The Journal. - For Palestinians Trapped in Gaza, There's No Way Out

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

As Israel retaliates against Hamas for its deadly attack Saturday, it has launched unrelenting air strikes on Hamas-controlled Gaza. Neighborhoods, hospitals and schools now lie in ruins. More than a quarter-million people have fled their homes. And water, food and fuel are scarce. We talk to the WSJ’s Jared Malsin and a doctor on the ground in Gaza about the mounting crisis there. Further Listening: - The War Between Israel and Hamas - An Interview with National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby  Further Reading: - As Israel Bombards Gaza, Fears of Humanitarian Disaster Mount  - Israel Aims to Dismantle Hamas as Blinken Tries to Prevent Wider War  - Israel Sought to Contain Hamas for Years. Now It Faces a Potentially Costly Fight to Eliminate It.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Saturday, the militant group Hamas launched a brutal assault on Israel. More than 1,300 Israelis have died since the assault began. And Israel has hit back with a barrage of missiles on Gaza, with the goal of toppling Hamas as the ruling power there. with the goal of toppling Hamas as the ruling power there. Israel also cut off food, fuel, and humanitarian aid to Gaza, and says it'll only lift the siege after Hamas releases dozens of Israeli hostages. Here's our colleague Jared Milsom.

There's this sense that they have to do something that's different from previous Israeli operations in Gaza, which were also very deadly and also took a very large toll on civilians. But there's a sense on both sides that this one is going to be qualitatively different. Gazan authorities say more than 1,400 people have been killed and about 6,000 have been wounded. As of last night, there was no more electricity. The UN is warning of a humanitarian catastrophe. The sky is filled with smoke. The buildings are rocking from explosions. The streets are full of rubble.

People are fleeing their homes by the hundreds of thousands looking for a safe place that they can't find. The schools are closed. People's workplaces are closed. Universities are closed. People are just kind of trying to survive. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, October 12th. Coming up on the show, the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. Introducing TD Insurance for Business with customized coverage options for your business.

Because at TD Insurance, we understand that your business is unique, so your business insurance should be too. Contact a licensed TD Insurance advisor to learn more. Gaza, the area that Israel is bombing, is a ribbon of land 25 miles long. It sits on the Mediterranean Sea and is bordered by Egypt and Israel. What is Gaza's relationship with Israel? How dependent is it on Israel? It is heavily dependent on Israel. This is a place that is not an independent country.

It is part of a larger territory. The border crossings are almost all of them controlled by Israel and the airspace. So it is also largely dependent on Israel for shipments of certain kinds of food, for a lot of its electricity, for its telecommunications system. Since 2007, Gaza has been governed by Hamas, which is designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. It's an Islamist extremist group that seeks to establish a Palestinian state. And while the group has signaled that it's willing to accept a two-state solution, it continues to reject Israel's retaliation against Hamas militants in Gaza look like?

There's been an intense Israeli bombing campaign. I mean, hundreds of airstrikes, thousands of tons of munitions used, according to the Israeli Air Force. That has intensified in recent days. The Israeli military, what they say they're doing is that they are primarily targeting Hamas's military infrastructure, but we also know that they're hitting civilian infrastructure too. There have been multiple hospitals, also the UN-run network of schools, which is the main place that people are sheltering. People are fleeing their homes by the hundreds of thousands looking for a safe place that they can't find. The majority of those people are in those schools. The Islamic University in Gaza, the UN headquarters of the refugee

agency there. These are all places that have been hit, also along a large number of residential buildings. The Israelis say that they are blowing up the homes of Hamas leaders and fighters. But either way, a large number of residential buildings have also been struck, we know from witnesses there and according to the UN. One area Israel has targeted is the neighborhood of Ramal in Gaza City. So Ramal is a kind of affluent neighborhood near the center of Gaza City. It's full of shopping malls, restaurants, a lot of offices of NGOs, businesses, media organizations. It has kind of broad streets and kind of, you know, large apartment blocks. And can you describe the neighborhood now?

From our colleague on the ground there and from the images that we've seen, I mean, it was transformed into a kind of moonscape of broken concrete, rubble piling in the streets. Bewildered people kind of trying to figure out what's next, milling around. And there have been further attacks since then, so the situation has only gotten worse. As of today, as of a few minutes ago, there have been 1,417 people killed. That's 1,417 people killed in Gaza since Saturday. Israel's military also ordered a total siege on Gaza, leaving people there with thinning supplies and without power. The siege involves cutting off all supplies of electricity,

food, and water from Israel to the Gaza Strip. So that's a large part of the supply of all three of those things. Again, Gaza is a small place. There's some agriculture agriculture there like fruit and vegetables that are grown there but it's really dependent on the outside world for certain kinds of food wheat for making bread for example and it doesn't produce enough electricity for itself and even then the power plant itself is shut down so people are in total darkness now

the hospitals for example are running on these backup generators, but even then, I mean, there's a finite amount of fuel for those generators. So the question is what happens after the fuel runs out if no more is coming in from the outside. Earlier today, I spoke with Ghassan Abousita, a British-Palestinian surgeon who's currently in Gaza treating patients. I'm hearing sort of a beeping in your background. What's going on? So this is the generator. We have to, I mean, the hospitals are completely reliant on the generators because the electricity has been cut off.

And so, you know, the only source of electricity are these diesel one generators have they have they gone out in the time that you've been there or have they stayed stable for now they got switched off at night to try to conserve the diesel because no more is coming in oh my gosh and actually could you talk about that um more about access to resources, food, water, you're talking about electricity, medicine? In terms of the consumables and the medication and the equipment, they were already in a dilapidated state. And then all of these wounded have completely depleted the system and i know a lot of the international organizations then released everything in they they had in store for emergencies like this and then used whatever money they had to buy supplies from the from the local market

but even with that just the sheer number of patients means that everything is running low already. And this is only day six. Is there a particular patient story that you feel comfortable sharing? I mean, there's this girl that we operated on yesterday. She's the daughter of a doctor at Shefa Hospital who was killed. She had horrific facial injuries and has to go through a lifetime of reconstructive surgery now without her mum. The day before, we also did an 11-year-old boy. We didn't know his name. You know, he had the trauma tag name of unknown child number six. And, you know, also devastating, devastating facial injuries. And no way to find out whether his parents lived.

He was just taken from underneath the rubble. Jared, what has the Israeli government or the prime minister said about the effects of their siege? So what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his address to the nation the other night is that he wanted to impose a price for this attack by Hamas on Saturday that would be remembered in history. He said Israel's enemies would remember this for decades.

And I think that is the mentality in Israel at the moment. This is a kind of almost a 9-11 moment for them. And that is the paradigm that we're in, where there's a sense that the status quo has to change and there's a desire for revenge, whatever form that takes. Israel has been telling people in Gaza to evacuate through notices on social media. But where can they go?

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trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash CA dash PRU dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Even before the current siege, it was really difficult for civilians to leave Gaza. People needed special permits to cross into both Israel and Egypt, and those permits were rarely granted. Egypt has really participated in this policy of isolating Gaza from the beginning, and Egypt has their own reasons for doing that, primarily that they don't want to accept a mass exodus of Palestinians. The Egyptian government, which is led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is a former general who came

to power in a military coup in 2013, he really views Gaza as a national security issue primarily and a political and humanitarian concern second. The situation in a sort of normal time is that certain people can come in and out. For example, people with dual citizenship, people going to visit their families, Palestinians from Gaza who live on the outside and go back to visit. So a tiny minority of people who are able to enter and leave with special permission. What's happening now is that even those people can't come in and out. And in recent days, Israeli forces have bombed the crossing at the Egyptian border several times, making it even harder to leave.

Israeli officials are telling people in Gaza to leave, but it sounds like they can't get out. What strategy is at play there? Like, what message is Israel trying to send? I think that is the concern is that you're telling people to leave a place that they can't leave. And what many people in Gaza have said to me over and over again is that they feel that nowhere in Gaza is safe right now. The places they would normally go, like the UN-run schools, are no longer safe because some of them have been attacked. And even for the fortunate few who have permission to leave via the border, cannot do that at the moment.

And I think the concern is what comes next. You know, where does this policy lead? How is the international community responding? The response we've seen from Western officials, including American officials, is that, you know, they have expressed solidarity and support for Israel in response to the attack and expressed the fact that, you know, Israel has a right to defend itself. You've also seen statements here and there, for example, from Secretary of State Blinken, you know, calling for the protection of civilians. But also, I mean, it just seems like a large amount of international sympathy for Israel at the moment, and not a lot of calls for restraint. I mean, you've had other countries,

for example, Egypt and Turkey, calling for a de-escalation, calling for restraint, trying desperately to defuse the situation, but to no effect. I mean, the situation has obviously only escalated. Earlier today, a spokesman from the National Security Council, John Kirby, talked with our colleagues on the What's News podcast. He said the U.S. is working with Egypt and Israel to find safe passage for civilians who want to leave Gaza. This isn't their fault. They didn't cause this. And if they want to leave, they should be allowed to leave. And two, we strongly support the continued access of humanitarian goods into Gaza. The United States is the largest contributor to Palestinian

humanitarian assistance. We want to see that assistance continue. Of course, that means you've got to have a corridor going in. What do medical professionals like yourself there in Gaza right now need? We need a humanitarian corridor to allow the evacuation of the wounded. Here's Dr. Ghassan Aboussita again. And we need a humanitarian corridor to allow the resupply of the hospitals in terms of material, consumables, medication and fuel. And we need a cessation of the bombing. Have your patients, have any of them talked about getting out of Gaza or anybody, is anybody trying to do that? Have any of them talked about getting out of Gaza?

Is anybody trying to do that? Well, yes. So I was probably the last group of people to make it into Gaza. The Israelis bombed Rafah crossing. And so there's no way in and out of Gaza at the moment. Are you stuck there now, too? You're not going to be able to leave? Well, I'm not intending to leave until there is a ceasefire.

But I suppose if I were to leave, there's nowhere to leave. Looking ahead, Israel is getting ready for a ground invasion. The country's military has placed tanks along the border with Gaza. And it's mobilizing more than 300,000 reserve troops to prepare for the operation. If Israel carries out a ground offensive, what could that mean for the region? It could be very destabilizing for the region, frankly. You have to start with the risk of a large flow of refugees. That's the place you have to look first, where again, this would spill over into Egypt. That's the only place for people to go potentially if the border were to open. The other risk of escalation is to Israel's north in Lebanon, where the Hezbollah movement

has been exchanging fire with the Israeli military for several days in a row now. So that is the other main concern of escalation. And beyond that, there's also this question of whether Iran could be drawn into the conflict. So those are the main concerns at the moment. How does it end? Nobody knows at this point. I, you know, again, I'll quote the Israeli military spokesman from the other day and say that, you know, he said that this is a new paradigm. And I think that's clear one way or the other.

We are looking at a new era in the Middle East, potentially a very violent one. This episode has been updated to more fully reflect the policy positions of Hamas. That's all for today, Thursday, October 12th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Anas Baba and Dov Lieber. You can hear the full interview with John Kirby

from the National Security Council on tomorrow's episode of The Wall Street Journal's What's News podcast. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.