The Decibel - Life for Palestinians one year after

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

This is the second part of a two-episode special looking at the rippling effects of a year of war in Israel, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. In this episode, Mark MacKinnon, The Globe and Mail’s senior international correspondent, talks about the scale of destruction in Gaza, how people are surviving there and what future Palestinians see for themselves. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The one-year anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war was met with explosions. On Monday, Hezbollah launched 140 missiles at northern Israel, including the city of Haifa. Israel's air defenses intercepted them, creating booms in the night sky. Israel continued to strike southern Beirut in its efforts to push Hezbollah further away from its northern border. And Hamas shot five rockets toward Tel Aviv. One of them landed on a farm outside of the city, as this police officer explains. They managed to land rockets in a central community where the rocket hit right outside of the front door of this family's home. Unfortunately,

there were two individuals who were lightly injured. After the Tel Aviv attack, Israel struck back, sending rockets towards Han Yunis in the Gaza Strip. They hit a gas station, as this eyewitness explains. She says that some people were walking by the fuel depot when Israeli rockets struck, adding that her son was there when the attack happened, and now she cannot find her son and doesn't know if he's alive. Following that attack, the Houthis in Yemen launched ballistic missiles at Israel from more than 2,000 kilometers away. Despite the warfare, memorials took place across Israel, including where more than 360 people were murdered at the Nova Music Festival a year before. One of the mourners was the father of one of the dead.

You know, we tried to look for her for almost five weeks, as Anat said. And we tried to look for her tattoo over here, which said, Die with memories, not dreams, which gives you another meaning suddenly. During this memorial's moment of silence, grief pierced through, with a mother wailing in the crowd. Today, we're bringing you the second part of our two episodes about the first anniversary of the October 7th attack and the subsequent war. Yesterday, we covered how Israelis are coping a year later with Mark McKinnon, the Globe's senior international correspondent. Mark has been covering the war from both inside Israel and the West Bank. Today, he explains what the last year has been like for Palestinians.

I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mark, thanks so much for joining us again. Thank you, Minika. So previously we talked about sentiments inside Israel. We talked about the hostages. But today we're actually going to look more specifically at Gaza. And I just want to start asking you, Mark, about a woman you talked to named Marwa Shaheen. Who is she?

Marwa is a mother of six in the Gaza Strip, specifically in the Nusayrat refugee camp in the center of the Strip, whose story struck me for a couple of reasons. First of all, that she'd been forced to move seven times over the course of this conflict, which really just tells you what Palestinians have been through in Gaza over the last year. And she, like other Gazans I know, could keep moving. They still get these evacuation orders saying you must leave this area because there's going to be military operations or Hamas is operating near you. But people have been moving and moving and moving. Conditions have been getting more and more grim. And Marwa, like others that I know there, has just decided to stop moving.

Whatever's going to happen, she's going to stay home now. The other reason that was really compelling about talking to her was, you know, at one point she just held up the phone to close the windows. I could hear the tank fire outside. You know, imagine you're home with your six kids and there's a tank on the street outside. And for her, that was not even a first time occurrence and happened regularly over the last year or so. I just thought she was extremely representative of what a lot of Palestinians have gone through over the last year or so. I just thought she was extremely representative of what a lot of Palestinians have gone through over the last year. And I just want to point out, Mark, because, of course, foreign journalists are not allowed into Gaza without the Israeli army. So how are you able to talk to her?

So the way that I've been doing, all of my colleagues have been trying to report on the Gaza Strip, is you have to do it by telephone calls, by WhatsApp conversations. In this case, last week I went to Ramallah for telephone calls, by WhatsApp conversations. In this case, last week I went to Ramallah for a day in the West Bank and sat down with a Palestinian friend and just, we called as many people they knew in Gaza and just sort of chatted with them. And the stories were all, sadly, similar. Marwa's was really very representative of other tales I heard that day. And the day that we open, the Gaza Strip is

open for foreign journalists. It's going to be, I think we're going to be shocked by what we see. And what is the state of Israel's offensive these days, Mark, into Gaza? Like, are people in Gaza still dealing with daily bombardment? I was just there on Sunday. And even in the short time there, being on the edge of the Gaza Strip, since we can't go into the Gaza Strip, but even the short time that I was there visiting the Israeli communities on the edge of the Gaza Strip, you heard three or four outgoing artillery rounds. There were helicopters and fighter jets in the sky almost the entire time. The Gazans that I speak with on a regular basis are just resigned to explosions. A good friend of mine sent me a video recently where he was just sitting on a plastic chair outside of his house and looking at the mosque across the street.

And I visited that mosque before with him in that house before, and the mosque had been hit by what looked like an airstrike. But the look on his face, the resignation, he's not shocked anymore. He doesn't even look sad anymore. He's just, this is life in Gaza. So the state of the conflict is that Israel absolutely controls the terrain in Gaza. Hamas must, you know, obviously it still has fighters that come out of the tunnel networks we've heard about, that come out of buildings. You know, they still have some fighting capability, but, you know, Israel has, you know, at this point it is really just about trying to hunt down

the remaining top leadership, really Yahya Sinwar, and finding what happened to the last 101 Israeli hostages whose fate is unknown at this point, many of whom are believed to have died. Okay, so that gives us a picture of what life is currently like in Gaza. But Mark, let's talk about the scale of things over the last year here. Like, how many people are displaced internally in Gaza as of today and how many people have died? So the number of deaths, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, I'm going to pause on that for a moment. Because you see a lot of people saying, well, that's a Hamas figure and somehow casting doubt on it. That is actually a figure from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.

And I went over this with a spokesperson for the government while I was there, the ministries of health and education have been under the control of Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas this entire time. And it's not, these are not Hamas ministries. Obviously, there's a lot of Hamas influence in the Gaza Strip, but these are figures that are backed by the Palestinian Authority and that are used by the United Nations in their own regular updates on what's happening in Gaza. So the number as of this moment, I think it just passed 41,800 people that have been killed since the start of this conflict a year ago. That's a staggering number. I think everybody can agree. And if you talk about number of people that have been displaced, 1.9 million out of a population of 2.1. So that's 90% of Gazans have had to leave their homes at least once over the last year.

And like I said, many, many people have had to move again and again and again. And the reason why 60%, I'm just going to, these numbers are important. I think you have to pause and think about them for a second. 60% of all buildings in the Strip have been damaged. So think about any city in the world. Imagine 60% of the buildings having been hit by some sort of weapons. And then on top of that,

you've got hospitals that aren't functioning. These kids haven't gone to school, of course, for a year. I mean, it is social collapse, obviously. And the day after in Gaza, it's going to take a very, very long time for them to get back to what life was like on October 6th,

which was already, you know, they were among the poorest people in the world. Mark, you mentioned hospitals. I just want to ask you about this directly. Do we know, are there remaining hospitals that are functioning in Gaza? Like, what is the state of health care? Again, the last report from the United Nations has it as 19 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are out of service. And of those 19, 17 are only partially functioning. So you basically have two hospitals that are operating in something close to normal. So you take that and then imagine, we talked a lot about the death tolls, the number of injuries, the number of people coming in that

are, you know, sanitation, illness, you know, these hospitals would be overwhelmed anyways, if all 36 were operating, when you're down to really just two that are properly functioning. It's a crisis. And when I was here back in May, I was talking to doctors about how, you know, they had to send women home, you know, almost immediately after giving birth, they just didn't have a bed for mother and child to stay in. Again, the numbers are awful, but I think they only tell part of the story. And I mean, we're also hearing about famine throughout Gaza as well, right? And we know within days of Hamas's October 7th attack,

Israel was cutting off shipments to Gaza, fuel, food. Do we know what is the status of aid shipments now into the territory? The UN's number on that, again, is 495,000 people are facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity and there is a trickle of aid last time i was here i saw some trucks entering from the northern end of the strip through the israeli controlled areas crossing but really just a trickle and i was speaking this week with people who are involved in trying to get aid into gaza and they said that we are still seeing as we've been saying all along, just aid piled up in Rafah on the side of the insulate, just on the Egyptian side of the border, but they can't enter

because Israel controls the Philadelphia corridor. There's also aid piled up in Jordan that is intended to come in to Gaza and is not being allowed through. And as we've heard in the past, we've talked about in past episodes, you see this, you know, flashlights being barred because the batteries are seen as potentially dual use, entire kits of medicine being disqualified because one of the medicines contains a substance that could conceivably be of some other purpose. I mean, very early on, the Israeli government said, you know, we're laying siege to the Gaza Strip and that they still are. So we've just been talking kind of about the land corridors of getting aid into this territory. Mark, for a while there was actually talk about building a floating pier, right, on the coast

to get more aid into Gaza. Can you just tell us what actually happened to that? Because from what I understand, aid is not coming in from the coast. So the pier, which was constructed by the U.S. military as a way of delivering aid directly to the Gaza Strip at great cost and great fanfare. At the end of the day, it was operational for all of 20 days before being closed in July. The pier should have been able to bring in 150 trucks of aid per day. It never functioned. There were allegations that the pier was being used for other purposes. It was probably a well-intentioned idea that went nowhere at all.

We'll be right back. So, Mark, we just talked about what's been happening in Gaza. I know, though, you've also spent some of the last year reporting from the West Bank, the other Palestinian territory. So let me ask you about that. What is the state of things in the West Bank? When I was speaking to Palestinian government officials this week in Ramallah, they're really worried about this will be the next front that we saw the war in Gaza. We're seeing now this conflict in Lebanon turning into a full fledged war with Iran playing a role as well. But in terms of what the end game here is, the Palestinian Authority is very, very worried that the real target is the West Bank, what Israelis call Judea and Samaria, and that the settlers in the West Bank are being more aggressive. They're attacking Palestinians. They're setting up new what they call outposts that didn't have legal authorization, that would stop settlers that were attacking Palestinian civilians, now largely stands aside.

If there is any hope for a two-state solution, for there to be a Palestine that exists on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the West Bank is the heart of that. It is where the Palestinian economy would be based. It is where diplomatic missions are. But the feeling right now amongst Palestinians, and I have to say some foreign diplomats, is that Israel's fighting a big, loud war in Gaza and one in Lebanon, a much quieter offensive than seeing them gradually take more and more of the West Bank under their control. And we are seeing a fair bit of violence. I mean, it's all relative compared to what we're seeing in Gaza, but there has been a fair bit of violence in the West Bank as well over the last year. Yeah, there have been. It's over 700 people killed in the West Bank over the past year, which makes it the most violent year there since the bad old days of the Intifada 20 years ago. And we've also seen in the last few days since I've been here,

we've seen first a shooting attack. It was actually two blocks away from my hotel in jaffa last week it was carried out by palestinians from the west bank from the city of hebron which is you know a very difficult place for palestinians to live in it's you know one of the most difficult parts the west bank in terms of the israeli military and security hold on the city and then we saw this israeli attack on a cafe in the West Bank city of Tulkarim. 18 people were killed there, including a family of four. Now, the Israelis say they were targeting a group of what they call terrorists that were planning another attack, something similar perhaps to what happened in Jaffa. But, you know, an airstrike in the West Bank, that's again, hasn't happened since the last intifada. So you're seeing this growth in the violence in the West Bank.

The Palestinians are getting angrier and angrier with what they see in Gaza, with the growth in the West Bank. The Palestinians are getting angry and angry with what they see in Gaza with the growth of these illegal settlements. And then the Israelis are using more and more force in dealing with, you know, what starts to look a little bit like another Palestinian uprising or intifada. And I know, Mark, throughout your reporting in this region, you have been speaking to Palestinians about how they're seeing these things as well. In particular, I want to ask you about, I know you spoke to a Palestinian Canadian lawyer who's living in Israel. What did she tell you about, I guess, how things have really changed over the last year? Yeah, Diana Butu is someone that I've known for 20 years.

At one point, she was an advisor to the Palestinian Authority and took part in the peace negotiations, you know, back when there were peace negotiations. And she now lives in Haifa. And for her, you know, she's gone from being a believer in the two-state solution to being a believer in the one-state solution. That's, you know, why she lives in Haifa rather than in the West Bank. She believes this is all going to be one country in the end, and Israelis and Palestinians are going to have to come up with a way to make that happen. She really was very, very worried about what's been happening to Palestinians living in Israel. Israelis call them Israeli Arabs.

Some people don't like that word, that terminology. So she calls herself Palestinian, even though she lives in Israel. And she was talking about how when she watches the news at night, the numbers of dead in Gaza, the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. It's not treated with the same sort of concern by Israeli media, by Israeli TikTokers who she says will make videos almost mocking what's happening in the West Bank. And she called it the dehumanization. She's been trying to go on TV and say, look, here's the context for all of this. Here's how this looks from a Palestinian perspective. And that has actually got the attention of some of her neighbors. Someone put her on a list of sort of enemies of Israel and doxxed her and put sort of her personal

information onto the internet, which has made it, you know, she's very frankly scared to be living in a situation where people, there's such high anger on all sides. And if someone said this person here who lives down the street is an enemy of the state, you don't know how people will deal with that. Yeah. More broadly, the other Palestinians you've talked to, how have people said they're feeling about the reaction of the international community when it comes to the events over the past year? I think it's fair to say that Palestinians feel very, very forgotten, like their lives don't matter. 41,800 deaths over the course of the last year. And there's been a lot of words at the United Nations.

There's been a lot of statements issued by human rights groups. But at the end of the day, there's no one intervening to stop this. There's no one putting, really it's the American government we're talking about here that has the leverage to force Israel to stop the war in Gaza and it has never been exercised. The reasons why not, people just think that, you know, that people come to accept that Palestinians live under occupation, that the Israelis are allowed to do whatever they think necessary for their own security. So yeah, they feel very, very forgotten, especially as this war in Lebanon has erupted, especially as the tensions between Iran and Israel become more pointed. Headlines are drifting away. The tension of the world is shifting away from Gaza,

and yet the war there goes on and the conditions there remain absolutely miserable. And I take that point. I do, of course, actually want to ask you about Lebanon, though, and what is happening there, because we are seeing a lot of action in the last few weeks. We've seen Israel turn its attention towards this incursion into southern Lebanon and even striking buildings in Beirut, the capital. How has this all affected the lives of people in Lebanon? It's a very scary moment in Lebanon. You know, my friends in Lebanon spent a large part of the summer in Beirut. The word they use is the gasification of Lebanon. They see what happened to Gaza. They're terrified that the same strategy is being unrolled in southern Lebanon.

When I drove around southern Lebanon in July, you can see why the comparison comes to mind. Because even then, before this much more serious offensive began, there were entire cities in southern Lebanon that were destroyed and deserted. And the same on the Israeli side of the border. Israeli towns have been, you know, this rocket exchange that was going on for most of the past year. But this offensive that started really in the last few weeks with this Pager explosion and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has people very, very worried, even opponents of Hezbollah. And there are a lot of opponents of Hezbollah inside Lebanon. I think that's important to point out. There are a lot of people who are not sad to see the end of Hassan Nasrallah. They're worried about how you're going to rebuild this country,

because Hezbollah went to war with Israel in 2006. Afterwards, the country rebuilt with the help of the international community. That country that was rebuilt after the 2006 war, Lebanon is just not as strong as it was in 2006. Their economy has collapsed. You can't get cash for the bank. This is before this current war. People can't withdraw their salaries and cash. The electricity grid was a shambles. People need generators to power their homes. Of course, that port explosion in 2022, right? That also hit the country really hard. Absolutely. And it was a country already on its knees before this war started. And because of Hezbollah's influence in the country, Iran's influence in the country,

Lebanon has far less friends in 2024 than it did in 2006 that are willing to help it out. And they're worried that after this war, there won't be the international rebuilding that they saw in 2006. It's just very lossy here, Mark. You've talked to lots of people on the ground and in cities and towns in Israel and in the West Bank over the last little while. How worried are people about the possibility of a wider regional war in the Middle East? As I speak to you in this moment, it's the big worry. And that missile attack that we all, everybody here in Israel and the West Bank sort of lived through

last week was much more serious than the one in April. In April, there was an exchange between Iran and Israel. It was very calibrated. Iran fired largely slow-moving drones that Israel and its allies were able to knock out of the air. And it was more of a show of anger than an attempt to really hurt Israel. This last one was fast moving ballistic rockets. We're now slowly learning that far more rockets got through the defenses this time. Israel's had some damage done to its airbase. You have Iranian missiles striking Israeli airbases. Now we're waiting for Israel's retribution. They are going to hit back. Will it be calibrated like it was in April, where you, you know, sort of trying to find a similar size target to sort of keep this from exploding into a regional war? Or has Benjamin Netanyahu's

government decided this is the time to, let's have this fight. It's been bubbling for 20 years, really. They are doing very well against Hezbollah, it seems, in the early days of this conflict. They do have largely control of the Gaza Strip. They have American backing so far for some kind of retribution against Iran. Whether the Biden administration can sort of keep that calibrated, because the U.S. certainly doesn't want a larger war here, is an open question. I feel we'll find out in the days ahead. Mark, really appreciate you taking the time to be here after such a long day of reporting. Thank you. Thank you, Manika.

That's it for today. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, And Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.