understand that he could protect these civilians by allowing them into 300 miles of tunnels? You can't infer intention there?

You actually think it's possibly that he says, no, he doesn't want them to die. He's really upset that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no no no no no no no no i'm not gonna let you go on with that let me just say stop stop norman please you said that you you just said you can't infer intentionality and that i'm just giving him a pass that's just not the case i'm you you played this clip all i can tell you is what i see him saying he's saying that we are the tunnels have been built for hamas uh not for our citizens not for our citizens which is yeah and it sounds accurate it doesn't sound

nice to me like i'm not what would be what would be reasons that he wouldn't let the citizens in other than he wants them to die well so so how how does um to say it's not my i don't it's not my responsibility so i'm not letting them in. My own people. Right. I'm in charge. Okay, yeah, no. So again, I don't have access to Yahya Sinwar's internal...

That wasn't Sinwar, but that was... Oh, whoever that was, sorry. Yeah. That dude. I don't have access to him, or Sinwar or any of these other people, obviously. But I can think of lots of reasons. So number one, the Palestinian population

is shot through with Fatah sympathizers who have been at war with the Hamas government ever since 2006 and 2007. So he wants them to die? He probably does. Fatah and Hamas are at each other's throats. Those are civilians. I totally agree with you.

But are you... I'm surprised i think it's okay so so i i i'm surprised that somebody would listen to that and take from it that the guy who's talking wants people to die i think what he's saying quite clearly is it is not my responsibility to protect them i think that's, because Hamas is the government of Gaza. Now, again, I just don't want to be—you're kind of putting me in a weird position where I'm defending people that I really loathe. First of all, it's not the United Nations' responsibility to build them bombshells. I'm not saying that it is or it isn't, but that's what he said. Then you're asking if what he says

indicates that he wants people to die. Now, if you want to get technical about it— Is his explanation plausible? If you want to get technical about it. Is his explanation plausible? If you want to get technical about it, first of all, there's no question that Israel is occupying Gaza under international law. I don't want to get technical. Well, we need to because technicalities matter. My opinion on it is not relevant and your opinion is not relevant on it because the International Court of Justice decided that that's what the situation is. It's not relevant to our conversation it is relevant because in actuality that it is correct to say that the if an occupying power has an obligation to gaza is not occupied but i don't want to get into that

norm that okay it's okay okay okay it's really according to the international court of justice gaza is occupied you think it's not that's fine i don't i'm going to grant you i don't have i'm going to grant you it's occupied and i'm going to grant you it's occupied, and I'm going to grant you that it's the United Nations' responsibility because— No, no, no, no. Well, you're missing the point then. If Gaza is occupied, then under the laws of war, under the Hague Conventions and many other things, then it is the responsibility of the occupying power to protect the civilian population. But they're not doing it, right?

And exactly. There you go. So then ask them, Israel's not doing it, sir, but you have all these tunnels— Dude, I don't know if they went on with more questions there. You're only playing 50 seconds because that's all the NMRI put up. So let me continue. Let me continue. No, no, no, but we have to be clear about this. I am not saying that Hamas does or doesn't do anything based on this thing right here.

50 seconds of airtime is fine, but again, the question is— But you have said it's absolutely untrue that Hamas is trying to maximize civilian. It's absolutely false. But let me just say, the New York Times, which obviously you have to stand by, it's fact-checking because if you want to say the New York Times

doesn't fact-check properly, that undercuts... I didn't say that. Well, anyway, I thought you said somewhere that thiscuts i didn't say that well anyway i thought you said somewhere that this story had been fact-checked i did say i said this story was probably fact-checked more than any other that's that's my guess so so then except not as much as uh trump as being a russian spy anyway that's that's a snide remark anyway new york times wrote um thousands have been killed in gaza with entire families wiped out is. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to expanses of rubble,

while doctors treat screaming children in darkened hospitals with no anesthesia. Across the Middle East, fear has spread over the possible outbreak of a broader regional war. But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas's leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say. It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment, the shattering of the status quo, and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in the fight against Israel. The Wall Street Journal— Well, let's take one to quote. No, let me put them together.

Go for it. The Wall Street Journal that found the Sinwar's letters or documents whatever in an April 11th letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh's adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would infuse life into the veins of this nation

prompting it to rise to its glory and honor and there's other things I mean there's been all sorts of I'm not... Their deaths will infuse life into the struggle. The veins of the nation. And another

thing, in 2018, Sinoir said, we make headlines only with blood. So there's multiple... Can I take each one in turn? Yeah, but I just want to make the point first. There's multiple statements.

And by the way, there's also on Arabic TV, you know, we've seen translation. But there's multiple statements. When asked about the blood, they say, yes, this is how we put our, this is how we get in the headlines. There was some other quote, 10,000 or 100,000, it would be worth it. And not a single, as far as we can see, finger lifted to protect the civilians. We know that, well, I have it here,

that the evidence examined by the New York Times suggests Hamas used the hospitals for cover, stored weapons inside, maintained a hardened tunnel beneath a complex that was supplied with water powering the organization. Wait, wait, wait, which complex? Shifa? Al-Shifa, I think, yeah. Okay. That's the New York Times. That is the New York Times, yes. Al-Shifa's values military target was not immediately clear in the days after the raid, but evidence examined by the New York Times suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover. New York Times, unwilling to be human shields, some Gazans turned gunmen away from the shelters. These are interviews the New York Times did with people who were in the shelters saying they're chasing out the Hamas because Hamas will draw fire.

Okay, good. So just think about that for a second. If I'm going to make— Let me get to my question. Okay, go for it. You said—you didn't say, you know, maybe yesterday. You said it's absolutely false. I'd be happy to explain it to you if you'd let me.

Yeah, so when you say it's absolutely false, you must have some evidence— I do. —that it's false. Yeah, I— That it's absolutely false. So— So what's that? So we can, let's, so first of all, you said a whole bunch there,

so we're going to go back through it. But I'm presenting my side. You don't need to address my evidence. You just need to show me the evidence that it's absolutely false. No, no, no, I do. Well, so Norman, you're, I didn't really know much about you when I came on,

but I'm guessing just, like, you described yourself as being a pro-israel person that's cool um but i'm pro-truth no no exactly i and i i i sorry i didn't mean to imply otherwise i i just what i was going to say is that because of that you probably have a pro-israel audience and so the evidence that you're not by the comment no sorry that's pretty funny the um but the uh uh but people people who let me say differently people who will trust you will probably also look at that kind of at the evidence that you're presenting and say yeah what norm's saying is right so allow me to go through it and and just talk about it because it's important but can't you just tell me what but yes i will and then i will get to the evidence you wrote it's absolutely

false without you wrote it's absolutely false without ever hearing my side of it so you don't need my side of it just tell me why it's absolutely false and maybe that'll satisfy me and i'll withdraw it and say you know what forget about the other stuff he's right he proved it was he proved it's absolutely false okay fair enough so i'll give you the evidence for it first, and then I'll go back through what you said. So there are several. So Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the National Lawyers Guild, all three have investigated the question

of whether or not Hamas uses human shields when they are engaged in war. But you know, I know about that. They're using a very technical legal definition of human shields. I don't remember what it is. I debated this with Finkelstein. Even Finkelstein had to admit it.

But Hamas is putting itself in civilian neighborhoods. And by not providing bomb shelters for that, that is not necessarily human shields. In other words, human shields is an imprecise kind of layman. So let me break in here and give a little explanation of the legal point that we're debating here.

I'm going to read from a question and answer doc on Amnesty International's website from July of 2014. The question is, the Israeli authorities claim that Hamas and Palestinian armed groups use Palestinian civilians in Gaza as human shields. Does Amnesty International have any evidence that this has occurred during the current hostilities? And here's the answer. Amnesty International is monitoring and investigating such reports, but does not And here's the answer. In previous conflicts, Amnesty International has documented that Palestinian armed groups have stored munitions in and fired indiscriminate rockets from residential areas in the Gaza Strip in violation of international humanitarian law. Reports have also emerged during the current conflict of Hamas urging residents to ignore Israeli warnings to evacuate. However, these calls may have been motivated by a desire

to minimize panic and displacement. In any case, such statements are not the same as directing specific civilians to remain in their homes as human shields for fighters, munitions, or military equipment. So, Amnesty International gives Hamas the benefit of the doubt because they may have been motivated by a desire to minimize panic or displacement. According to Amnesty International, only directing civilians to remain in their homes as human shields for fighters, munitions,

or military equipment would be technically use of human shields. And I didn't use the term human shields, I don't think. But if I did, I shouldn't have. But I'm saying Hamas is purposely strategizing ways to kill as many of its own people as it can, because that's the only way it wins this war. It has no military hopes to beat Israel. It's fighting a PR war. It has no military hopes to beat Israel. It's fighting a PR war. And it came close to working at various times. As

people see all the horrible loss of life, there's tremendous pressure on the United States government to pull the plug on Israel. All around the world, there's legal actions, there's protests, there's the universities. There's lawsuit, I mean, legal actions. There's protests.

There's the universities. And Hamas sees all this and, forgive me, given what they're capable of, doesn't say to themselves, well, this is really good for our side, but wouldn't it be better if we could just get all these people out of here so no more civilians die? Because they could. They could send them all to the beach, right?

It's a small it's a small plot of land okay so the uh so the uh so again so okay yes amnesty international and human rights watch discuss the question of whether hamas uses human shields if you want to read the more technical legal parts of it the national lawyers guildyers Guild report on this. Feroz emailed me that the National Lawyers Guild report that he referred to actually did not make a determination of whether or not Hamas used human shields, but it does have another definition of human shields as a legal matter. It says, it is a well-established principle that individuals may not be coerced into supporting a belligerent. The legal principle requiring distinction between civilians and combatants prohibits the use of civilians as

human shields. Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that civilians who find themselves in the hands of one of the parties are entitled in all circumstances to respect. They shall at all times be humanely treated and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof. Article 28 of the Convention expressly prohibits the use of civilians as human shields by placing them alongside soldiers or military facilities with the hopes of attaining immunity from attack. The official commentary to the Convention refers to this practice as cruel and barbaric. Articles 31 and 51 of the convention also prohibit the use of physical or moral coercion on civilians or forcing them to carry out military tasks. I can find it. I can find the name for you. I don't remember it off the top of my head. I think all of these were written after Cast Lead and then after Operation Protective Edge, so in 2009 and then in 2014 um and and they uh they all asked the

question is it true that hamas used human shields which it's i don't if you want to say it's an imprecise term that's okay uh but what the national lawyers guild said oh pardon me and again i didn't it's not like i reviewed this stuff before coming here, so forgive me if I'm not quoting people word for word. But what the National Lawyers Guild said is the human shielding can be either direct or indirect. military objects and indirect is uh building military objects near civilians or locating them near civilians and not forcing people to stay within that within the the area so um so though that's the definition i don't think you could i i don't know how precise things have to be for are you a lawyer i have no idea i am a lawyer but okay so i never practiced law i don't probably you're probably better off for it.

But so I don't know how precise it would have to be from a legal standpoint, but I think that's a pretty clear definition of something. I mean, I can go back now and I can add it in later. There actually is a headline here that says so much human rights watch that they did use human shields in Kessler. But it's really not what was discussed. What was discussed was... The maximization of... Okay, so fine. So if you want to talk about maximization of civilian casualties, but without talking about human shielding, that means you have to believe that Palestinians are all idiots who want to die. But you're saying Hamas is not forcing people to stay in dangerous places, yet they're just... Well, there are accusations, and there's been videos, apparently, and people screaming that Hamas forces them to stay in areas. We've seen this.

I'm reluctant to say that it's true. It seems true. I don't know what you're talking about. I have not seen any. If somebody wants to pull that up, I'm more than happy to watch it. Okay, so that's, I think, well, would you agree? There's a pretty good consensus that Hamas wants to maximize human, civilian deaths. Even the newspapers, which have not been pro-Israel have had articles like the New York Times. I think it's a big mistake to think that the New York Times is not pro-Israel.

I just think you're thinking about the conflict totally incorrectly when you think about the term pro-Israel. But we really have to talk about the question that you raised. The question that you raised is whether or not Hamas is deliberately getting its own people killed. I think the question of human shielding is a reasonable way to approach that question. Because, again, we, you know, yeah, you showed a 50-second clip of some guy saying something that I think you're really imputing to him. No, no, but we know there are no bomb shelters there. There's definitely no bomb shelters there. That's 100%.

But we know there are billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of tunnels. It sounds like about a billion dollars worth of tunnels. It's more than that. No, it could be. I honestly don't know. I don't know how much it costs to build a tunnel in Gaza. Not that a billion is a minor amount of money. No, not at all, especially in Gaza. But anyway, so Human Rights Watch,

Amnesty International, and the National Lawyers Guild all concluded that Hamas was not using human shields. They concluded that Hamas does not consistently carry out all, the term in international law, international humanitarian law, must take all, a military must take all feasible precautions to isolate itself from civilians and to isolate civilians. Had they done that? When conducting military activities. So when Hamas wants to fire a rocket or something it's not it wouldn't you know if there is an option to go further away from a house they should do that rather than stay in the

house right so that's uh so in that regard amnesty human rights watch and the national lawyers guild all said that they didn't do that are you going going to send me links to that for the show tonight? Yeah, I'm happy to. Here, let me write that down, too. And then, okay, so let's get to the next thing. No, no, no, no, no. We're not getting into that. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

Human Rights Watch. As long as you got the time, I got the time. Oh, yeah. Okay, go ahead. And then on top of that, and I know you'll maybe not agree with the way I characterized the Goldstone Commission, but the Goldstone report also asked this question. And they said very clearly that people in Gaza were very critical of Hamas. They were critical of Hamas's brutality, of the torture of Palestinians, of the arbitrary arrest, of arbitrary rules, et cetera, et cetera. But no one ever accused Hamas of forcing them to be human shields uh so that's relevant

like i'm i know you're saying it's not like the it's not exactly the full answer to the perfect you know yeah we don't get that unfortunately but then there i want to point out something the same claim is made about hezbollah and in the case of Hezbollah, there is a remarkable report from, I believe it's by Jeffrey Biddle and Stephan, maybe Friedman or Friedland, I can, again, happy to send it to you. They are, they're two researchers for the U.S. Army War College. They wrote a report after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, and they went to Israel, and the report is based almost exclusively on interviews with Israeli soldiers. And they concluded, I'm quoting them almost verbatim, Israeli frontline soldiers consistently report no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah with

civilians. Hezbollah made effective cover of the natural and the man-made terrain in villages that had been depopulated before hostilities started. Human Rights Watch also investigated that war and found that, again, I'm quoting as best I can remember, Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its munitions from unpopulated areas of Lebanon and from banana and citrus groves. And furthermore, they said, Israel's own firing pattern confirms this, because that's what they were aiming at. That's where they found unexploded ordnance, that's where they found damage, etc. So I'm sorry, Norman, but it's just not, it's just, there is no evidence. Let me say it this way. Other than, other than, other than, that's not random, that's not a fair characterization,

but other than statements by people who otherwise you wouldn't believe a word that comes out of their mouth because they're nuts. Other than that, there is no evidence that this is happening. And I'm, yeah, and, you know, I apologize. I think you're, I think you're referring to something I wrote on Twitter, which unfortunately is something that takes up a lot of my life. So if I spoke imprecisely on Twitter and said that it has been proven to be false, when in fact I should have said there is no evidence for this, I apologize for that exaggeration. I hope somebody can forgive my thumbs for not being a model of academic precision on Twitter. Getting to what you

brought up, the first thing you said is that somebody, I forget if it was Sinwar or somebody else, said that the cost of Palestinian lives is the necessary cost for Palestinian liberation. That's not quoting exactly, but it's something like that. That's hardly a radical statement. That's give me liberty or give me death. I have but one life to give for my country. These are American sayings that are quite famous. If you look at any liberation struggle, they'll say exactly the same thing.

Martin Luther King gave his last speech saying, I can see the promised land, but I won't get there, implying that he's not going to survive to get there. This is not unusual. And again, I don't, I don't, I'm a physician. I don't, and I don't even, I don't particularly think nationalism is a healthy thing to think of. I don't, I've said many times, I don't really care where the borders of Israel and Palestine are. So I don't think this is a healthy thing for people to be dying over. But nevertheless, it's hardly evidence of fanatical desire to get one's own people killed.

Gandhi, you know, if you go back and look at Gandhi's, he actually used to write letters congratulating people when they're, you know, I edited Finkelstein's book, What Gandhi Says About the Israel-Palestine Conflict. And I read a lot of Gandhi's collected works during that time. It's a massive book, but some massive some massive collected works. But the, he actually used to write letters to people when their kids would be killed by the British or by the, you know, the British proxies in India, congratulating them, saying, good for you. It's such a happy day. So this is not an abnormal thing. And the same thing, that these deaths will infuse life into our struggle. That's, I'm leaving aside that it's an accurate statement.

That's true, okay? I mean, like, it's just—I'm sorry. Again, I don't want to be defending Hamas. I'm trying to get to're saying because you should be able to not inhabit a binary... What's binary about it? What's binary about it is that if Hamas was trying to protect its civilians, we'd see evidence of it. The notion... You're switching... No, no, no, you're switching it.

You just said Hamas... You started off by saying Hamas is trying to maximize civilian casualties. That is very different. I'm conflating them. I'm conflating them because in reality, the only reason you would not save the lives of your flock is because you decided it's better for them to die. Okay, so I agree with you. I agree with, I think. Not when you can say, you can come in here. Can we come in?

No, no, no, you can't. Why can't we come in? Because that's for the United Nations. But we're going to die here. Oh my God. That's awful. That's awful that you're going to die there. But sorry, it's the UN's responsibility.

But you have 300 miles of tunnels. Can I just come in for a little while? Nope. Nope. No, I agree with you on that 100%. So that you can't see through that and say, obviously they want these people to die. Okay. But just the Goldstone report. What was the purpose of the Goldstone report? To investigate Hamas? The Goldstone report spends a huge amount of its time investigating Hamas, actually, and detailing Hamas crimes, detailing crimes that Hamas committed before Operation Cast Lead and during it. I thought the Goldstone report was just to investigate you are so if you knew the goldstone report as you should and i'm a little bit disappointed to hear you say that because the there's a very famous story about the goldstone

report goldstone's told that i think when he was at stanford goldstone was handed a uh or that or that he couldn't goldstone was handed they wouldn't cooperate with him or something go ahead goldstone was handed a mandate that said you are to investigate crimes that Israel committed. He said, no, that's not a balanced mandate. I should be investigating crimes committed on both sides. And they said, fine, that sounds good. About, I couldn't tell you exactly off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure about a fifth of the Goldstone report is spent discussing Hamas crimes. Okay. That's just not true.

What crimes are they fine? Yeah, I read the Goldstone report a really long time ago, but they talked about the arbitrary arrest. They talked about killing of Palestinian civilians, mostly because they were thought to be collaborators, but without trial. Things like that.

And they also, I think, I believe, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but just because I was going to add one, I figured you'd want me to. I believe they sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but just because I was going to add one, I figured you'd want me to. I believe they also talked about a failure to take all feasible precautions in all circumstances. In other words, war crimes. And they were quite clear about it. There was very little. In fact, they were much more clear about Hamas' crimes than about Israel's.

What are you leaving out about Israel's crimes? No, no, he didn't leave anything about it. No, what are you leaving out about what Goldstone found about Israel's crimes? No, no, he didn't leave anything about... No, what are you leaving out about what Goldstone found about Israel's crimes? That Goldstone retracted much of the report. So that's actually not true. You can look at the Washington Post retraction that he published, and it's certainly true that that's the way it's been interpreted, and I'm sure that's how he meant it to be interpreted.

There's no doubt about that. But Goldstone is the guy who has his name on the publication there are through the chair was there were three chair people of that commission i forget the other one's names because goldstone is the only one that matters but because he you know goldstone was chosen for an obvious reason right he's a major international jurist his daughter made alia to israel uh he's described himself as a lover of zion for his entire life he's obviously jewish he's described himself as a lover of Zion for his entire life. He's obviously Jewish. He's described himself as a Zionist. Dude, I didn't do that to you. Why are you doing that to Goldstone?

What? What did I say? I didn't attack your credibility based on the fact that you might be Arabic. I'm not Arabic. No, no, no. What are you? I'm not attacking Goldstone. But you bring up he's Jewish.

No, no, no. No, no, no. If that was how that came out, I apologize. I was saying the exact opposite. That's why he was chosen for the role. Oh, no, no, no, no. If that was how that came out, I apologize. I was saying the exact opposite. That's why he was chosen for the role in that. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. No, no, no. My attention was divided for a second. That's okay. I'll cut that out. Go ahead. No, no. If anybody... I don't want there to be any question about... If anybody says something that comes across as being racist or anti-Semitic or anti-anything,

maybe not anti-anything, but anti-a lot of things, that should be challenged. And I don't, I think we should all be comfortable challenging that. But then also, like you just did, saying, oh, no, no, my bad, I've misheard you. But no, my point was that Goldstone is all of these things, and that's why his name carried so much weight in this report. But there are three other people that wrote the report with him. So it was a body of four. And all three of them said very clearly that what Goldstone is saying just doesn't make any sense. And it seems like it's correct.

Send me that, too, because even Finkelstein didn't make that argument. I'm happy to send it to you. Let's see. Send UN Commission statement about... So what Goldstone did say... I've got to stop looking. No, that's okay. He said in the Washington Post, he said that if he knew now what he knew then,

the report would be very different, something close to that. Yeah, he says we know a lot more about what happened in the Gaza war than I did when I chaired the fact-finding mission. If I had known that what I know now, the report would have been a different document. For example, the most serious attack of the Goldstone report focused on the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander's erroneous interpretation of a drone image. An Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of the investigation is frustrating,

it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I'm confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly. The purpose of these investigations, as I've always said, is to ensure accountability for improper actions, not to second-guess battlefield commanders. Good. That was perfect. Can you open the Goldstone Commission, and can you read the first two sentences of its conclusion? I will do, of its conclusion. Yeah. I want to, I'm just going to, while you look that up, I'm just going to say why I'm doing this. The uh what you just said is that

goldstone uh found that in a particular case and this is this gets back to what we were talking about before about with how can you know this kid was killed criminally that kid was killed criminally in one particular case it appears that a war crime may have been committed and that an appropriate investigation needs to be needs to be conducted to figure out if that's actually true or not i don't particularly think israel should be investigating be conducted to figure out if that's actually true or not. I don't particularly think Israel should be investigating its own war crimes. I think that's kind of nuts. But that's a different matter entirely.

That's a question of process and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Dude, it's too hard to find the computer. That's okay. I'll give you the computer. I can quote it for you virtually. If you give me a couple words, I can find it. Search for punish, humiliate, and terrorize. Punish with commas between them? You can put quotes around it. Punish, comma, humiliate humiliate, and terrorize. Punish with commas between them?

You can put quotes around it. Punish, humiliate, and terrorize. I think this is it. So, the operations were carefully planned in all their phases. Legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning stages and at certain operational levels during the campaign. There were almost no mistakes made according to the government of Israel. It is in these circumstances that the mission concludes. So in other words, this is what the mission found. punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population to radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.

Okay, fair enough. But Goldstone obviously says it would be a different document if he'd known it. Now, where does it say that? Read the part about no war crimes. What? You said Goldstone found no, I'mstone found no human shields or whatever it is. Oh, sure.

Yeah. You know how to find that? Or if you can't find it, you can send it to me. Sorry. Yeah. I can look for it tonight and just send it over to you. Sorry. So let's just go.

It's going long. I'm a little jet lagged from a trip I took. Oh, no. Let's go through, to be fair to you and to make it interesting. But just to round out that last point, what Goldstone said in that Washington Post article, if he wanted to refute the report, what he would have said is that conclusion was wrong.

That's not what he said. He said this specific instance may or may not have been what we should have focused on in a fact-finding mission. No, no. He just used that as, he says, for example. Yeah, for example. How does that one example change the conclusion that Israel, because again, look at what the example is. He said that a specific soldier may have misinterpreted something. That's fine. And again, in that particular case, he may or may not be correct. But that has nothing to do with whether or not the state of Israel, with the backing of the United States, designed a war in order to punish,

humiliate, and terrorize the civilian population and to radically diminish its ability to provide for itself. It's very interesting to debate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and I'd love to have you back on to do that. You're shifting the focus away from, you know, what we're talking about here. Well, you asked me about the, you brought up the Gold away from, you know, what we're talking about here. Well, you asked me about the, you brought up the Goldstone mission, and you asked me to find specific things in it. No, about, this is all in the context of you saying that it's absolutely false that Hamas tries to maximize civilian life.

You're right. And again, if I overstated the case, and instead I should have said that there is no evidence of this other than bizarre statements from crazy people, who happen to be important in Hamas? That's not, you know, there's no evidence of this other than salt you know bizarre statements from crazy people uh who happen to be important in hamas that's not you know there's no doubt about that but other than that is there any evidence for it not that i've seen you haven't seen evidence if you have it please on and i mean i mean this seriously please send it to me if you i will i will okay so let's just get to the chain let's get to the the the very hot issue of the x-rays. No, I know what you're talking about. People are claiming that the x-rays are false, that they're pixelated, whatever.

I have to say, I looked up, I did a Google search of x-rays of skulls with bullets in them, and I saw x-rays, so you can't say that they don't exist. But let me ask you, and the New York Times said that is absolutely, they're sure that they weren't fabricated they they wrote a several paragraph statement which was released i think today or yesterday well let me let me ask um

is there are there patients names attached to these x-rays um i don't know if they're there there are patients names on the screen but usually when not not on the no no yeah on the screen yeah so you so on the on the on the the video on the on the sorry brain going blank on the computer screen when you look at the x-ray uh in in gaza like in the hospital yeah the patient's name is there but when we take pictures of things we usually don't uh we usually try not to put the patient's name on there so that the picture is… Well, the x-ray has to have something to identify the patient. Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying.

Like if this is the computer screen, the image is going to be here, and then the patient's name and ID number and all that stuff is up here. But when we take a pic… Because we don't… Like in the U.S., if I wanted to get CT scans off a computer, I put a thumb drive in. None of that stuff works over there. So we just take pictures with our phones. That's what that is. Right.

But typically, when somebody, when a newspaper does a story about somebody shot in the head, they give the name of the person who was shot or the parent's name. This would be, if I was fact checking, I'd say, okay, doctor, who is this? When did they die? Let me match it up. We have lists of people from the Gaza Health Ministry of people who've died, right? This is what fact-checking is.

Did they match up these three people with names on a list of people who've died to verify that these... Was the New York Times shown dates of these people? Why don't you read their statement so you can answer that question yourself. I don't know about the first one, about whether they looked through the Ministry of Health data to confirm whether or not these children were listed as dead. I'm also not, yeah, well, anyway. The search for the term metadata in that statement.

Did I just see it? New York Times refutes the thing. You read it then. I want to read stuff. Here, I got it then. I want to read stuff. Here, I got it here. While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature,

we decided these photos of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck were too horrific for publication. We made a similar decision for the additional 40 plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds. We stand behind this essay and this research underpinning it.

Any implication that the images are fabricated is simply false. So what does that mean? Tell me what that means. Sorry. Oh God. How do you guys work with all these cords all right so so yeah so the times opinion regularly rigorously edited this guest essay before publication i cannot tell you how ridiculous no tell us about it tell us about what was the process well the process was so first of all,

I had to verify, even though I knew all these people through contacts, like that's how I met them or I imagine met most of them, but that's how I found them. I still had to provide

photographic and documentary evidence that they were in Gaza, which is sensible and it's just, you know, it's unusual to say, to assume that someone's lying. You had no photographs of the 13 children you saw?

I don't have photographs of all 13 kids that I saw. Any of them? I probably do. I can check. It seems like you would know that. When they're fact-checking, you would get your photographs together. Well, no, Norm, and please don't misinterpret this as me being irritated or anything, but I don't think that... I don't know if people appreciate

what it is to work in a hospital in the Gaza Strip. I'm running around with blood all over my hands quite literally i have no gloves i'm pronouncing people dead left and right uh i there was a you know i remember this there was a doctor who or maybe see a doctor or a nurse he was a healthcare worker of some kind of care member i apologize but he brought his mother in and she just had to strap them into the leg she didn't die uh it was a piece of the tile floor probably that had been ripped up i have it on my desk in uh in uh in california uh we didn't have any gloves and she was bleeding pretty badly yeah so i held pressure had him hold pressure went and got the few instruments i could find got and so with no gloves i pulled this piece of shrapnel out of her, sew the small blood vessel that was just a muscular bleeder, so just put a figure of eight suture in it, and then packed her wound, showed him how to pack the wound.

I go over to the sink, and the sink is not working. There's literally no water coming out of it. So now I go about the rest of the day, not the rest of the day, that's an exaggeration, the rest of this mass casualty event with blood all over my hands. I don't have pictures of anybody I saw them because it would be blood all over my phone. This is common. Can I say something? Yeah. It needs to be said.

Whatever the truth of all this is, the fact that you risk your life, you go into a war area, and that you're helping save lives is a tremendously important thing that you should be admired for. And whatever I argue or believe or whatever you convince me of otherwise um i i'm very mindful of that oh i know no no but no it needs to be said no i appreciate that thank you i there are things that to be perfectly honest don't when i say don't make sense i understand people do things that are irrational but it seems to me and then i want to get is that you know when you're tweeting out pictures of the the auschwitz looking person, but you're also seeing a murderer every day, that you would take pictures of that. That when the New York Times is fact checking you on this story that you would look, let me see, they're going to fact check me. Wouldn't it be great if I had, the easiest way to fact check is let me show them the pictures of the thing.

Oh, I'm not sure if I have those photos or not. It seems to me the first thing I would look up would be, let me see if I have photos of this. That's the easiest way to show the times I'm telling the truth. Now, the next question is, does the, Mimi, is that her name? No. Dr. Saeed, yeah. Mimi Saeed? Yeah. Yeah. Did she, well, you said that she did, did she attach various photographs to these x-rays to people who died? So these are all the three. All three of these are the same girl. A little bit graphic, but I think it's fine. Okay.

This is obviously the picture that was in the Times, right? This is the bullet sitting. This is the picture that was on the far right at the top. I think it was at the far right. Now, I want to show you some things. Now, I want to show you some things now the the now i want to be very clear about something anybody who says that they showed this to a radiologist or any doctor that looks at imaging ever and they said i can tell you that picture's fake is lying that is

an absolutely ridiculous claim you can't tell you also can't tell that it's not faked just by looking at it but it's a two-dimensional image there is no way to know if that bullet is inside the skull or outside of the skull based on this image they showed it because the assumption like they put it there i don't design or if it's just a photoshop the creation or it could be photoshopped that is entirely possible but there's no way to look at an image of a you know this is what we call a scout a ct scan scout film uh there's no way to look at this and know that it's fake just by looking at it like off the top of your head because of radiology that's completely ridiculous and people who claim that are absolutely just lying through there i think

you're probably right because um it's not that i'm probably right i think i look at 10 to 15 ct scans of heads per day i think you're right because we would know by now if you were if you were wrong well there's plenty of people claiming on twitter that yeah but but not but not definitive not a definitive expert uh on a in a forum different than twitter yes exactly yeah uh so i would just want to show you some things so you can see here there's this distortion this is so this is hair right here this is skin scalp and this is uh skull right this is a suture line which is just an area of growth so that the skull can keep expanding while the brain has a subdual hematoma what you call it no no no this is just this is this is a natural break in the bone

because the kid's head is going to expand like baby yeah exactly it's a suture line as we call it yeah uh this is the coronal suture line so this is the scalp now the scalp should how old is this child uh i believe this is her so uh four okay probably four and a half um that's that's a guess. Please don't. Okay. But the... Has she died? I believe so, yes. So this... So based on the CT scan, I have a hard time believing she's not dead. But so this is the scalp. So follow this line here.

You can see here this is swelling, right? In other words, the scalp should be as thick here as it is over here. This should be the same, but this is all swelling, right? That's why there's this bump right here is what I'm trying to say. This and this are bone fragments.

And you can see right here, there's a defect in the skull. This is the frontal sinus that's developing. This is a defect in the skull. Now, like I said, this is a 2D image. It could certainly be Photoshopped. That's entirely possible. In this day and age, anything can be fake. Of course, no, of course. But I don't think it's fake yeah i don't either but here

so let me now this is the ct scan itself so what what a scout film is is that you put somebody into the ct scanner and then you just have to tell the machine how far how high to go up how high to go down so that's what they do they would have run it from here to here that's that's all it is so this is let me just turn this that's the actual video this is a video of the ct can i include that in our in our package tomorrow i think that's fine yeah i'll email it to me okay so so this is the brain oops sorry let me pause it and then scroll through it you can see how shitty the equipment is so this is the top of the spinal cord it's surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid that's the black stuff you go up and you get to the brain stem this is the cerebrum and that's the brain stem this is called the midbrain the pons you go up further and again she's holding a phone that's why it's shaky sorry but now right

here see how this right here the gray of the brain goes right up towards the right up to the skull this you've got gray but then you've got a different gray and you've got the skull this is subdural hemorrhage okay you can see air in the brain right here and this is subdural hemorrhage right here go forward further this is so now we're going from the bottom up we're like scrolling up through the brain this is the beginning of the bullet right where you would see it right there and you can also see it's not or this is the the um the starburst appearance is what we call scatter from from a metal artifact the the x-rays just bounce all over my radiologist could explain it better than that but it's okay so you can see the bullet is oriented longitudinally or meaning like in the plane of the of the cut just

like here in other words because we're scrolling up like this you can imagine how the bullet looks like that there's the subdural here now when we scroll further up you're going to see the defect in the skull right there exactly where it looks like it is right there you can see these two fragments of bone right where they are now and then just to show you the the rest of it the bullet came in here, caused a hematoma on the scalp, broke through the skull. This is parenchymal damage, like where it's the meat of the brain, right?

This is the bullet track through the brain. This is air that's gotten all the way to the other side of the brain. This is the left ventricle here. It's the open cerebrospinal filled space in the brain. And the right one is here. Now, you can see it's not even on the right side of the body, because this is the right, this is right and this is left when you're looking at CT scans.

So there's swelling here in the brain, and that's pushed the whole midbrain, or pushed the whole brain over. Okay, I'll only be curious. But my point is, it is ludicrous to claim that these are faked pictures. It's beyond insane. Yeah, that's pretty convincing to me. Now, it is ludicrous to claim that these are faked pictures. It's beyond insane. That's pretty convincing to me. Now, it's very convincing to me. Now, why am I seeing this and I haven't seen this on television?

So there's a reason. So actually, I was planning on putting these on Twitter tonight just because it's some controversy. But I don't, and I don't mean by you. Please don't misunderstand me. The people making this some guy was reading this and he said, okay, well, you know, I went to the Israeli medical literature and I found a case report of a guy shooting from Gaza into a kibbutz and hitting a kid in the head, like a nine-year-old boy, I think it was. And then they had an image that looked exactly like this. And there was a bullet inside his head. And he said, you don't think that this image is fake, do you? And then there was somebody responded to it uh their their um uh twitter description or something labeled them as a rabbinical student and i think a pizza lover

or something like that so i'm assuming they're not a physician and they said oh no no no see how there's a line around the bullet and like this is just complete like like sorry i'm trying not to swear because it's like you're missing me i know but i'm a doctor i'm not supposed to swear because it's really pissing me off. I know, but I'm a doctor. I'm not supposed to. But it's ridiculous. I went to school for a long time, and then I did a residency for a long time, and then I did a fellowship, and now I've been attending for a long time. It's not something that you just look at on YouTube or teachmeradiology.org. And it's crazy. I mean, there's no good faith in this at all. Some guy just emailed me or Twitter messaged me and said, uh, I'm going to be writing about

this for some, uh, one of these very, you know, kind of like right-wing strange websites that publishes stuff. And he said, uh, I'm, I've got, I have a half a dozen medical experts to testify against you. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. I want you to organize a Zoom call with them. I want to know who they are, and I want them to present their evidence to me. And then I'm going to record that, and when you write about it and say that this is in any way reasonable, I'm going to ask that you publish that video as well. Because it's just, it's absolutely and utterly ridiculous to claim that these things are fake. And it's angering, I'm sure.

Well, it's frustrating is what it is. Because, you know, I... No, I find it frustrating, too, because, as I started off by saying, I just want to deal with the truth. You know, I don't want these people on my side saying something isn't real when it is real. It's such a distraction from things that are important to actually discuss. Yes. Listen, what you just showed me, I'm going to put it into the thing. I can send it to you.

Yeah. Unless you are a sociopath, which I don't take you to be, then what you're saying is very convincing. You follow what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless I'm just an absolutely unabashed liar. Yes, yes. Then what you're saying is convincing, and I don't take you to be a sociopath. I, what I, far from it.

So, what I, where I, we're going to come away from this interview thinking is that I meant to ask you one other question various people report seeing these children that are shot is each one a discrete example or do some of these people perhaps see the same children

that's entirely possible to be perfectly fair so like Mark Perlmutter and I were there at the same time it is entirely possible that be perfectly fair so like mark perlmutter and i were there at the same time it is entirely possible that uh that you know they yeah no no that that's there's no no one i don't want anyone to think that they can like multiply the number of people by the number of days that they were there and get the number of kids and guys who've been that's so not what that piece is so as a person who wants um who wants i mean you know we've i'm sure we've all spent a lot of time in the last year just um trying to come to terms with the awfulness of war and what it means to say war is necessary

war is justified um how i've faulted pro-Israeli people for imagining that somebody on the receiving end of a just war, of a just war, can say, well, it's a just war, so therefore, you know, we had it coming. You know, this is not something... That's not how human beings actually work. It's not how human beings work.

And yet, maybe another day we'll have this conversation, because I think we're getting along well. From the Israeli point of view, the alternative is also very difficult to accept, but all I need to know, as a

model person seeking the truth, is the questions I've already asked like what is a reasonable number of people to be killed in in crossfire in such a horrible thing as war how many people uh are are killed because hamas exposes them we disagree about this but i believe exposes them with a strategy we don't but I believe exposes them with a strategy. We don't disagree with that. I completely agree with you that Hamas does things that expose Palestinians to Israeli fire. Intentionally. That's where we're disagreeing. But regardless of that, whether or not Hamas does it, or well, actually, no, let me actually clarify a little bit.

Hamas conducts its operations or whatever in such a way that – where, like, exactly like Goldstone and others have said, does not take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian cash. No, no, no, no. But that's important. But the question of whether they do it intentionally or not is not relevant because it's done knowingly. And it's the same thing as, you know, like recently Mossad headquarters was targeted by Iran. Intention is always relevant. It's always relevant.

In terms of like a prosecution it is, but what I meant is in terms of... Morally. And morally as well, 100% I agree. But you were asking what percentage of people were killed in this way and this way and this way. For that calculation, it's not relevant. So that's what I was referring to, sorry. Morally, I completely agree with you. But there's a—but you have to ask the same—it's important to remember, you're asking this—you've got to ask the same question on the other side.

Where's the Pentagon? Where's Mossad headquarters? These things are downtown. I know the Pentagon's not really downtown, but to be fair. Well, I don't know why you're shaking your head like that. You know, the CNN reporter that went and reported from Mossad headquarters after the ballistic missile strike, the Iranian attack on Israel, he said, he stood there, and I can't remember the exact words, but he said, you know, even if the Iranians were aiming at this building, I mean, look, there's civilians everywhere.

How could they, but he didn't say, these Israelis are using human shields. That's a term that has to do with who's doing what. Now, it doesn't have to do with what they're doing. It has to do with who's doing it. I think the bureaucratic offices of most armies and stuff like that are in cities. Yeah, exactly. And that's not a strategy. But when—that's not a strategy.

America has probably never— I agree with you. That is not a strategy. It has never concocted a strategy in order to have— Of maximizing civilian casualties. I totally agree with you. Or even worrying about the Pentagon being bombed. Also true, but the Israelis have.

But, well, maybe not even the Israelis did that. No, no, no, that's not right. I'll tell you why you're wrong. I'll tell you why you're wrong. Because Israel never for a second has ever thought that putting their Mossad headquarters around civilians would deter any enemy from striking Mossad headquarters. And there you go. And that's exactly why I think that gets down to it.

But if Israel started putting Patriot, Iron Dome batteries on Dzingov Street, that would obviously be something quite different. And that is a case when Hamas, we have seen these launchers purposely, when there was open spaces nearby, they bring them in where the population is dense. I'd be surprised if you've seen that with your own eyes. But if you have, again, please send it to me. I'd be very interested in seeing it. I have a hard time believing that from a video we've seen video of of uh rockets being launched from buildings

right but if the building's empty in the ap building was all kinds of stuff at one time it wasn't there was i listen seriously the new york times the new york times found these tunnels under al-shifa hospital no no see you that no. We're off subject. Fair enough. But it's important to be truthful about this. The New York Times didn't find tunnels under Shifa hospital. Israel built tunnels under Shifa hospital in the 80s when Israel built the hospital itself. Do you remember what happened? They found it being in use. No, they did not, sir. Well, I just read you what they wrote. So remember. I don't think New York Times wrote a story about the fact that they found some old tunnel

that's out of use. Okay. I would encourage you to read the details about this because it's very interesting. But do you remember that there was a moment where, I think it was a France 24 or something, some reporter went down to the tunnels under Shifa that everyone was so amazed about, and there was an Israeli spokesperson with them, and they showed them a list of terrorists that watched the hostages, there was a thing on, it was in the New York Times report. The very top of it was written Al-Aqsa. Okay. I know Al-Aqsa just means Jerusalem, but. But that was the name of the October 7th.

It was the name of the October 7th attacks. I'm pretty sure the calendar was a year out of date as well. But it was a blank calendar. Now, I don't speak a word of Arabic. I can like sound out the letters. And I looked at it and I said, hmm, it's interesting that they're repeating over and over again and there's nothing else on there. And yeah, so just explain. If it was so obvious, if there's tons, and again,

you're welcome to look into it. I will also look into it. We can discuss it another time. Because you're right, it's not the subject of what we're talking about. But if there's so much evidence, why is an Israeli spokesperson who certainly can read Arabic, why is he making it up? Why is he saying this is a calendar that shows when Hamas was here and there, even though it's blank? Let's not get sucked into the calendar. But I will send you, I'm not going to put it even in the podcast,

but I'll send you the article because... Send it to me. I assure you I'm genuinely interested in reading it. Write that down to remind me to send it to you.'m i'm i assure you i'm genuinely interested in reading it i write that down to remind me to send it sure so i'm exhausted no it's all good man no worries so so that's that um i think that uh the the the notion that hamas doesn't um maximize civilian deaths is is nuts uh if if they're not maximizing what he does what what are they what are they doing like what is there what does what what are they what are they doing like what is there what is there how do they expect to win this war uh i mean again i i don't

really know what hamas's strategy is but if you uh so it's a good it's a question of how there is a question why did the war start i mean obviously october 7th started off the phase of what's going on right now right hamas hasas has given, you know, long interviews to, like, DropSite News and places like that. All right, actually, not places like that, just to DropSite News, from what I understand, in which they discussed their thinking about the, what they call the Al-Aqsa flood, what we call October 7th. And Islamic Jihad has also given interviews about it. They're very worth reading. You know, I think you have to, like I just said,

I don't believe anything that that guy said in any other circumstance. These are worth reading if you haven't. I found a few. The paper, though, did not include people's names. The Arabic words were days of the week, the numbers underneath days. The Gazan Health Ministry said in a statement that the paper was nothing more than a regular work shift timetable, a standard administrative practice in hospitals. The ministry did not address one key detail.

The calendar begins on October 7th, and the Arabic title written at the top uses Hamas's name for the attack, Al-Aqsa Flood Battle 7-10-2023, because overseas they put the date first. So that was from the New York Times. Now, this was amazing. Everybody dropped this from the story as they reported

on the fact that this was an ordinary calendar. They left out that it started on October 7th and written on top was Al-Aqsa floodbed. And I predict, now that you know that, you will drop that. In other words, you're not going to say to me oh

shit yeah they were using the hospital but how does that show that they were using the hospital so how did then why you brought up the calendar so i i think it it was apparently evidence to you that the calendar was just an ordinary calendar that didn't say anything i said now that it was a blank calendar because but now that it seems exactly detailed written around october 7th you're not going to say i i mean i I wish you would, but you say, you know what? I might be wrong. They might have actually been using this hospital. Well, I always might be wrong.

But the— It's meaningless to you that the calendar actually started October 7th and says al-Aqsa on it. Okay. So if I can finish the sentence, the, so, okay. You're assuming that somebody went down on October 6th, put up a new calendar that said that started on October 7th because they knew the Al-Aqsa flood was going to be the next day. I'm not assuming anything. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

How does having a calendar that says Al-Aqsa flood on it, like, do you think that the Palestinians didn't know that that was what it was called? Or I don't understand how this changes anything it's your okay hold on do we both agree that the calendar does not show what the israeli minister says it shows which is a list of terrorists taking watching hostages in this tunnel i i don't know well the times didn't say it says that did they the time i don't i don't know if the time said it didn't say that it did say that i can think i think we can safely assume they would have said that that's what it says. It says a piece of paper taped on the wall in the hospital's basement, for instance,

quickly became the subject of debate. Admiral Haghari said the paper, a grid with Arabic words and numbers within each square, could be, he said, could be a schedule for guarding hostages where every terrorist writes his name. The paper, though, did not include people's names, the Arabic words with days of the week and numbers underneath the dates, the Gazan Health Ministry said. Okay, so it doesn't, but it does say Al-Aqsa flood at the top, and it starts on October 7th.

Yes. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that someone who was staying there decided to start their own history on October 7th to say, well, that's the day that we had, you know, that's the day everything changed. Because when did, again, when did they find this? Did they find it on October 8th? No, they found it like probably in November or December when they raided the hospital for the first time. Okay. There, I mean, the Washington Post, there've been a lot of news organizations that begrudgingly came to the conclusion, and American intelligence came to the conclusion, that Hamas was using the hospital as a command and control center. I think that you don't want

to admit that, but I will say this. I think, Norm, I have not come here and imputed your desire to find the truth. I don't think you should do that to me. Well, but I've conceded a lot of points. No, no, no. There's nothing about Well, but I've conceded a lot of points. No, no, no. There's nothing about conceding and not conceding. When we're searching for the truth, we find the truth. I've admitted that maybe, you know, that I, not maybe, that I spoke too strongly about the evidence on the Twitter thing.

It's fine. Let's see this question. We all sometimes just make mistakes. It's fine. That's good. If you wanted to, I would be very happy to go through the evidence for the use of it. Not right now. No, we should do it off the air.

We're happy to do that, too. Yeah, we should do that. But to do that, we have to prepare for it. We can't just do it right now. The reason I should do it off the air is because as I'm hosting a show and imagining people listening and it's going too long and people— Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I totally agree. It's effing with me but um i i would say that in what is supposedly it's not actually the dense densest place on earth we used to hear that but it's not but but a very very densely populated

small place it's not really feasible is it that they put three or four hundred miles of tunnel under just the the unpopulated areas? Isn't it a mathematical certainty that they built these military tunnels under civilian areas? Almost certainly, yeah. And now these tunnels are the targets, and that's why a lot of people are dying. Even buildings are collapsing. Right. So that's why a lot of people are dying even buildings are collapsing right so so that that's a good point is is it is that does that explain the israeli pattern of attack and etc etc explains

some of it well maybe it does maybe it doesn't i it's hard to know there are uh so cnn had an investigation where they went to a cemetery that israel was destroying in gaza and they said why are you destroying the cemetery i guess there's a tunnel underneath. He says, okay, can you show it to me? So they go down to the tunnel. And again, paraphrasing, I can't remember the quotes, but they went down into the tunnel. And the guy said, see, right now, we're right underneath the cemetery.

This is in the tunnel. So obviously, you know, look up, you can't tell where you're under. And then with GPS and what do you call it, drone footage, they figured out that they were nowhere near the cemetery. That doesn't explain why they were destroying the cemetery. So I think you have to be really careful in allowing whatever we see to confirm what we want to be true.

Again, I want to emphasize, I have lived in Israel. I feel much more comfortable in secular Israeli society. I'm being honest I might not believe me but I've always I felt much more comfortable in secular leftist Israeli society than I ever have in the United States if I was Jewish I just it just I don't know why I just did I've I didn't get the feeling of uh of heaviness of competition there's a lot of a lot of different reasons and maybe you know I was I was a kid I was 21, 22 years old. Maybe it was just romantic idealizing of another place. I have absolutely no desire to see Israel destroyed. I have no desire to see Israelis

harmed. That's not where this is coming from. I have seen crimes that my own government is participating in. That's the issue here. That's why I've been involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict for a long time. That's why I ultimately ended up becoming a doctor. Like it's, it's been a big part of my life. I just don't want there to be a confusion about that. And it's the same, I think it's the same with you and you strike me as a very decent human being i don't think that your uh your desire to uh to find less fault with israel's what's what's israel's doing or what hamas is doing or to say maybe froze only saw two kids shot in the head not 13 i don't think that comes from a place of malice but i do think that it's i think it comes from a place of wanting the world to be a better place than it actually is

and it's a very ugly realization it's it's very hard to get through my head you know and i'm again i may not believe me or not you may believe me or not but when i when luisa the love like the the journalist when she asked me how many kids i'd seen shot in the head i told her i don't know and when i went back and counted in the journal remember the journal is just the ones that i actually wrote down when i went back and counted i was actually kind of surprised to remember to see that it was 13. You know, I don't honestly know if I thought it was more or less,

but I just hadn't thought of it that much. It's I don't, I don't really these, these things are weird. You know, they're, they're kind of, it's gotta be horrific to see a child with a bullet in his head.

Oh yeah. And even in the U S it is. And I work in Stockton, California. We see kids shot in the head not frequently but not not never yeah but we do need to know what went on yeah no the truth of the matter matters exactly but this is the uh yeah and that and that's and that's you know and i i also want to like be clear is suppose uh like uh let's take a totally different thing just for a second i know i know i'm sorry i know you said you're tired but let's take a totally different thing just for a second i know i know i'm sorry i know you said you're tired but let's take a totally different thing we wrote uh me and

98 other uh health care providers wrote an open letter to the biden administration telling them what we saw and asking to have a meeting we had an there's an appendix to that letter too uh and the appendix is very detailed or uh data driven i guess you would say. And in that appendix, I went through the integrated food security phase classification data for Gaza. That's the technical group that monitors food insecurity in the world. And if you look at their data, which admittedly everybody admits is not great because it's very hard to get data out of Gaza. But if you look at their data, the minimum number of Palestinians that you can estimate

that have died from starvation or starvation-related causes since October 7th of last year is 62,000. Now, it's a huge number, and I sincerely hope it's not true. And if it doesn't turn out to be true, that would be wonderful. How can it be true? How can it be true? We'd be seeing social media videos of people that look like concentration camp. You do.

It was by 62,000. So this is what I'm saying. We see almost none. No, that's not true, Norman. And maybe you can explain this because from time to time when I do see somebody emaciated like that, they're surrounded by people who are sometimes pudgy. Yeah. I'm like, what is going on? How can one person be starving to death around friends and family that are overweight?

So Alex de Waal is the major, is like the preeminent historian of famine in the modern period. His book, I forget the name of the book. If you read it, he goes into details about how, so famine almost never affects an entire, famine is not usually like what was happening in a nazi concentration camp but that's that's what we think of in our heads right in uh when

and again i i'm using the term famine let me just i'm not using that in the ipc's technical definition i'm just using it to mean a time when people don't have enough food and some of them are dying because of that uh famine usually happens happens in circumstances of scarcity, but it always affects people who have fewer mechanisms to cope with it. So like if you look at the IPC's phase classification, it goes one through five. The first level is no food insecurity. The second is there's food insecurity, but by doing things that the family doesn't, they classify it at the household level. So by doing things that that household doesn't normally do, for example, selling clothes or sometimes sex work, things like that, anything to get money, then they're able to get enough food. The third phase is where those

coping mechanisms, for lack of a better term, break down. And now they're using those coping mechanisms, but they still don't have enough food and they're starting to eat into their savings. The fourth classification is where even the savings and everything are exhausted. And the fifth is an extreme version, the catastrophe phase. If again, if there's some IPC. Yeah. But so that's how this is classified. It's not uncommon. It's very, very uncommon for an entire population all to be starving to death. But again, that's the picture we have in our head because we think of like the American Scots.

That's not the point I was making, but I want to let you finish. Well, but you said there are chubby people next to dying people. That's normal. I understand that there might be different levels of who's starving, who's not. But I'm saying that we see these isolated videos of a child in a bed. And no adult is going to let a child get to that level of starvation

while they're eating comfort and maintaining their weight. So it's, you know, listen, you actually really seem like a good guy somebody i'd want to know somebody i want to spend time talking to to um uh enrich my own knowledge of of thing you have a lot of life experience that um is vital to the understanding of this conflict that that i don't have but there's certain disconnects in certain things you say that I have trouble accepting. That's fair. And the notion that there could be,

I think about 62,000, 30,000. But this is what I'm starting to say. More people starving in Gaza. Well, everybody has a cell phone. And we don't know about it. And Hamas is not announcing it, and the Gaza Ministry of Health is not adding it to their numbers. This is a credulousness.

Well, who am I being credulous towards? The integrated food security phase classification? To whoever it is that's saying terrible things. That is similar to— The IPC, which is funded by the united states the eu canada and australia whatever whatever it to to to no but you said that they they didn't report it they said if this is true it would be this then you said no i said based on their data that's the love but yeah that's what you're saying yeah it could actually be that we have 30 000 people have died so that i don't i don't want i don't want what i was saying to be misinterpreted what i said is that with the available data that's the lowest number that

can be estimated i don't know there but at the same obviously not true it's i wouldn't say it's obviously not true i don't know i will bet you a thousand dollars i'll bet you ten thousand dollars and when this is all over. We're not going to find out that on top of all the poor people who have died, 60,000 people starved to death. Okay, fair enough. Like I said, I don't know. We would see the videos. There are people in Gaza.

I mean, you would have seen it. You were there. I did. You saw people. You saw whole groups of people, like Auschwitz victims? So let me, so you, I think you said you saw the one picture of the child. Yeah, I saw the one picture. Right, so that kid, do you think we admitted him to the hospital?

I don't have a thought about it. You tell me. Well, how, so, okay, so this is important to understand. Our hospital, European hospital, which was the best one at the time, lacked even the most basic things that are needed to medically feed a child. So, like, with that kid, if you just start pumping tube feeds into his stomach, you're going to kill him. He's going to have huge electrolyte shifts and his heart's going to stop working. Same thing that should happen.

But why was he starving to death? Was he sick? Was he injured? Why wasn't he? Yeah i need to injure but he'd been in shifa hospital but this is my point we sent him home and we told his family just give him little bits of food but we knew that wasn't going to work so he probably it unless he made it out to egypt which is always possible but that's my point he was starving like that because he was injured if he was home with his family he wouldn't have been starving like that well how do you know okay so so it wasn't starving for family, he wouldn't have been starving like that. Well, how do you know? Okay, so- He wasn't starving for a lack,

he wasn't like that for a lack of food. He was like that for a lack of the ability to take in food. I don't know that that's true. The, so- Well, if that were true, if it weren't true, then his family would at least be,

you know, I hate to use these terms because it sounds almost flippant. No, it's okay. But the true then his family would at least be you know i hate to use these terms because it sounds almost flippant but the fact that his family was like were they being monstrous and not feeding the kid while they were eating nicely well his family was mostly dead but the uh so this is this is a point if so the integrated food security phase classification their last estimate was that or not last the uh one from may if i'm remembering correctly yeah was that 495 000 gazans are in the catastrophic phase of food insecurity but there was also a u.n report that found no starvation in gaza right or oh you'd have to send me that but i don't believe yeah i was in the the cindy mccain says that there's a famine in gaza

she's the well i mean no i mean like now again like it's it's no but but your your skepticism there is is is warranted because like do we really care what cindy mccain says but she's the head of the food program so it's not like she's making it up uh us aid says that there's a famine in northern gaza well you have to define famine then no they're they're talking about famine in the in the case of in the sense of the technical sense of the integrated food security phase classification which is much more restrictive than what people normally think of as famine. You need a new microphone. Listen, we need – yeah.

You think that – But this is what I'm saying. The IPC's numbers say that 495,000 people, about a quarter of the population, are in the catastrophic phase of food insecurity. In that phase, two of every 10,000 people per day die of starvation and starvation-related causes. And if you calculate that out, that's the number we came up with. There's a table in the thing. Look, the point, Norm, that I was trying to make with all this is not that that's the true number or it's not the true number. Exactly what I was trying to say is we don't know. And what's on in gaza right now is so extreme that we don't know if we're starving tens of thousands of people i think we do know because we do not then why

doesn't the gaza ministry of health say it norm either you think that okay is the ipc full of anti-semites or something what what is what is their motivation for making this up? No, no, no. You can't just dismiss... It's like an earthquake's hitting, and you're like, no, no, no. How do we know there's really an earthquake there? What about this anti-Semitic earthquake organization? You didn't say they're anti-Semitic, I know.

But what is the motivation for the integrated food security phase classification, this technical group of probably famine nerds who sits in a room, gets funding from the U.S., the EU, Canada, and Australia. Actually, not Australia. Sorry, Britain, I think. The four major, and that's it. What is their motivation for making this stuff up? Listen, I don't want to get sucked into that.

I could say that the U.N. has been, and these organizations. It's not the U.N. into that, I could say that the UN has been, and these organizations, and similar organizations, NGOs, whatever they are, have been very anti-Israel. But I don't even want to say that because I'm not casting aspersions on them or whatever it is that they've written that I haven't seen or been able to consider. I'm saying as a very reliable common sense matter, if 30 or 40 or 50, 60 thousands of Gazans were dead of starvation and another 60,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 not dead, but just starving to death bone thin how could that we not know about that that's a good question there's there's no way we could not know about that and that should be obvious to you that doesn't now if you told me that

hundreds of people are starving to death actually with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras even that i find hard to believe. Okay. And the fact that you saw one kid, but he was injured and not able to take nourishment actually doesn't even count because that's not what starvation is. But, again, the idea that you are ready to entertain what seems outlandish. It does seem. I completely agree. The outlandish facts could be true.

Yes, exactly. Which, forgive me, which clearly aren't true. This more than anything calls into question the article. So, Norman, you are not qualified to make that statement. I'm sorry. I am. No, you're absolutely not, sir. You have no idea what you're talking about.

First of all, you don't even know the group I'm talking about. Second of all, you don't know the data that they presented. Thirdly, you have no clue that they've never made any anti-Israel statements. They've never even mentioned Israel in anything because there's never been a starvation. I only said that because you questioned me. I was like, I don't need to know. Yes, you do. See, this is something that's driving me bonkers.

No, because it's not possible. This is going back to the biblical student who's claiming that— Am I correct that if 60,000 people die of starvation, there's some multiple of that who are on the verge of starvation? Of course, yeah. All right, so we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. And that's exactly what they're doing. In a place full of cell phone cameras, where we're seeing—and are all resembling Auschwitz victims, and we don't see it.

That's not possible. I don't need to know what this organization is. I'm not sure why you don't see those things, but plenty of other people do. Here's my computer. Bring me up a picture. Okay. I don't really search for pictures of starvation and gossip,

but we can try. So you have to believe that Oxfam, that IPC, that the... I have to look into what they actually wrote. I don't believe any of them thinks that hundreds of thousands of people... None of them have written that hundreds of thousands of people have died, and I didn't say that. No, 60,000 dead and another multiple of that on the verge of dying. I think...

I can see what I said made you upset and i but no no but but we got to wrap it up i know i get you but it's what i what the the point that i was trying to get to when i first mentioned all of this was not to say that that is the number that have died what i was trying to say is that we don't know and it's impossible to know until these things are actually investigated seriously if somebody investigates every shooting of a child that was done and finds that every single one or you know not every single one but like the large majority were justified okay i take back what i said that i don't i certainly wouldn't have any problem doing that now israel has a long history of killing kids so i'm not really sure that that's i don't think that's going to happen um like you

could read but sell them out if you say but sell them as an anti-israel organization that's kind of nuts the uh you know it's it's not new but it's been taken up to 11 and i'm sorry but i saw these things with my own eyes and i can't just let them go um it's it's not really a reasonable expectation starvation god so let's see what comes up we should do another one because i want to talk to you about tanahasi coats because i i didn't realize that you had such expertise on the whole um conflict i have to be honest i know absolutely nothing about tanahasi coats but the um but i did see his book the other day so okay i mean there are plenty of pictures here norman i don't

know how many is enough for you but um you you know, and this is just a Google Images search of starvation gossip, but this is the, this is, but I want to point this out. Looking at pictures online doesn't make you an expert in something. Being the integrated food security phase classification makes you an expert. Being Oxfam. Here's a picture. These kids, I mean, I don't doubt that they're hungry. I don't know that they're all gathered there. I just took the first picture. I don't know that they're gathered there to get aid. But nobody's starving. Norman, I Google imaged starvation Gaza. I didn't anticipate that every single, but you're showing a picture of a food line. I just took the first one, that's all. I'm going to go through them. You said that there aren't enough pictures in

Gaza to convince you that people are starving in large numbers. There's no picture here that you show me of people starving in large numbers. I see one kid in a hospital with a mask on, but again, it could be like the pictures that I see of people really starving emaciated are in

medical care, not on city blocks. All right, dude, let's wrap up. You're a good guy. Here's the same search for starvation Sudan. This is what I'm saying. It's exactly the same. It doesn't make you an expert to look at pictures or YouTube videos or social media posts.

I've seen video of starving people in Africa during a famine. I lived through these things and saw it, and it did look like concentration camps. I mean, we used to see commercials, and during the We Are the World video, we would see the most horrifying. Dude, come on. You're talking, oh, the We Are the World video?

I'm talking about that period when people were starving in Ethiopia. We saw, the whole world saw what famine looked like. Okay. We haven't, and that's before um, that's before, let me just say, that's before, um, everybody had a cell phone. So we gotta wrap it up. We will see.

Here's the pictures for starvation in Ethiopia. Show me a picture of a hundred people starving. I can't now. Yeah, of course you can't, Norm. This a hundred people starving i can't now yeah of course you can't norm this is my point i can't now because i i random googling doesn't make you an expert on something norman the fact that you're willing to dismiss the ipc out of hand is problematic you have to understand that you should be willing to defer to people who have great expertise ethiopian famine it's a horrifying picture. Okay, Norman, you are showing me a black and white picture from like a thousand

feet away. Here, hold on. We're gonna... I want to find a higher quality image so that we can actually look at it. Listen, I'm making a different point than what you're saying. The point I'm making is that in a world... Look, here's a picture. Are they all starving to death? No. Yes, they're all... Look at them. They're all bone thin. They're world... Look, here's a picture. Are they all starving to death?

No. Yes, they're all... What are you talking about? They're all bone thin. They're all got their ribs started out. Of course they're all thin. They're sitting there talking. They have cups in their hand. No, no, Norman.

There was no starvation in Ethiopia. Dude, these look like starving people. All their heads are huge. Their abdomens are not even visible. They're sitting children. How would you see their abdomens? Norman, you're being ridiculous. I'm sorry.

Stop. This is ridiculous. You are not an expert by looking at pictures of something online. You told me to look at pictures. I didn't know that. No, you said show me pictures of starving children in Gaza. Look at the legs of these kids. These are stick figures.

I agree with you that they're thin, Norman. That's not the point. The point is this is one photograph. Photographs don't prove things. You're talking about dismissing three reports from the IPC, three reports from USAID's Famine Early Warning System, the word of Human Rights Watch, the word of Oxfam, the word, I don't know if Amnesty International has published on it or not.

You're just willing to dismiss all of this out of hand. That's because you haven't seen enough pictures? Because I know that if 60,000 people were starving to death and another 100 or 200,000 were like this. I think you should be careful about what you know and what you want. Hold on, hold on. I really think you should. Hold on, hold on. These people here in Ethiopia that we're looking at that are bone thin,

these would be the people who haven't yet starved to death. Correct. But you're saying there's another possibly 60,000 that have actually died of starvation. I'm saying that's what the available data indicates. Yes, yes. And you think it's possible. And that the Gaza Ministry of Health hasn't even reported them. So how would the Ministry of Health know if people are starving to death in a tent and then being buried?

Would they know? Yes, they would know. Can you tell me how they would know? Gaza is a very small place. 60,000 people dying. How does the Ministry of Health collect data? Since you're an expert on this and you're telling me, since it's obviously you know what you're talking about here. How do they know who gets killed in war?

I don't know. You tell me. I do know, but you tell me. I assume families report it. They have some semblance of a government still there and police and officials that report it. I'm sure they take the data in any way it comes to light. The Ministry of Health reports that come out daily on their telegram account, the Ministry of Health reports are from confirmed cases of deaths that

are brought to morgues. That is how the Ministry of Health reports numbers. They also, keeping in line with what they've done in previous conflicts, because starvation was never a major problem in Gaza, hunger was, but not actually not death from starvation. They only report violent deaths on a daily basis. There is absolutely no way. And if that guy shoots himself with a silencer or something, I don't know if that guy kills himself right now, and then somebody takes him outside and buries him. How are you going to know? How would the federal government, how would the United States government know? That's just, that's not how the world works, man. You get, you get counts of deaths when you show up at a morgue,

when you have a functional hospital system, a functional morgue system, a functional election. So how many people does the Gaza Ministry of Health report died of starvation? They don't, that's what I'm saying. They don't report on it. It's not a report that they release. Well, 60,000.

Some people will bring these people to the morgue. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. But that's what I'm saying. There is no report put out on a daily basis, I don't even know about ever, about starvation deaths in Gaza. So the Gaza ministry is aware that thousands of people are dying of starvation? I don't know what they're aware of or not aware of. All right.

Okay. I know you have to go. No, no, no. You've absolutely lost me here, just like the argument about the bomb shelters. But you know what? We'll see. The truth will come out. It will, but that's the point,

is that we just, to the point that we don't know what we're even doing over there, that's what's scary to me about this. All right, I'm just going to conclude by being, I mean, I said it already, but I want to say it again. I'm of two minds here,

because clearly you're not someone to be dismissed. You're not a bad faith actor. You've risked your life to save human life. You've demonstrated to me that, shown me that scan, that the x-ray, I'd be shocked if it wasn't real. That's all on one side. And you seem like a general you don't seem like even a um

a hater of israel i mean i'm sure you're you are opposed to israel politically but you're not like uh um just to be clear no i'm not okay well in any case you're definitely not you're definitely not vehement in your vibe on the other hand we'll see I there's certain things that you are ready to believe that to me just seem outlandish and I don't think it's because of my political point of view I think it's just a different way I see the world and um I'm happy to have met you. I'm very impressed that you came to do this show. You must be quite in demand right now. Not really. Well, that's not a credit to our marketplace of ideas

because a story which is getting so much attention and a guy who wrote it who's ready to talk to people, they should be having you on. I'm happy to talk to anybody, but yeah, but yeah, no, I, I just, I would, the only thing I would emphasize is that where we, uh, agree is where I'm able to show you directly or where it has to do with you just listening to me and thinking this guy just, I don't see any reason to think he's lying where we disagree is where I'm giving you not what I believe I'm giving you the information that the expert organizations come up with. And you are saying it's untrue.

And I'm saying I'm willing to defer to them. You and I, I said, it can't be true. You said it can't. Well, also, but like with the,

with the human shielding thing and like that, I'm, I'm not, in other words, where we disagree is where we are referring to what other people have said, not what you have. You have your list of things that you're promising. I just want to say that that's like a point of agreement that we can sit down and talk to each other and it's nice. Yes. Thank you.

Do you have your list of things that you're going to send? Yeah, I got lists. Because I would like to get up first thing in the morning tomorrow include your your your lists of you know things that you want to i'm going to send you a list of support your case and then i'm going to post it tomorrow cool i'm going to send you uh interviews where i said that i uh i don't know if i said the number or the the that i saw kids have shot every day whatever you whatever i can find yeah um that that was just those the journal that you said yeah and i i'm happy to send you the whole i'm pretty sure i don't think there's anything in there that you that the lay person can't see um i'll send you the national lawyers guild amnesty and human rights and that scan video

i can send you the scan video yeah scan video and i'll send you the statement from the other Goldstone Commission chairs or whatever they were called and you will send me the more details about the calendar. I did. I already did. I read it to you.

I didn't send it. That's all there was. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I got my shaking hands. Thanks. Okay. Thanks, John.

Yep. Thanks for meeting me on, like, random quick notice, too. Oh, thank you. I'm exhausted.