The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 152. "A War on Children": A Generation in Gaza at Risk (James Elder)

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Why is the humanitarian situation in Gaza the worst that James Elder has ever seen? What does the process of rebuilding Gaza look like? How do the people working on the ground not lose hope?  UNICEF spokesperson James Elder joins Alastair and Rory to answer all these questions and more.  To donate to UNICEF UK's Gaza appeal visit unicef.uk/gaza-podcast. £30 could help provide life-saving therapeutic food for a child for 3 weeks.  Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via www.revolut.com/rb/leading, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan. This offer’s available for New Business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and Terms & Conditions apply. For US customers, Revolut is not a bank. Banking services and card issuance are provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. Visa® and Mastercard® cards issued under license. Funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000 through Lead Bank, in the event Lead Bank fails. Fees may apply. See full terms in description. For Irish customers, Revolut Bank UAB is authorised and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania in the Republic of Lithuania and by the European Central Bank and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules. For AU customers, consider PDS & TMD at revolut.com/en-AU. Revolut Payments Australia Pty Ltd (AFSL 517589). TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics  Twitter: @RestIsPolitics  Email: [e-mail] Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Harry Swan + Charlie Rodwell Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolities.com. That's the rest is politics.com. I've seen more children with the wounds of war, Alistair in Gaza, than any of the other 50 countries I've been to with UNICEF. What's it like practically for agencies and NGOs on the ground? It's the most dangerous places we know in terms of numbers of UN workers killed. Every time I go back, every time, particularly this last time in June, Rory, everyone is thinner. Early on, I honestly, we talked about this as being indiscriminate.

It's not a word we used lightly. We warned of starvation if food would be continually denied and was blockade, blockade. We repeated that there were just no proof of evidence of aid diversion, systematic, meaningful aid diversion. We were saying it and we weren't listened to. We can't be neutral on facts. If I see a child starving, I have to say so. When a government's accused of systematic breaches of international humanitarian law, it's a mistake to always have to quote them and therefore balance the story.

What's actually happening that we don't see? You'll always hear this idea that as many trucks can come in as are needed. Okay, first of that, that's just demonstrably false. The responsibility for facilitating aid is with Israel. A girl or a boy has been killed every single hour in Gaza since that horrific attack on the 7th October, every single hour. This episode is sponsored by HP. Now Rory, I hear that Windows 10 is finally being put out to pasture this year.

It is. And something pretty relevant for you, Alistair, given what I've seen as some of your technology. It's going on October the 14th, to be exact. And after that, Microsoft is going to stop supporting some of those old laptops of yours. No updates, no security patches. So if you were still using it or a business was still using Windows 10, it would be really exposed to cyber threats, for example. It would be like locking the door, but leaving the key in the lock.

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so no baffing jargon, just practical advice. And here's the bonus. Restless Politics listeners get 10% off business PCs at HP.com using the code Trip10 term supply. So unlock efficiency and innovation upgrade to Windows 11 ProPCs with HP and get 10% discount. Visit HP.com slash politics to find out more. Welcome to the rest of this politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastair Campbell.

And today we are very lucky to have with us, James Elder. And James Elder is a veteran with UNICEF, the great UN agency, focused on children. He is their spokesman. He has worked in many of the most difficult zones in the world. He's worked in Angola, he's reported on South Sudan. He has most recently been very, very engaged in trying to bring the world's attention to the situation in Gaza. And he's in a very unusual position because as a member of the UN staff, he's able to freely enter Gaza in a way that is impossible for journalists and indeed impossible for. almost anybody else. And that's given him, I think, one of the most realistic, intimate insights and what's happening on the ground. So, James, thank you very, very much for being with us today. Pleasure. Nice to connect, gentlemen. And James, can I maybe start with that? Because you wrote a piece for UNICEF. Now, you guys, you're very competitive. You're always trying to do fundraising, and I get that. And this was a, it was a fundraising piece. But at the same time, there's one line that absolutely

leapt out of me, said I've spent my 20-year career with UNICEF working in humanitarian crises around the world, from famines and floods to war zones and remote refugee camps. Yet none of these experiences have prepared me for the level of devastation and despair that I've witnessed in Gaza. Is there even an element of that that is just about the charity guy who is trying to keep people engaged emotionally? Or is it really so bad compared with some of the other crisis? and disasters that you've been involved in. Yeah, unfortunately, it's the latter. It's an interesting one because I think it's also, I think there's a real,

been a real structural flaw in how reporting on Gaza has been done. And I can kind of speak to that later. And I understand that part of that is because the UN is fundraising, you know, UNICEF entirely. We are donor funder. There's no magic pool of money. So that happens. But Gaza, you know, I've been there now five times since the horrors of October 7.

And, you know, normally I'll spend half my time trying to share the stories of people, that privilege you get, a access you get. And I'll spend half the time talking about what UNICEF's doing. Gaza was 95% trying to bear witness because, you know, international press, as you know, very well know, a band for clear reasons. And local journalists are killed in levels we've never seen. But the last time, Alistair, I was there, which was just a couple of months ago, I knew it'd be worse.

It's always worse. That's just a cumulative reality, right? every aspect is worse. So the level of indiscriminate attacks continues, level of devastation on hospitals, displacing people four, five, six times, on and on and on. It goes, you know, three blockades across different parts of the Gaza Strip. So everyone's working from such a lower base. They've been brought to their knees. The only things that are spiking are things like disease and trauma. So I knew that, but it was like nothing I'd seen because of water deprivation, restrictions on water, which of course, as someone said to me, James, we've learned to survive

without food for a week or two. We can't live without water. That was huge. And the other thing that really struck me was the sounds of children. I've seen more children with the wounds of war, Alastair in Gaza, than any of the other 50 countries I've been to with UNICEF. And, you know, shrapnel does a particular thing to a child's body, a quadcopter shot, a burn, a blast. I didn't know there was such a thing as fourth degree burns. I learned that in Gaza. This most recent visit was not just seeing those things. It was hearing them. It was hearing the screams of children because of the severe lack of painkillers and walking into a room and just being surrounded. You know, the very first time I went to Gaza, which was November 2023, that was when I knew something was

off, if you will. And when UNICEF very quickly, you know, we were speaking at levels we'd not spoken about before, talking about it being a war on children. That's about evidence. That's not a headline talking about indiscriminate. My executive director talking about the killing of so many children will not bring peace in the Middle East. And one of those things I saw was very early on at NASA Hospital in the South. And it's a war zone. I used to say, this feels like a war zone. It was a war zone. I'm walking over children's bodies. Doctors are running everywhere. There are people who need amputations lying on the floor. There are tents full of people outside, which is what it looks like right now, to be honest, is they're finally getting tents in.

Those tents are at NASA Hospital for Field Hospitals. And then there was a bus that came and a lot of doctors ran out to this bus, and I got onto the bus and just this wave of burning flesh, this smell that does not ever leave you, hit me. And there was about nine children in this bus, all with horrific wounds, with shrapnel, with burns, with, you know, Gengreen beginning. This bus had taken three days.

These children had been evacuated from Shifa Hospital, when Shifa Hospital was under siege. And it had taken three days to go, what is, I don't know, 45-minute drive on a good day, three days based on checkpoints, Three days on based on being stopped, three days on being denied movement, three days and I got on and saw, you know, things will never erase from your mind and many of those children on that bus died. But it was a smell there and just to realize at that point that, you know, there had been deliberate decisions made to keep those children from moving quickly, watching children push grandparents through sand through checkpoints for a mile, you know, in wheelchairs, things that just weren't right. I had security experts who, you know, from the UK who went to things like Sandhurst and so on,

who, you know, were working now in the United Nations and just from a military point of view saying, no, no, there is something deeply wrong here. That was November 2023. So unfortunately, it's only got worse. And from everything we hear, it's about to deteriorate even more or get more aggressive, more violent. James, can we just step back from that very moving description for a second and give us a little bit of a sense of the logistics of things. How do you get in and out? Do you go in through Israel? Do you, who else is there?

How many internationals are there? How many of staff are Palestinian? What does it feel like? How many different UN or other NGO bases there are? Are you clustered in refugee camps in the way that you might be in somewhere like South Sudan? What's it like practically for agencies and NGOs? years on the ground? It's certainly the most difficult place. It's a most dangerous place. And again, I'll do my very best, have no suppositions here just to give facts. It's the most dangerous

places we know in terms of numbers of UN workers killed. You know, rules of engagement. I've never been in conflicts before where, you know, we've been so desperate to try and get vaccines and nutritional food to a place and we've had our vehicle come under fire. And not naming names, but coming under fire only from a single point where a military outfit had a checkpoint. And then we hold that position. Then we move. again when given a green light. That's never been the case. So it's very dangerous. At the moment, it used to be in the early days. Rory, for the first year, we were going through Rafa. Then, of course, the Raffer offensive, that is no longer. That's also very relevant. We saw a 90% reduction in medical

evacuations. Once Raffa closed, that's critical, but we can speak to that later, if you will. For now, yes, you go to Amman, then you take a bus, you go in across the King Hussein Bridge into to northern Israel, given a day pass by the Israeli officials, and then you go through into Gaza, usually through there's a border crossing there, a main border crossing for aid, Kerem Shalom, sometimes through gate 96. These are just crossing straight into Gaza. And, you know, lots of checkpoints, obviously, just to get in. And then once we get to that checkpoint in Gaza, then we're met by our own vehicles,

armored vehicles or minivans, depending on which NGO and so on, which UN agency. And then we drive through Gaza. to depending on where NGOs stay and it's all different places. UNICEF was very fortunate. We had excellent, excellent team early on and found us. Basically, it's a home. It's a property. It was a German doctor built a house.

So, you know, used to fit 10 people and we've kidded it out so it can fit 30 people. We've been very lucky that's never had to evacuate. We're surrounded by evacuation orders. When I first went there, it was surrounded by sand. This is sort of Khan-Unisal-Mawesi. Now it's surrounded by thousands and thousands and thousands of tents. So that's where we are. Others are in different places. Some have come under fire. They are meant to be deconflicted where we are. So everyone is in different places. We'll have to see how long people

can stay in those places, anywhere in Gaza City now. We've got primary healthcare clinics again that are being evacuated, almost literally as we speak now. It's one of the great dangers for malnutrition because we locate children, we start treating them and then they force to evacuate. So for UNICEF, for example, there's always a ceiling on staff members after a UN colleague was killed earlier this year, the ceiling was reduced. That makes things more difficult. For UNICEF, we've got around 20 international staff, 70, 80 Palestinians. Every time I go back, every time, particularly this last time in June, Rory, everyone is thinner. I don't just mean people on the streets tapping your window of your vehicle doing that hand to mouth sign of I'm hungry or kids lifting their

shodes to show their ribs. I mean, colleagues, you know, colleagues who still have an employment unlike most others, still have access to a meal a day. So everyone is thin. Everyone's lost someone. Everyone has lost multiple, multiple family members. The stories are utterly relentless. But, you know, internationals go because it's the frontline duty, and that's what people do in these situations.

That's what they know they'll do. But I think it is very difficult, A, because of the bombardments and because, you know, nowhere is safe in Gaza. That's not a cliche, but also because of the aid, the denials. You know the difference. You see, for UNICEF, it's quite an amazing moment. you see the difference it makes when you give nutritional supplies to an acutely malnourished child. You know, that or a vaccine, look at the mother's eyes when they get a vaccine,

we also know what happens when those things don't happen and the denials have been so great. It's very frustrating for colleagues to have this game played around them, which is a game of people's lives. James, can I jump in there? I mean, what you're saying is very, very graphic. And, of course, it's the sort of reporting and accounting that maybe we wouldn't normally get from journalists. You said that you feel your role has been a bit different. You're talking much more about what you see than what UNICEF does

and what a normal kind of UNICEF person in your position would do. What have you been able to find out about why the Israelis? This may seem an obvious question, but I'd be interested in your take on it, why they are so clear that there should be no international media in there? I think, you know, obviously UNICEF's mandate, the reason we're still there, you know, is to try and avoid politics and focus on humanitarian. I think, unfortunately, or fortunately with this crisis, so many statements have been made by senior officials make it very, very clear after the horrors of October 7 what the plans were.

And so those statements are absolutely evident in terms of things like no food, no water, no medicines. You know, we will treat people like human animals, I believe, was one. I, you know, I know those statements well, and I learned that. I worked in Sri Lanka, Alistair, and I, and, you know, so I was aware then and during Sri Lanka of governments making statements around no fire zones and many civilians dying in those around denials of aid, around indiscriminate attacks and around the United Nations at the time, taking all those statements, you know, that they will be safe zones, there will be no

indiscriminate fire, taking all those statements on face value. And that was, as we now know, under the Petrie Report of Sri Lanka's case, there's a great failing of the United Nations. This time, the United Nations has borne witness and been very, very clear and candid on what we've seen. And at the same time, statements made by the government have been clear, I think, on some of their intent. And I think that international journalists would see that. And hopefully, you know, many of these atrocities would have stopped a long, long time ago. And I think that this has become a sort of problem.

There's become a reflex to defer to governments, to defer to government statements, almost regardless of their track record. if you will. And that's, I don't know, it's like a flaw in how conflict is reported. I mean, for UNICEF, for example, as I say, we, early on, early on, honestly, we talked about this as being indiscriminate. It's not a word we use lightly. We warned of starvation if food would be continually denied and was blockade, blockade. We repeated that there were just no proof of evidence of aid diversion, systematic, meaningful aid diversion. And now we have statements from, you know, senior Western member state officials that that's the case. We warned of disease and we we saw polio. Now, all this, this isn't to say we told you so. Not at all. It's to say, though,

that we were saying it and we weren't listened to. And now there are reportedly at least 18,000 girls and boys killed. There's certainly starvation. There's horrific spikes there. So I think that's the role that UNICEF has felt it's important here. We can't be neutral on facts. If I see a child starving, I have to say so. If I see a child bombed, I have to say, you know, this child needs needs medical support. We're not a news agency. We're a humanitarian human rights agency, but you're right. Journalists are shut out and misinformation has flooded in. And I just think that when a government's accused of systematic breaches of international humanitarian law, it's a mistake to always have to quote them and therefore balance the story.

Maybe for listeners, to try to give an idea of what it would normally be like, not in Gaza, but somewhere else for an aid worker or a UN member of staff, because one of the the things that's striking is that in 2024, 168 UN staff members lost their lives, and 126 of those were killed in Gaza. And the Secretary General points out that these are individuals, many of them, were involved in delivering life-saving aid, others alongside their families, otherwise shielding the vulnerable. Help us understand the norm before we get back into Gaza. What would you normally expect is the way that governments should be treating UN's staff and NGOs and these kinds of conflicts. And what actually is the norm if you were in

South Sudan or in Somalia or in Angola in terms of these kinds of things? Yeah, I mean, governments have a responsibility, a legal responsibility to enable aid, to facilitate aid. That's extremely important. So that's a legal responsibility. In fact, in this case, Israel is the occupying power, the legal responsibility is to provide the aid, but that's being done by the United Nations and many, many NGOs and brave Palestinians, as you say, And again, no magic pot of money for UNICEF. So that aid that we provide or the aid that is denied comes from, you know, member state governments.

So in a normal scenario, then, yeah, you have that provision of aid. You're allowed to reach a population. You certainly do it safely. You certainly don't have that level of denials that go on. So if you're in a, you know, let's say, I don't know, Ukraine. If you're delivering aid in Ukraine, then you have a right of passage that you know where you're going. You probably don't even need de-confliction zones from the military.

You just know where you can move. They know where you are. Staff are in safe places. You know, the simple fact that you work for a humanitarian organization is evidence enough. Proof of that, you might give information about where you're moving to, but otherwise, otherwise that's fine. Garsar is incredibly different like that, even in simple things of not just like a food for humanitarian workers, but the level of bombardment.

It's a very strange place like that. You can feel guilty, you know, getting a good meal. you can certainly feel guilty at night time whereby you just know you've got to try to sleep through the bombardment. So you stick a pillow over your head because you need a few hours sleep and there are nine-year-old girls sleeping in tents not far away. That's extremely unusual. Extremely unusual. I have many, you know, I have many, many colleagues with a long, long security background who say that Gaza's entirely changed the rules of engagement. We're working in a security environment or a lack of security environment.

Unlike anything, the United Nations has worked in. But I think, you know, there's been that feeling of responsibility to protect to be there always, irrespective of what's happening, but that is coming at a severe price and made even more difficult below those denials. Gori mentioned the head of the United Nations, Guterres. He's persona non grata in Israel because of some of the things he said. Do you feel when you're there that you are part of the enemy? Do you feel that you are viewed with suspicion because you're in UNICEF? No, UNICEF, I mean, everyone has immense difficulties of getting aid.

Now, if you're UNICEF, and we're very fortunate because a lot of our work, it's so broad, we do cash assistance for people, it's life-saving. We do trauma work can be life-saving, and a lot of it is supply-driven, though, of course. It's the nutritional stuff, the water, the water, all those things are supply-driven. Where it becomes really problematic, Alistair, is the denials. And if you're being denied what is core to your mandate to save, lives to get life-saving support to children, then that can only ever feel like it's combative without a doubt.

At the same time, and how do you feel when you hear, as constantly we do, that there is no impediment to aid going in, that sometimes it's the United Nations to get blamed for it not going in? What's actually happening that we don't see? And how do you feel as UNICEF when, in a sense, people are trying to put the blame on people like you. Yeah, it's extremely frustrating, of course. I've, you know, the counting trucks, it's been a game played and, you know, the fact of, you know, arguments around malnutrition or starvation, I think John F Kennedy said a long time ago, sincerity is subject to proof.

And as I said, it's what I speak to, what the lessons learned from Sri Lanka about taking statements on face value. It's all about the evidence. You know, so, for example, you'll always hear this idea that, you know, as many trucks can come in as, as, as, as are needed. Okay, first of that's just demonstrably false. There have been three blockades, one across the entire Gaza strip for 90 days, and then two others in the north of Gaza. Each one of those crushed the nutrition of everyday people. And every time, every time there's another one, then of course you're working from a much lower base. And at the same time, once you deny aid, then you're also increasing the risk of disease. That's a horrible collision there,

getting a lack of water and disease into malnutrition. So those things were, we're fine. fundamentally evident. But yes, the statements are always made. But then when aid does come into Gaza, then as you say, Riley Alastair, the allegation is the UN's not doing their job. The responsibility for facilitating aid is with Israel in this condition. And what we have said for 21 months is to get aid in, you need multiple entry points and you need multiple routes. It's really simple. There are there are entry points in the north of Gaza that are about five miles from where people are, where people are starving. So open multiple routes, have multiple entry points and in you go. And those restrictions are made. There is, you know, there is only one power that has the ability to allow food in or not

not in. So it's been frustrating, completely frustrating. That's, as I say, this idea of the way there's a structural flaw in, maybe it's because the United Nations, because we do have to go around selling ourselves and so on, that journalists have got used to in previous conflicts thinking, you know, the UN's saying what they're doing. But in this one, no, we're very much saying what the situation is trying to bear witness and explaining what we're not doing. But yes, you constantly come up constantly, constantly now. We've come up in a war of words. But I think now the evidence, unfortunately, is incredibly, incredibly powerful.

And it's important. It's good that people are now seeing the reality of starvation. It's horrendous. It's also very troubling to me in a way that, you know, it's a girl or boy. A girl or a boy has been killed every single hour in Gaza since. that horrific attack on the 7th October, every single hour. And we don't really talk about 18,000 children killed. We're talking now about starvation.

Again, that's good. But it's worrying that it's taken those imagery to get the world's attention back for a moment. Mind you, we're getting the attention at the same time when we know we're about to see a horrific escalation. I wanted to develop a little bit the contrast with Ukraine, because I think that that won't be familiar to many listeners. We often see these two conflicts as though they're very similar. But I guess what I'm hearing from you is that actually the rules of engagement seem to be a bit different in Ukraine and that actually UN operations in Ukraine are distinct and that the Russians and Ukrainians are not killing the number of UN staff that are happening in Gaza.

Can you try to illustrate that? Explain a little bit more because the Ukraine situation is obviously horrifying, but in terms of humanitarian access, it's a bit better than Gaza, right? Much, much, much better. We have pretty much full access in. in Ukraine. I was in Ukraine a couple of days after after the war started and was able to move incredibly freely. I mean, literally got across, walked across the border from Poland into Ukraine as tens of thousands of people went the other way. I'll never forget that moment with a border official

looking at me very strangely thinking, you're sure you're, you know, you're going the right way. And every time we've sought to act, we largely have access to where we need to go. Certainly, the warring parties are aware of where we are. There's no threat of that on frontlines. An organisation like UNICEF is regularly close to frontlines. We have mobile teams that would literally go in the east across those front line areas, doing trauma work, doing healthcare work. And always, as long as your location was known,

you were absolutely safe in all conditions. So it's been a very, very different operating environment without a shadow of a doubt. James, just to develop for a second. I'm a real admirer of UNICEF's work, so I've seen your work, for example, in Ethiopia, some great work on water. I spent a lot of time with Robert Jenkins, who was your boss in Jordan, a kind of inspirational figure. But give us a sense of the difference between the kind of work that was going on in Jordan, where you were supporting Syrian refugees and providing emergency nutrition and water and the kind of work that you're doing in Gaza.

What's the difference between UNICEF with refugees in Jordan and the kind of stuff you're doing in Gaza? The big one would be access. Access and trauma, Rory, that there you have a set population. Yeah, they've lost everything. So let's remember that. I think there's a problem with the word displacement. People forget the level of trauma that comes into that. So those people have lost everything. But it's a population whereby our greatest challenge to get those children back into school, to ensure they've got the nutrition, the water, the health care is a around funding. Our greatest challenges in a place like Jordan would be around funding. Otherwise, people know what to do. And it's a really important marker of humanitarian work. Humanitarian work is about going to where people need your support. And it's about making sure you've got the

evidence-based that your support is making a difference. So in a place like Jordan, we would know what to do because people like Rob Jenkins have been around. And it's then literally a sense of funding. If we've got the funding, we get the kids in school, we will rebuild the water systems, make sure everyone's got a right amount of water, make sure that you've got health care, that you've got vaccines, you know, because it's a population that's extremely vulnerable. Make sure, you know, education is, we call education a lifesaver because kids get to go into school and get a sense of normalcy, normality, and hang out with their friends. Gaza, look at education just to start with education, because again, it gets overlooked.

One of the highest literacy rates in the world, if ever there's hope in Gaza, it's because of that ability for Gazans to bounce back, for Palestinians to bounce back. I don't mean that Rory is some sort of cliche. I mean that I think because they've been through so, so, so much, so many hardships. But because of this incredible literacy rate, then they've got systems in place. And we saw it during that last ceasefire. I would have, you know, colleagues and Palestinians tell me when I went in June and when it was utterly horrific, but saying, James, during the ceasefire, we were pizza, pizza places open,

cafes, cappuccinos, that's their ability to bounce back. That's based on education. Now, 90% of schools in Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed. We are in uncharted territory when it comes to say, to say trauma. There is, again, not exaggerations. There's no reason for them. Pure, pure facts. We call Gaza a war on children because we've never seen the sheer number and proportion of children killed or wounded in a conflict in living memory. We say that every single child in Gaza needs mental health support because we've never seen a single place where every single child has that level of,

of mental stress. And if this war expands, I know, I know Alice says worked a lot on mental health, if this war expands, this trauma doesn't deepen, it calcifies. So we're not just witnessing psychological wounds. We are looking potentially like the slow erasure of an entire generation's chance of recovery. I mean, I've sat with teenage girls who have spoken about living intense, let the bombs hit me. They're done. They've got nothing left. I mean, that's a horrific thing for more than one particular person to say. Their self-harm that children do that goes on and on and on and on.

So trauma is very, very different. It's unmanageable right now. We try to manage it. UNICEF does think. I see amazing things in Gaza where children are trying to talk to meditate and breathe and to try and think of being in a place. A little girl explained to me.

I try and imagine smelling basil in my grandfather's garden, but they're living in tents and they're being bombed every single night. and their parents are depressed. It's very, very hard for a child to look at their parents and their parents know full well they've lost the ability to protect that child and the child if they're a teenager knows their mum or dad's

lost the ability to protect them. So trauma is aid being denied or not? We now know it is because we've got a 500% increase in acute malnutrition in children this year. 500% this year. The worst malnutrition is you and I speak in Gaza in its history. That's on a denial of food. Now, the reasons we'll be given either there's not a denial of food or it's because Hamas is taking it all.

Okay, there's no evidence base for that. We know that now from US officials. There's also no logic in denying aid. We have dozens of incubators on the wrong side of the border and a huge number of women giving birth prematurely. We have oxygen for children who need that to breathe on the wrong side of the border. It's not allowed in. Why on earth would those things be denied? But water, you know, in Jordan, we would get water supplies.

We'd get tanks. We'd, you know, we would do drilling everything we possibly could with the, funding Rory in Gaza, water is controlled. Israel turns on or off the electricity. That's the desalination plants. They control the fuel coming into Gaza. That's where the trucks can operate. There are lines going from Israel into Gaza, whether they open all those.

That's the water. Everyone in Gaza has a below emergency level of water. So you combine 21, 22 months of bombardment, denials of food and water and sanitation, of course. and that's that horrific collision on a child's body. We'd never see that. Well, we wouldn't see that in another war zone, much less a refugee camp where we have some control over things. Okay, James, Rory, quick break, and then back for more.

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From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. James, when you were speaking like that, I kind of, this may be unfair, I had a kind of picture of Bengavir and Smotrich and some of the more extreme elements of the Israeli government kind of cheering that on. This is what we've been trying to do. It's like what's feel so horrific about what you're telling us is these are acts of strategy. These are acts of policy. I work with Yusuf always felt pretty straightforward in a way. I learned through my backpacking days and my parents just a simple sense of, I think, a couple of things. One was the idea of, community service and the other is opportunity. The idea of just simple opportunity. My dad

used to say, I don't go in the lottery because I've won the lottery of birth, right? Going up middle class and I realize that it's all about opportunity and that's what I think UNICEF tries to provide. So I'd go around the world. Alistair, you try to talk about the opportunity, get a kid in a classroom, give them the right nutrition, allow their brain to develop because malnutrition is not just about a thin child, it's about lifelong impact on mental development and you would just advocate for all these rights of a child. Gaza's the first place I've been where I feel like I've got to advocate that they're children. The first thing seems like I've got to do is advocate that they're people,

that they're worthy of these things. And that has been obviously jarring and deeply troubling. How do you, I mean, you come across as an incredibly sort of positive and enthusiastic and engaging person. Do you, when you're there with the pillow over your head, you not get completely devoid of hope, literally hopeless? There's been almost, maybe the best way to answer that is I just have never felt that hope was mine in a way that particularly, particularly, you know, six months ago, Palestinians would still hold on to hope, you know, a mother. I never, never forget when there was talk of a ceasefire

in 2024 and a mother, it was very close. It looked very close to people. I have been skeptical. Looked very close. And she said, my goodness, this is. is the first night in like 10 months. I can promise my daughter, she had a seven-year-old daughter. I can promise my daughter in the tent. She will go to bed and she will wake up. I'll promise for that. You felt this hope. And then, you know, 12 hours later, the bombing started and that hope was absolutely blown up. The same way Palestinians at incredible literacy rate, they are, they're aware of international humanitarian law. I've had more than a few Palestinian say to me, you know, because I will explain to them the outpouring of, of, of, of,

pressure around the world, of young people, of people who are so, so frustrated by this impunity that's occurring. And I'll say, look, we do appreciate that, but we understand that international humanitarian law doesn't apply to us. So I don't feel like mine is, you know, hope or despair, mine to, to have or not have, but I certainly now feel that a few months ago, it's running very, very, very, very thin on the ground. And now, now, because I get messages every day from people, and there is a generosity and a grace that I've rarely seen. I know it can sound like a cliche, but, you know,

I tell people I'm going back into Gaza, what do you need? And they're like, no, no, no, just to see you. And of course, you take your medicines. But because there's a pride and a humility, which is immense. But as a young woman said to me, you know, I thought the worst thing about starving would be the hunger. The worst thing is the humiliation. It's so humiliating.

So, yeah, Gazans, Palestinians right now, as they think of a new offensive in Gaza city and pushing three quarters of million of people to an area where it's already one toilet to a thousand women, yeah, their hope is running very, very thin. I ask every person I see whether I know them as a friend, whether I've met them, a colleague, or just in a sort of quasi-journalistic sense, how are you? It sounds a stupid thing to ask. And no one really has an answer now because there's a level of trauma that's cut through and how they are, their answer is, I'm surviving.

Everyone says I'm survivor, whether it's in Arabic or English. It's a daily sense for struggle. So I feel that irrespective of my sense of hope, Palestinians is running out. James, one of the things that is happening is that UN agencies and NGOs are having to change their attitude towards the death of their colleagues and the risk they're facing. I mean, I remember Med Sans Frontier, which is operating very courageously in Gaza at the moment, pulled out of Afghanistan when I was there in, I guess, 2002 because some of their staff had been deliberately targeted and killed. And they said, this isn't good enough. We're not going to operate in a country where people are deliberately targeting MSF vehicles. But in Gaza, it seems as though you've entered a very, very different world. I mean, the risk appetite now, I mean, certainly that's maybe the wrong way to put it, but the number of the number of the number of of staff that you're losing from the UN and from NGOs was almost unimaginable 20 years ago. People were not taking those kind of risks because quite understandably. I remember even people saying this in Afghanistan in the 90s.

Look, we're here to develop humanitarian assistance. We're not trying to martyr ourselves. We're not trying to get ourselves killed. No, look, I think the Secretary General's been amazing. And all the UN agency, the bosses have been very clear on a stay-and-deliver approach. It's immense. Now, of course, international staff make that decision. International staff have their families.

I sit with those international staff. I know some very stressed spouses and children when people are in those places, but they make those decisions because on a good day, it's game-changing. On a good day, you're saving a life. Palestinian staff are simply extraordinary. On one hand, they don't have a choice to leave, which is, again, like all the things I never imagined I would see or understand with this conflict of, you know, it's one thing to have your home destroyed and Palestinians are maybe like many others, but maybe not. It's very much a place

I find everyone puts 20 or 30 years of every single penny into brick and mortar, and that's gone in a second. Then they're living in a tent. Then you've had your mom and two sisters killed, and there's no schooling, and then there's no food, and you still can't leave. So whether it's our colleagues or our partners, because for UNICEF, it's kind of one and the same. You know, if I've got a Palestinian colleague who works for UNICEF. It's just very similar to a doctor who works in a hospital that we support. Now, those doctors, I'm talking about surgeons or head nurses who go and do 20-hour shifts and then go back and live in a tent, without a doubt having had family members, dear family members killed, wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning, try to think of ways to find water for their

family, then go to the hospital to work, very distracted in a sense, hoping that, you know, knowing that if their family, someone dies, they won't be with them. And they work. So, yeah, there is no operating environment. I don't think that we've ever encountered like this. But I think that stay and deliver sense is very, very important. But it's, yeah, it's been pushed consistently to its edges. Traditionally, the aid in Gaza was delivered through the professionals that have done this for decades all the way around the world.

The UN agencies, the big relief agencies, the big international NGOs. in the same way, I guess, that I've seen these kinds of operations operating in other humanitarian zones around the world. And then a decision was made basically to stop that and replace this with a whole new framework, which has resulted in these cues and hundreds of people being killed. Tell us about what this change was. Explain a little bit for an ordinary lesson of what that change was and what's now happening. Yeah, so the arguments that were made by Israeli officials were of Hamas stealing all the aid, the aid diversion. Now, the good news on that front is, and UNICEF had said for 18 months, just show the evidence as had others, you know, UNICEF,

this is not the first war zone we've worked in. We have what's called last mile distribution. You track it. You have third party monitoring all the time. Humanitarian aid is more than just food. It is those incubators. It is vaccines. It's all these things. But the good sense was to show what humanitarian aid can do. And we obviously we could talk, you know, your experience, Rory from Jordan, or we talked to Afghanistan or Ukraine or Yemen, Ethiopia, what humanitarian aid is and how we do it. But we don't need to look to those examples because just during the ceasefire earlier this year, we saw 400 distribution points, exactly what humanitarian aid must be. Go to where the people are. You have to, of course. If you don't go to where the people are,

how can you ask children who have their parents killed or the elderly or the wounded or anyone? You go to where they are and you make sure your aid is making a sizable difference. We had 400 points. UNICEF sometimes would go door to door looking for malnourished children. And we saw all the indicators we want to see. Across the UN system, all the agencies you saw malnutrition going down, disease going down, access to water and food going up. Ceasefire broke or was broken and all that suddenly ended.

And under what have now been demonstrably shown to be not true in terms of aid diversion, those arguments. There was this creation, as you say, of this aid mechanism, the GHF, they operated from four, from only four sites. So, as we talked about earlier in terms of this, you know, the criticisms around the UN and so on, there's been a systematic attempt to sideline, you know, sideline, they tried and tested humanitarian system. And you suddenly had 400 aid distribution points turning into four.

So these four sites were, as you say, they were heavily militarized, they were private contractors, and they were guarded outside by the IDF. Now, the reason the UN said even before these opened, even before they open, we're very clear. You can't work with these for two simple reasons. One is you can't put four distribution points in the very south of the Gaza Strip. You have to have them all over the Gaza Strip.

You must make aid accessible. The other is you can't make people walk through a militarized zone to get to aid. You have to demilitarize aid. You simply must. And on paper, that made so much sense to me. You can't make people walk through a war zone to get to aid. Unfortunately, that was what was set up.

And then when they started, we started seeing mass casualty events. We started seeing civilians shot when they're entering them. And we've now had explanations. The Israeli defense forces have explained that they felt threatened and so on. But you're asking civilians to walk through those areas. So the whole thing, it would have been ludicrous if it wasn't so lethal. But James, could that have been done without the willing, the desire of the Israeli and American governments

that that is what should be created. How does that happen politically? Yeah, I don't know politically. I only know that obviously, you know, Israel's the occupying power has full control over who does or doesn't do aid in Gaza and the funding mechanisms and so on. I'm not privy to. And those were the systems set up, those four systems.

And I've never seen anything where, you know, you know how to see key message documents. You're looking through all your evidence about these things. I've never seen something so stark where the messaging I read and then I went to Gaza just as these things opened. And I had grandmothers in tears. I wasn't going to talk to them about the GHF. I was going to talk to them about our cast attribution or why children didn't have the baby formula. I had grandmothers in tears saying, how can I go to these places?

It's the same people who get food every time. It's the strong. It's the young. It's not the most vulnerable. so you're not hitting a target audience. Then I would talk to families who would literally make democratic decisions. They're like, we're starving. You know, the physical change I see in families is immense.

And you'd have a young guy going, I'm done. I've got to help my family. I cannot see my parents look like this. And they'd have a discussion. They'd say, no, you're not. And these young people would go down. I remember speaking to one young guy. And he said to me, James, we went.

We were in the cage. We were in the area. We did everything we were told. We waited for four hours. And then at one o'clock in the morning, a quadcopter came over. and we're shooting at people, why would they do this? Now, why would they do this? So those were the systems and there are, I think it's more than 30 mass casualty events.

I know that certainly hospitals, field hospitals, have had more people, have had days where they've had more engine come in from those sites than from general attacks and general warfare. I myself was very early on seeking out children just to see if children have been going to these sites and met a little boy. If I may just briefly tell his story, little guy, Abdul Rahman. I went to NASA Hospital. He was 13, immense, immense young boy. Anyway, he was in the hospital.

His father had given them the last of the family money to go and buy bread. And he'd gone out onto the street and he'd seen, because this was the very early days, first three or four days, information was very sketchy about these things. He'd seen people moving on mass to this place. And he thought, I'm going to go and get a box of food to my family, not bred a box of food. He went down there and what was now happened dozens of times. There was shooting. There was gunfire. He actually got hit by shrapnel from a tank shell.

It went through his abdomen. When I met him in hospital, he was in immense pain. He was one of those people I say who I heard, not saw, just sore. He was screaming because he hadn't had painkillers for seven hours based on a sheer lack of painkillers allowed to go in. He wanted to tell his story. His mother had a medical evacuation form, which wasn't. worth the paper it was written on, but he wanted to tell his story. This little boy, as he told his story, Alice, he sat up through this most immense pain, this brave little kid, but he didn't want to lie down, I guess. He wanted to sit up next to me. He was holding under my hand as he told his story. His dad, proud father, is in tears because the boy is sort of apologising almost for,

you know, putting his parents in this situation, telling me that he just wanted to get food for his family and so on. And I saw him again a week later. His situation was deteriorating on the day I left Gaza, that mission was two weeks long on the day. The very day I left, he died of those injuries. He died because his family was starving and he tried to go to one of these sites to get food. Now, yeah, when humanitarian aid, that's not how humanitarian aid is delivered, you know, when WHO, WFP, WF, All-Braid Partners on the ground delivering aid, people are not being killed when we're vaccinating or giving nutritional supplies to mums and malnourish babies. That doesn't happen. I think that's very important just to reinforce what you said there, which is that aid is delivered all around the world by your nation's uses.

You say, World Health Organization and the Food Program, UNICEF and others. And I've never seen it be necessary for people to kill hundreds of people trying to feed them. James, last one, I guess, from me, which is, what is the process of rebuilding? Let's imagine that a ceasefire comes. What's then involved for you and other humanitarian partners over the next three, six months that would follow a ceasefire in trying to support and assist? I think one of the things that struck me when I was last there, because I'd been through Gaza City a lot, getting aid supplies there, but I'd never stayed there. And when I was in Gaza City, something that gave me hope, Aurora, in terms of that rebuild, was standing on the very top of a building and looking to seeing how much was still there. I mean, I've seen Khan Yunus going from being a city to being rubble.

I've seen the same of Raffa. So seeing one hand how much physical structure is there, hearing those stories about during the ceasefire and about people having cake and cappuccino and how UNICEF suddenly went from having nothing to 100,000 children into classrooms, that's on the back of Palestinians. You can't recreate an education rate like a 98% literacy.

So that gives me immense hope. So the first things you would be doing are the health system. There's a health system that has been systematically devastated. And again, we're talking some host. hospitals that, you know, I don't like to say world-class, I don't want to divide the world into sections, but, you know, genuinely, the very best of health care that I've seen, but that has been utterly, utterly decimated. Because, of course, we're always talking when we talk about, you know, children with the wounds of war who can't get out of Gaza, medical supplies can't

get in, children can't get out. We're forgetting 50-year-olds with cancer. We're forgetting children with leukemia, all those things. That needs a very fast rebuild. So an immense amount of rebuild to a health system. Nutrition will be first and foremost. We are at a point now whereby, you know, because we've had so many deprivations of food coming into the Gaza Strip, you start to see cognitive decline, can last a lifetime. So we have to, have to address nutrition and healthcare as the most immediate priorities. Then, colleagues, we'll talk to you about, you know, unexploded ordinances, all those things that are rebuilding set up that, that I can't speak to, I don't have the expertise when we look at the sheer devastation.

of homes, you know, 60, 70% of homes that have been damaged or destroyed. So it is a huge, huge, almost unfathomable about, and as I say, to speak to what Alistair said before, but I found some hope because, I don't know, I saw, I saw some of those structures. I understand those education rates. I understand Palestinians how they have that ability to recover. Really simple things to Alistair. I got a young colleague. She's immense. She's 25 years old. When I walk through those hospitals, when I walk across children with limbs removed and mothers in tears, she's doing the same thing, this young woman, and she's still there, living with her family, even though the family home's being blown up. And she was talking to me about the ceasefire saying, James, I wish you saw it. I wish you saw how we bounce back and respond.

She said, you know, we love life. Now, I say that because Palestinians feel that. I think maybe they felt a fragility, maybe something, but there is something there is something there for, which means no matter what's happened, they've driven and got these education rates that are the envy of the region. There's something that has this ability to bounce back. So donors will have to step up massively in ways we've never seen. But Palestinians on the ground have that ability to have that ability to recover.

But it's not limitless. We've seen that attack on healthcare. We've seen that attack on doctors. We saw so many professors killed in those first months. So I'm not being blithe to the enormity of the challenges. I'm just saying that there is something very special about that ability to recover. But yes, as you say right now, it's a prayer for a ceasefire because all talk is that this gets worse for that population. Your job is kind of, you know, to make the world aware and it's to make people care.

And I was saying to Rory on the podcast recently, I was talking to a guy who works in the kind of environmental field, that he said this thing, was at the Plastic Summit, that he worries that we're in an era of shock and yawn, that we just get so overwhelmed by the shocking stuff we see, whether it's climate, whether it's war, whether it's put. whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Gaza, whether it's all the bad stuff going in the world. I just wonder, in the 20 years you've been working for UNICEF, has it become harder to make people care?

Yeah, I think I'd break it into almost two parts. I agree on the, there's a real problem with empathy. There's people that, you know, algorithms, without a doubt, Alicera, just feeding people too much information. There's a complete empathy fatigue, and we know that people, that people are more likely to care if they see a single child than if they see multiple and they're seeing crises everywhere. But I also, I talk to young people.

I try to make a habit of, you know, hearing from other generations, checking my own confirmation bias and listening. And I hear a lot of young people who care greatly about what's happening now. And actually, to me, it's troubling as well. It's almost part of that trauma there. There's that trauma that's taking root, being forced into Palestinian. children, I think of young people around the world, Alistair, this young generation of, you know, where, I don't know, where war is live stream and hypocrisy is laid bare. And people say,

yeah, well, we've always, there's always been global hypocrisy, but not seeing news 24-7, not as you say, young people have an umbrella of a climate crisis. And now they're seeing, you know, at one hand, the world's response to attacks on Ukraine. On the other hand, the world's lack of response to attacks on Palestinians. So there's a lot of response to attacks on Palestinians. They're seeing human rights broken. They're seeing that, I don't know, I think it's becoming corrosive, and they're learning that justice is very selective. That worries me deeply about a young population who are very empathetic.

And I completely understand why some populations want to turn away. Of course, everyday people, I really do. My goodness, I want to turn away, you know, never will. But I understand that. I don't think that leaders do. I don't think member states should turn away for a millisecond. And I certainly know that the Palestinians, girls, boys, mum's, dad, grandmothers, they don't get to turn off. My last question, and thanks so much for talking to us and for being so, I don't know what the word is really,

but just so clear and graphic, I guess, about what you've seen, is how you as an individual cope when you go home. So you're Australian, we all know that. And you're back home now in Brisbane and you're with your kids. And is there a part of you that goes through the experiences you've been through and then gets home and thinks, car, you know, why isn't everybody shouting about this all the time? Why are we not caring enough? Why are we not doing more? Or are you able just to kind of put things in boxes and say, well, I go there, I do my job, I try my best.

Then I come back and I just have to try and get on with the rest of my life. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I read it, Lindsay, I think it's kind of indulgent to do my own sense, but in a short hand, yeah, I don't think you can process it all, and it's certainly not something I can box because I've met so many people in Gaza, so many colleagues who are still on the ground, so many families, who I'm in touch with almost every day, who just, again, their generosity in terms of giving their own time and their pride, they're not asking for anything, if anything,

They're just asking for a sense of what's happening around the world. But then you hear the stories and you hear a story like I did the other day of, you know, one of the young people I'd met whose mother had now just been killed a few days ago. So, no, it doesn't leave. I used to get, when I was in Ukraine in the early stages of the war, Alistair, I'd come out and people would say, what about you? What's, how are you? And I would tell a sort of anecdote because it didn't feel very comfortable.

And I'd say, look, I remember I was once at a hospital. and there was a 14-year-old boy who had, he'd been told to, he could leave on a certain route with his family. That was untrue when there'd been an explosion. He'd lay under a, he told me this story, he'd lay under a car, and he watched his mum burn to death. As he told me this, he'd broke into tears. And I told the council, enough, enough. This, come on, and she said, no, he's never talked about this, James. He needs to talk about it. So he told me that. He lost his leg. And I went to a hospital that was underground, a maternity hospital. and it was just the cruelest thing I've seen because it was all these young mums and they were meant to be

celebrating with, you know, husbands and mother-in-laws and shower teas or whatever you call these things. And they were underground and they were in the dirt. And I just walked out of this and it was just been a bad day. And it was winter and I sat outside and sort of hunched over and had a moment. An old Ukrainian woman came over and I don't know. She thought I was Ukrainian or something and she said something and tapped me on the shoulder. And my sense was she was sort of saying, it's okay. You'll be okay.

And I snapped out of it and I thought, get over yourself. You get to leave here, you know, and that was always my response there. Gaza's different. You don't leave Gaza, not until this ends, not because of what it's doing to the people, because of what it's doing to international norms, because of the dangers, what impunity there is doing to, you know, international systems and things that have given a lot of people, a lot of security over the time. And simply because, yeah, I know some of those seven-year-old and 17-year-old kids are

intense tonight. So, no, I said shorthand, but it's not. No, it doesn't. but, you know, I got a rock star wife and good kids, so you dive into family and you feel very, very, very, very lucky. Well, thank you so much for talking to us and keep on keeping on. Thank you, fellas. Thank you very much.

Well, that was pretty, what's the word, pretty harrowing at times. I do think actually it's interesting how his voice is this, he's like a storyteller, isn't he? because I think he's part of the filling of the gap of what happens when you cut meteor out. It's also remarkable that the UN has enabled him to do that. I mean, the UN has at its worst as one of the most repressive bureaucracies and in terms of giving people freedom. And you can imagine the political sensitivities around this from member states and others. And UNICEF depends on a lot of its funding from traditionally,

enormous amount of its funding from the US. and other European governments, and the Israelis presumably will be protesting day and day out about his attempts to talk about what he's seeing on the ground in Gaza, and yet he's doing it. And as you can imagine, I mean, it'd be very unusual, actually, if you think about your own life, to have a government spokesman in a government department

speaking quite that openly, you know, about problems in UK prisons or problems in the health service. I think it's wonderful. And I think it's wonderful because I've always felt that that's what's lacking in international departments. I would have loved to see, even back in the day before Gaza, people running UN agencies and their spokesmen and ambassadors speaking with that kind of detail. I mean, so much of it is the sort of being able to get the concrete example. Politicians are often just not that good at communicating the kind of detail that brings it alive. And he's absolutely right about how people will relate much more to an individual child than talking about thousands and thousands of children. I think that's what he's a skill. he's obviously developed over time.

But at the same time, he was also very, I sensed, very conscious of his own political position. Every time he mentioned October 7th, he talked about it being the terrible events. He didn't really want to get pushed too hard on the politics. And there was a moment where he said, and they opened fire, and there's only one place they could have opened fire from, which was a military checkpoint, which was him saying they were shot by Israeli soldiers, but he didn't quite bring up. And he didn't particularly want to sort of say that, you know, Ben-Gavir and Smaltrich are terrible.

And he was, he was, he was, he was, he's doing it through storytelling, which in the sense is what journalism is as well. Well, just to sort of round off for listeners, um, the story he's telling is from UNICEF, whose prime responsibility is children and they're there with other big UN agencies, WHO that focuses on health, World Food Programme, that focuses on food. But then there are all these other NGOs.

The biggest UN agencies, of course is UNRWA, which is losing hundreds of people a year. But there have also been casualties with World Central Kitchen, with the Norwegian Refugee Council, with the Medicines-on-Frontierre, the Danish Refugee Council, where one of their own staff had quarters was hit, which they had de-conflicted. And then, of course, there's the story that we talked about a few weeks ago,

which is the deliberate attack on hospitals. We probably haven't talked enough about the deliberate attack on journalists. Yeah. The killing of Shereen Abuakal, the Al Jazeera correspondent, now going back many months, but now the more recent killings of Algeriazira correspondents on the ground, four of them, including one who Israel claimed was a member of Hamas. No, I thought he was very, very impressive. We should put in the newsletter the article that he wrote for UNICEF,

from which I quoted, and also another very moving piece he wrote, I think he was in The Guardian. And, you know, he was, I also noticed he's pretty professional. When you said, my last question, that was the first time that he actually mentioned the word dollars. Dolors are going to have to step up. So that's the other thing. In these situations, you must never miss up an opportunity to reach out to the donors.

Anyway, it's a great organization. They're working under massive, massive pressure. And I'm very grateful that he came on. Thank you, Alas. See you soon. Bye. See you soon. Bye-bye. Hello, it's all but pest and from The Rest is Money. I've just had the most gripping conversation with an economist Nick Bloom from Stanford, who's published a very influential paper on the costs of leaving the European Union.

He and his colleagues calculated that leaving the EU has cost us 8% of our national income, our GDP. That's 240 billion, more than we spend on the NHS every single year. What's really striking is that his numbers are now the national income. numbers being used by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, when she talks about the advantages of getting closer to the EU. So if you want to know how damaging Brexit has been and whether that 8% number is robust, whether it's real, join me for the latest episode of The Rest is Money.