The Daily - A Child of Gaza Becomes a Political Symbol

Episode Date: May 17, 2018

The death of a Palestinian baby during the protests in Gaza became a rallying cry for critics of Israel. Within hours, the family’s story was being questioned. Guest: Declan Walsh, the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times, who has been reporting from Gaza. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the death of a baby during the protests in Gaza became a rallying cry for critics of Israel. But then came the charge of fake news. It's Thursday, May 17th. Declan Walsh, what has been happening on the border of Gaza and Israel

these past couple of days since we last spoke with you? Things have really started to slow down here, Michael. We had this incredibly dramatic and bloody day on Monday where so many people died. There were clouds of tear gas. People have been carted away, injured, hospitals full. The next day, the protests scaled back dramatically. We went from thousands of people masked along the fence with Israel to just numbers in the low hundreds. And the energy has really shifted from protest to grief. Funerals were taking place across the city on Tuesday. And at the same time, images start to appear on social media

showing the body of a little girl being mourned over by her mother in a hospital here in Gaza. An eight-month-old infant child, this girl Leila, she was killed by gas asphyxiation at one of these camps. So these were images of an eight-month-old child named Leila Ghandour, who had been killed during the protests, apparently the day before. And these images really start to capture the emotional response of people to the violence the previous day, not just here in Gaza, but around the world. She's become a symbol of the grief of a community.

The baby's family blames Israeli forces for her death. And Declan, what is thought to have happened to this eight-month-old girl, Leila? So on Monday afternoon, when the protests were in full swing along the border, a call went out in Leila's neighborhood. In a local mosque, an announcement was made that a bus was waiting in the street and this bus was going to take residents of this neighborhood, a poor area of Gaza City called Ashat. This bus was going to take residents down to the protest area. So in Leila's house, Leila was dozing in a back room in the house and people started to scramble. The women of the house went out towards the bus. And Leila's 12-year-old uncle, a kid called Amar, who I met earlier,

he went into the back room and he bundled Edla up in his arms and he walked out the door of the house towards the bus as well. And he was working under the assumption that Leila's mother was on the bus and that they would all be reunited when they got to the protest. But when they got there, it turned out that Leila's mom was not on the bus. She was feeling sick that day and she had stayed at home. So here we have, you know, this eight-month-old child who's suddenly in the middle of this dramatic scene in this protest camp. Now, it's important to note that at the protest along the border, all the action takes place really in a pretty concentrated area at the front. And then at the back of the protest camp, you have, you know, a lot of other activities.

You have a huge prayer area. You have tents. So Leila is in a tent with some of her female relatives while these protests are going on. And then at some point, she starts to get unhappy. She's crying. And yet again, at this point, 12-year-old Amr, who the family said is a boy who had a bond with this child, often played with her at home and so on, felt close to her. He picks up the child again, and he takes her out of the tent and towards the forward area of the protest, where her grandmother

and towards the forward area of the protest, where her grandmother is in the thick of the action, in an area where there's huge black plumes of smoke, where people are pushing towards the fence, Israeli soldiers are firing at some of them. He hands Leila over to her grandma, and soon after that, before the grandmother can retreat, if you like, with the child,

a tear gas canister falls nearby them. Both of them are engulfed in the smoke. Their eyes are watering from the tear gas. It's a pretty unpleasant sensation for anybody, let alone for a small child. And then the grandmother washes the face of the child. She said that she fed her a little bit of a sweet drink, and then they moved off home soon after that. And that's really when the tragedy struck. They reached their home.

The grandmother said that she realised then that the child was no longer breathing. They rushed the child to a nearby paediatric hospital. And when they reached there at about 6.30 on Monday evening, the doctors pronounced the child dead. I went looking for my daughter, and they told me she was taken to the hospital. I went to the hospital and I knew she was dead. Obviously they were devastated, but it's not the first time. In this house, which I visited earlier today, while I was talking to the family,

I noticed on the wall behind them a giant poster that showed one of Leila's great uncles, a guy also called Amr, who was killed in 2006 while fighting with the militant group here in Gaza. There's also a photograph of another uncle who was killed in 2001 while he was throwing stones at Israeli soldiers along the border when he was a schoolboy. So, like so many families in Gaza, they have an experience of death as part of the struggle against Israel that goes back, in many cases, generations. And Declan, you talked about how powerful this image has come to be, but what exactly does it symbolize? I think it symbolizes two things for the Palestinians. I mean, firstly, and most obviously, as they see it, the brutality of the Israeli army in trying to keep the population of Gaza inside what they refer to as an open air prison, the world's largest open air prison. Secondly, and perhaps more profoundly, it's a measure, I think, of the desperation of people in Gaza.

So many people have been willing to go along to these protests at immense personal risk, walk up to this fence and risk the sort of scale of the battlefield scenes that you saw along the border were all designed really as a kind of cry for attention from Gazans who say, look, this is the life we live. We are hemmed into this area that's been blockaded for the last 11 years. Our lives are desperate and we would like the world to pay attention to that. And even in the case of Leila, that spilled over into her own funeral. I was there a couple of days ago when her father sat at the front of the mosque for an hour. He had Leila's body in his arms. He was stroking his child's hair. And then, you know, people streamed out into the streets with some of them holding up Leila's body at the front. You know, chanting slogans against Israel

in a real sort of electric sense of the emotion that this death has brought out in people, but also, I think, their own sense of desperation about their own circumstances and their own lives. So this seems pretty clear-cut. A Palestinian who wasn't posing a threat, she was eight months old, falling victim to Israeli aggression.

It looks like that. And then a new piece of information emerges. It turns out baby Leila had actually been suffering from a congenital heart condition. And as these pictures are streaming around the world and there's so much sympathy being generated and this picture has become this very powerful symbol, questions start being raised about whether the thing that actually killed Leila, whether it was the tear gas, as her family says, or whether in fact she had died from this heart condition that she'd been suffering from for all of her life. And so the family says that she has

this condition. Then we have a report that comes out on the Associated Press, citing an unnamed doctor in Gaza who says he believes that the heart condition was the cause of her death. Wow. And then around that time, we get the Israeli military seizing on a version of this information. It's not clear where they've got it from. And they issue a statement on Twitter saying that they have obtained multiple accounts that call into question the version of this story whereby baby Leila was killed as a result of tear gas inhalation.

So all of a sudden, this story that looked like, in a sense, Leila was the purest victim at the protests on Monday, all of a sudden now there's at least questions being raised about whether that's really what happened or whether it's more complicated than that. So the implication is that baby Leila died of something genetic, this heart condition, not from Israeli tear gas. That's right. I mean, what the Israelis are saying isn't entirely clear because they say they have these multiple accounts that raise doubts, but they're not giving us those accounts. And in fact, you know, we called the Israeli military earlier today to say to them, look, we've seen your comments on Twitter. Can you please provide us with these accounts or at least provide us with details of these accounts so that we can assess them or we can see, you know, what exactly you're saying?

And they didn't do that. And then you have the pro-Israel voices on the internet that seize this new fact and use it to promote their version of what's been happening in Gaza, which is that this is a situation that has been manipulated by a dangerous armed group called Hamas that does not recognize the state of Israel and wants to destroy it. So now we have two competing narratives, depending where you look on the internet, all around the images of this dead baby. You have very sympathetic, heart-rending coverage in many papers. The paper shows the picture of the grieving mother. She is, of course, mourning the death of her eight-month-old infant who passed away after inhaling tear gas. You know, I saw one British tabloid where they talked about the angelic face of baby Leila. But then on the other side of the debate, we find staunch pro-Israel voices who are saying,

you know, here's the truth about what goes on in Gaza. It's more complicated. Hamas plays a hand in it. They want the media to show the body count. They want the media to show the dead baby, even though Israel tried everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties. You know, and you see people like pro-Israeli commentator Alan Dershowitz, who went on Fox and Friends to say that this is all part of what he calls Hamas's dead baby strategy. You use children and women, you deliberately put them on the front lines. You make it impossible for Israel to defend itself without occasionally killing a woman or a child or an elderly person.

And every time Israel accidentally kills somebody like that, Israelis grieve. Israel loses. Hamas cheers and celebrates because that's exactly what they want. So suddenly we have the image of baby Leila that is now being used by the other side to make the point that this is exactly what Hamas does to try and manipulate opinion and indeed to manipulate circumstances on the ground in Gaza. Just remind us, what role Hamas has played in these protests? What role Hamas has played in these protests? Well, they've certainly been a central force in organizing the protests.

You know, formally, the protests are not controlled by Hamas. They're controlled by a broad coalition of many groups in Gaza, including other militant groups like Islamic Jihad, but also community organizations. You know, there's a really broad cross-section of Gaza society participating in the process. But it's impossible that they would have taken place without, you know, the support and the coordination of Hamas. And indeed, when I was at the protest site on Tuesday evening, we had the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, turn up just as the protests were ending. And immediately, it was an incredible sight. There were hundreds of people who had been at the fence, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. And then as soon as Ismail Haniyeh turned up, the entire place

emptied, if you like. Everybody ran towards his car. They thronged around him. And he gave a short speech,, you know, he said some words to some local TV stations. But what was most interesting was the chants that went up. People were chanting, no more peaceful protests. We want rocket firing. So that really gives you a sense of the balance of tensions here at the moment. We've had these protests that have been largely peaceful along the border fence and that have brought an immense amount of sympathy for the

people of Gaza and I suppose have provided a sort of public relations boom for Hamas itself. But Hamas is a militant group at its core and it retains the right to resume military strikes against Israel. It's already fought two very bloody wars against Israel in recent years. And the tone of what happened when the Hamas leader turned up at the protest site the other day really underscored the fact that, you know, Hamas is saying, look, if the sympathy that we have gathered through these protests does not translate into some concrete action on the ground that meets our demands about ending the blockade, for instance, then we may well return to violent action against Israel.

Is there any truth to this pro-Israel claim that this photograph is being used as propaganda by Hamas? Is that a known strategy that Hamas deploys? Certainly, Hamas has encouraged this story, you know, openly. I met with a spokesman for the health ministry here, which compiles the casualty figures. He told me that they had promoted this story effectively, that he had on his Facebook page, which is widely read, he had distributed a photograph of Leila where the child is smiling and you can really see her green eyes and she looks like a beautiful girl. So, you know, they've certainly been pretty unashamed, if you like, about using this. But they say, look, this is not cynicism on our part. This is a real thing that happened. And we are just bringing to international attention one family's tragedy. And we're using that to illustrate the brutality of Israel against our people.

But particularly because there's now a question about what exactly baby Leila died from, then that has really given fuel to opponents on the other side who say, look, this is Hamas playing fast and loose with the truth, using the lives of ordinary people to play politics. lives of ordinary people to play politics. And so both sides use this image to validate their pre-existing views and to kind of affirm what they think has been going on. That's right. It's really come to symbolize, in many respects, you know, the difference between the two sides here. We have one group of people for whom Leila has become the personification of Israeli brutality. You know, she is the most innocent of protesters who, for whatever reasons,

happened to be at that protest site on Monday and was killed. And then on the other side, we have another group of people who see this as a sign of everything that's wrong about Gaza. Here is a manipulation of the facts by a cynical militant group that would do anything to cement its control over the territory. But I think, you know, it's probably true that the people who see Leila as an innocent victim of brutality are still very much in the majority. I mean, it's pretty clear when you look on the internet and you see the floods, the emotional responses of people from across the spectrum who really see the death of this child as a sign that things have really gone a major step too far along the border between Gaza and Israel. You know, for the Israeli military,

it's a sign of how difficult it's been for them to make their point about why they responded with such violence on Monday. And indeed, there was a briefing given by an Israeli military spokesman. And in that briefing, he admitted that they had, as he put it, lost the public relations war over what had been taking place along the border.

And he attributed that to the power of images of children like Leila. I wonder what this family says about the really fateful decision to bring Leila to this demonstration. Did you ask them about that? I did. Did you ask them about that? I did. And they absolutely regret the moment that they allowed that child to come to this protest. Leila's mother in particular is completely grief-struck.

Earlier on today, she was so intent on disproving this idea that Leila had not been killed in the tear gas that she brought me to a local hospital. She brought us to the ward where she brought Leila's body in such a panic a couple of days earlier, looking for emergency assistance. She introduced us to the medics who received the body and who told her that her child was died.

And then she stood in that ward at the spot where that pronounce was made and she started to cry. And she told us that this was, as she put it, she said this was an event that had attacked her heart. And so underneath all of this rhetoric between both sides who've taken this story and used it for their own purposes, under all of that you have one family that right now is still grappling to deal with the loss of this little girl.

And, you know, for them, certainly they're a family that have been on the forefront of the wars in Gaza in the past, but that doesn't take away from the fact that right now they're grieving very deeply and trying to figure out how they're going to get past this. Zachary, thank you very much. My pleasure. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

The White House is dismissing threats by North Korea that it will cancel the upcoming summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. This is something that we fully expected. And if they want to meet, we'll be ready. And if they don't, that's OK, too. And we'll continue with the campaign of maximum pressure if that's the case. White House officials told The Times they were taking the threats in stride, in part because it was Kim, not Trump, who had sought the meeting in the first place.

And they had expected North Korea to maneuver for tactical advantage in the run-up to the June 12th summit. The North is now saying it wants to come to the table as an equal nuclear power to the U.S., a reversal from its offer of denuclearization. And on Wednesday, President Trump released a financial disclosure form which confirms for the first time

that he repaid a debt of over $100,000 to his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in 2017. The disclosure doesn't specify the purpose of the payment, but in late 2016, Cohen paid the adult film actress Stephanie Clifford $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair with the president. The Times reports that the disclosure raises questions about whether the president improperly omitted the debt from his filing last year. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.