PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Israel emptied half of Gaza. What’s next?

This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.

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Alaa Salama:

Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Alaa Salama, Audience Engagement Manager at +972 magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea. Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of +972 or make a one-off donation.

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Alaa Salama:

More than a month after the ceasefire in Gaza was reached, the scale of Israel’s bombardment and destruction has abated. But conditions in the Strip remain dire. More than 300 Palestinians have been killed. Aid is still heavily restricted. Recent rains have flooded tent camps, and over half of Gaza remains under direct Israeli occupation and inaccessible to civilians, leading many to wonder whether the genocide and ethnic cleansing have come to an end or have simply shifted into a slower and more bureaucratic form of violence. To understand both the diplomatic maneuvers behind the scenes, often without Palestinian participation, and the realities on the ground, I’m speaking with Mohammed Shehada, a Gazan political analyst and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Mohammed Shehada, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Mohammed Shehada:
Thanks so much for having me.

Alaa Salama:
Let’s start with the latest news. The UN Security Council just passed a resolution that many Palestinian factions, including Hamas, have rejected. Is there anything new in the resolution? Is it any different from Trump’s peace plan — so-called peace plan?

Mohammed Shehada:
Well, it’s extremely dangerous on multiple grounds. One of them is that Gaza is merely the pilot project. If they get their way with it, the West Bank would be next: no autonomy, no sovereignty, no state function, no institutions. Everything is up to the whims and desires of Trump, and a bunch of unaccountable corrupt cronies — Tony Blair and others. The mandate of that Board of Peace is sort of elusive, undefined, it’s very broad, it’s left deliberately vague, because they want to take power over everything. There were reports that came out in Channel 12 recently that even said that Kushner is interested in turning Gaza into a tax haven for billionaires. In that report, it said that Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel were interested in Gaza because of tax-free startups with very cheap labor, so basically having the population there as indentured servants. The sky is the limit when it comes to the imagination of what they’re going to do with the place. And then you see that the powers of the Board of Peace would have power over the judiciary. They would have power over hiring and firing judges, the attorney general, district attorneys, etc. They would have the power over the land distribution. They would have even the power over Gaza’s gas marine field, so it’s Iraq all over with the exploitation of oil.

They would have the power over virtually everything. The most concerning sign is that the countries we’ve been counting on to form some sort of resistance to this recklessness, to this obscene violation of the principle of sovereignty are the countries that issued a statement supporting and endorsing this resolution because they were muscled into it. It’s not that they did it out of pleasure. I’ve been briefed on some behind the scenes information throughout the ceasefire negotiations, and you see basically Arab countries — Turkey and others — being very devastated, upset, furious with the changes that were made to the Trump plan after they had endorsed it. Netanyahu met Jared Kushner for six hours and ruined the plan completely, he added enough loopholes to ensure that he can continue the genocide in many other ways. And they were devastated with this — they said “we did not approve of this.” They still issued a statement welcoming, supporting and endorsing the plan. The other element that is very baffling is the international stabilization force. So you have all of those Arab countries, European countries — even the UK is endorsing what is called the Northern Ireland model of decommissioning, which is very different from Netanyahu’s demand to complete surrender, subjugation and disarmament — and you have those countries understanding that the mandate of the ISF should be providing protection for Palestinians, enforcing the ceasefire, monitoring the ceasefire, security sector reform, and that’s about it. They cannot be a subcontractor of the occupation. They cannot do policing on Israel’s behalf. They cannot do counterinsurgency.

And then you have the UN Security Council resolution that is giving them all of those powers, not just powers, they’re tasking them with those responsibilities explicitly to go after Hamas, to go after other militant groups, which is why many countries have sort of verbally expressed interest in sending troops, but when it came to actually sending any troops, none whatsoever sent a single soldier. I’m in touch with CMCC, the center that Trump set up in Kiryat Gat, and they are very clear, they don’t have a single soldier on paper from any of those countries because nobody wants to be Israel’s subcontractor. The domestic upheaval resulting from being seen as collaborated would be enormous.

So what you’re seeing here is basically Netanyahu pushing Trump, Kushner, Whitkoff to endorse a vision that is untenable, that is unrealizable, so that Netanyahu would use the untenability of that vision as an excuse for the IDF to stay in Gaza. The latest I heard from CMCC is that Netanyahu has been saying even the ISF — the one that he’s demanding to take over Gaza — he’s saying they’re not going to be able to handle Hamas. They cannot disarm Hamas. He’s acknowledging this behind the scenes. His conclusion is that the ISF should not be on the ground; it should be the IDF that stays there for the medium term, in other words, forever.

Alaa Salama:
But the resolution passed. A lot of voices thought that Russia would veto it. Russia did not veto it. Is this an international admission of being unable to stop the U.S. from deciding what’s happening in Gaza?

Mohammed Shehada:
No, it’s rather another thing. You have Russia, China, and all of those Arab countries, and other countries that voted for it — I think Sierra Leone and others. Each one of them has its own interests, its own asks from the Trump administration. Each one of them would demand a bribe in return for throwing Gaza under the bus. That’s as simple as it is.

I don’t think that The U.S. was unstoppable in that regard. Russia could have easily vetoed it and got away without consequences whatsoever. What can the U.S. do when Moscow is already buried underneath multiple layers of sanctions? China could have as well vetoed it, because you see the U.S. recently bowing down to China when it came to the soya beans, the tariffs, all of those negotiations, because it was hurting American farmers very severely. In that regard, the only logical explanation is that each one of those countries got something in return. It’s yet to be seen what that was.

Alaa Salama:
On the Palestinian side, Hamas rejected the resolution, as did many Palestinian factions. But in reality, what do we see them being able to do?

Mohammed Shehada:
Not much. There’s mostly now the diplomatic capital, the political capital, the sort of public sentiment trying to mobilize their public or the world one way or another. But even then, one of the traps of this ceasefire is that it’s mainly a nominal one. If you look on the ground, Israel is still bombing Gaza. They’re still destroying homes one by one. They are still now restricting the amount of food going in way below the 600 trucks that were agreed upon, and 600 is the bare bone minimum for survival. So they are allowing it — it’s fluctuating like Bitcoin up and down. They’re still restricting tents. They are still not allowing anyone in East Gaza, 58% of Gaza, closing down the Rafah border crossing. and destroying all the homes left in East Gaza.

The list is very long. Hamas cannot do anything about it. They don’t want to give Israel a pretext to resume the genocide in full force. So instead they settle with this no peace, no war kind of equation. On the other hand, if you look at the limits of public opinion, it was a point of concern for many Palestinians that the momentum we’ve been experiencing for the past two years was mainly led by the nature of Israel’s action being very spectacular, obscene, unprecedented, genocidal, and flagrant. The videos we saw every day of decapitated babies, murdered mothers, families entirely killed, etc. that were stirring a lot of emotion.

The main concern back then was “What are we going to do when Israel lowers down the volume, continues the genocide in other attritional ways?” As you see right now in West Gaza, where 2.4 million people are stationed, caged, beleaguered, bombed, and starved, there is this forgotten place where the genocide is continuing, not by mass murder, mass destruction, or mass bombing, but by creating conditions on the ground that make life impossible, especially now with winter.

My phone didn’t stop ringing with pleas from friends, families, colleagues, etc. that are saying they’re drowning with the least bit of rain that hit Gaza because tents there are so flimsy. About 92% of homes were destroyed or completely obliterated. Israel is getting away with it because the element of the aggressive bombing is no longer there.

It was a point of contention — what can Palestinians do to maintain that momentum? Hamas on their own, not much. The Palestinian Authority on its own, not much either. What we needed is basically to use this as a moment to create a national platform, a national strategy, to use this momentum of the past two years to draw attention, not towards what Israel is doing to us on its own, but what we want and how we want to achieve it. And that was a big missed opportunity.

You see what the Palestinian Authority, their logic for the past two years and since the ceasefire started — the reason why they keep welcoming all those Trump statements and anything that comes their way without any sort of objection — is because they operate with the mentality of “keep your head down until the storm goes away. Don’t try to create any trouble that Trump or Netanyahu can exploit to crush the Palestinian Authority or the West Bank.”
They are terrified of this Gaza Administrative Committee being replicated in the West Bank, where you don’t have a government, you don’t have an authority, you just have service providers without any mandate whatsoever — no elections, no structures, no institutions. It’s all under Trump’s oversight, determination, and control, so it’s a very scary time to be a Palestinian and a very powerless place for any Palestinian leadership to be.

Alaa Salama:
Back to Gaza, back to the ground, last month you published an article on +972 Magazine, where you argued that the so-called “yellow line” was moving towards permanence. Now leaked documents show that the U.S. is in fact creating blueprints for a permanently partitioned Gaza. Can you briefly explain to us what this yellow line looks like on the ground? It’s a black box for most of the world — we don’t know what’s happening behind the yellow line.

Mohammed Shehada:
So the yellow line was supposed to demarcate the initial Israeli withdrawal. They were supposed to make an additional one and the third withdrawal throughout the ceasefire. They made none of this, they just froze that line and made it permanent, entrenched themselves there, put actual physical blocks in many areas. In some areas it’s still invisible and it’s an elastic one. It expands, it shrinks, it goes up, it goes down, the IDF goes into the other side — what is called West Gaza, where the entire population is — all the time. They go in, they carry out operations, assassinations, arrest people, they advance the line, they push the concrete blocks further in, or they just, in their minds, expand the invisible yellow line and anyone that approaches it is killed immediately. That line is giving Israel 58% of Gaza at the moment.

With the concrete blocks it gives them over 60% because they did it the same way that they did the separation wall in the West Bank. It took a lot of extra land on the Palestinian side — way, way, way too much — superfluous details there, but it’s the same kind of thing. The other element with the yellow line is Israel convinced the Trump administration that everything to the west of it, where the entire population is, should just be left without any reconstruction, without any work of the ISF, the international community, without any access to journalists, without anything at all. It should just be caged, cut off from the world, bombarded regularly, and even the IDF would advance in it constantly. They might continue to shrink it until it collapses on its own or until Israel destroys it there.

On the other side of the yellow line, the east part of Gaza, is the part where the IDF is located, but not allowing any Palestinian to exist. They kicked out the entire population there. They’re destroying homes there, one after the other, methodically, patiently, systematically; with mines, with explosives, with exploding barrels, etc. The bombardment there, the bombing, the noise is constant. I have friends who live in close proximity to that line, they say they hear those explosions all day long, from the very morning to the late night.

There’s the other element that Israel used this separation as a way to play the Americans. They said, “Okay, if you want us to start reconstruction in Gaza, to allow an international force to talk about government, the administrative committee, to talk about any of those things, we will only do it in East Gaza, behind the yellow line, where nobody’s allowed to exist, except for about a couple thousand gang members, that have been cultivated by Israel as proxies and their families and that’s about it.” Those gang members — one is led by a drug dealer with two deputies that are ISIS members and then you have another gang that’s led by a murderer, a collaborator, and another one that’s led by another drug dealer, and another one by collaborator — Israel is presenting those to the US as the future of Gaza, that those are de-radicalized people, that those are the models, the pilot project for what Gazans would look like.
If you have prisoners that broke out of prison and are seeking protection under the IDF’s control and are collaborating with them for that purpose — because they’re in the same dilemma as Netanyahu, criminals on the run from authorities — then you can get them to say whatever you want. They’re living under your mercy. If you kill any of them overnight, nobody’s going to know a thing about them, it’s like a complete black box, as you said. So that’s why we see Israel using them for this propaganda purpose.

They are now trying to use the same kind of tactic to say, “Look, we’re not preventing reconstruction, we’re allowing it in the Hamas-free area.” That is the Abu Shabab area. The main point of concern there is that who would want to move into an area controlled by the IDF and run by a criminal gang. That’s exactly what Israel is counting on — that nobody would want to move in there, that it would be a minimal population movement to the other side, to East Gaza. The IDF controls who’s allowed to go to East Gaza in the first place; until now, they’re not allowing anybody. So later on, they can say, “We need to vet people, we need to make sure they’re not affiliated with Hamas” and drown them in bureaucratic procedure. There’s all sorts of tricks to do here.

Even with East Gaza, where reconstruction is supposed to happen, Israel and the U.S. have the clear understanding that it would not be any genuine rebuilding of homes. They would just provide them with caravans, prefabricated homes, food, water. The Americans have the clear working assumption that if they just dump food into an area and a few more people until people scurry there like rats — “there’s food, run there for your life or else you’re going to bomb West Gaza” — that everybody would want to move there.

It wouldn’t work, and that’s exactly what Netanyahu was banking on. He has no interest in Gaza being habitable whatsoever. He wants to use this as a facade and excuse to resume the bombing, to resume the starvation, the invasion of West Gaza. He will keep pointing at East Gaza and say, “Look, we have new Rafah!,” where you have this Potemkin village, a facade as a PR stunt, and nothing more.

Alaa Salama:
Just looking at history, when has Israel ever given back any piece of land that is taken? And I’m sorry, it’s scary to now say Western and Eastern Gaza, like this is a new thing that If things keep moving forward the way they are, this is just creating reality on the ground, which Israel is great at. But this is also incredible because Israel has done — throughout the genocide — has done so much to try and empty northern Gaza of its inhabitants, and it failed. But now we’re talking about — you said almost 60% of Gaza being almost empty of its residents — How did we get here? How did that happen?

Mohammed Shehada:
Well, the IDF methodically would go into neighborhood by neighborhood and they would declare it what is called an “extermination zone,” which means soldiers there are authorized to shoot to kill anybody except for animals. That was the cruelty of it: the soldiers gave testimonies where they said, “we are allowed to shoot any human whatsoever, even at a long distance where they’re not threatening us. But with stray dogs, the only open fire procedure is when the dog’s jaw is about to bite you. That’s when you can shoot them. Otherwise, you’re not allowed to.”
So each neighborhood would go to, they would turn it into that extermination zone, or “kill zone” and give people there three choices. Either they would kill people at random, they would round them up and take them to the Sde Teiman man torture camp, or they would put them on a death march and force them out at gunpoint. You saw it happening in northern Gaza, in Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahya, between the months of October until December last year, when Israel imposed what was called the “General’s Plan,” completely caging that area, cutting it off from the rest of Gaza, starving them for 100 days — over 100 days — bombing them incessantly.
They would even send those robotic vehicles, armored personnel carriers that are filled to the brim with explosives — it had been automated — they would send them into those areas and bomb them or detonate them at random in densely populated places, causing almost like earthquake shockwaves. They would also use those quadcopters, where they would send those automated killing machines — or remotely controlled ones — and they would send them to shoot at anybody on the street. So you had the population in Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahya, slowly thinning out over the course of those 100 days, where the IDF would use all of those combinations— starvation, mass bombing, terror bombing, quadcopter drones shooting at people — and then they would invade by land on the ground and force people at gunpoint, either to the Sde Teiman and torture camp or on a death march to walk all the way to southern Gaza.

I had a friend whose mother in her eighties was living in Jabalia when Israel was doing it, this “General’s Plan.” And she took a walk to visit her daughter, the house is very close by. And then as soon as she went out, a quadcopter drone spotted her and started shooting indiscriminately. That 80 year old woman started to run for her life and hide between destroyed buildings. And then she didn’t show up the next day and the next day, and the family was extremely concerned with what happened to her. They started to try looking, where did she go? Here, there, there. And then they found her.

Luckily, she was alive, completely emaciated, starved, but do you see like this terror shooting, this terror policy of shoot to kill, anybody at all, even the elderly? Then Israel invaded those neighborhoods, took people out at gunpoint, put them in two lines where they racially profiled any male between the age of 14 to 100 — anybody that looked remotely religious, anybody that had a beard, anybody that looked like Hamas-ish, anybody that they thought is interesting, as well as doctors, nurses, journalists, etc., they put them in a separate queue and took them back to the torture camp.

Everybody else, they told them, “You have this yellow neon light to hold as sort of like a flag, and you need to walk with it. There’s going to be a drone on top of your head. If you deviate from the line that we told you to walk on, you’re going to be bombed. You need to keep holding this the entire time as you march on this death march to South Gaza without food, without water.” It was a long, long, long walk, back then it was scorching heat in October. It became a little colder in December, and it started raining.

You had them walking for about 20 kilometers on foot. I have friends who lost family members on death marches. You had the same thing being applied in Rafah. Before they go in, they would bomb the area indiscriminately, incessantly by air, land, and sea; artillery fire every other minute; an airstrike constantly every five minutes; gunboats shooting indiscriminately, and machine guns. You would have people fleeing from terror, some people staying behind.

Then the IDF sends the robots, the armored personnel carriers, the drones, then they go in after sending the dogs, the sniffer dogs, or the human shields. Israel developed this “mosquito protocol” where they would capture Palestinians at random —including the elderly, children, and women — and they would dress them up as IDF soldiers and use them as bait. They would send them into areas that are likely booby trapped or areas where Hamas might be hiding or operating. They would send them there to just get shot and get rid of them. The people who would make it back alive, in so many cases that I’ve seen, have been exterminated right after.
But it became a pattern, very systematic. Soldiers were saying the reasons they were using human shields on this mass scale is because they were losing sniffer dogs — they put the lives of the sniffer dogs above Palestinians. They were very explicit about it. That’s why they called it the “mosquito protocol.” That’s how they managed to empty those areas.

Alaa Salama:
You previously mentioned that Hamas can do very little right now. Could you go a little further into details about why that is exactly? Where does Hamas stand in terms of its control of Gaza, in terms of its political powers inside and outside Gaza?

Mohammed Shehada:
Well, with Hamas, what you have there is that they have clearly lost their offensive capacity. They cannot pose a threat to Israel itself — not to the IDF — but to Israel itself. What I mean by this, they ran out of most rockets, they have [used[ the overwhelming majority of it. They virtually have none left, barely a dozen, a couple of dozens, and that’s about it. They are extremely reluctant to use any of them because of Israel using it as a pretext to resume the genocide. So they have lost the offensive capacity, but they still maintain a very substantial defensive capacity.
They can sustain an insurgency in Gaza for a very, very long time, because it doesn’t take much to sustain an insurgency. All you need is a couple of militants, a couple of combatants in each neighborhood operating autonomously, independent from the other cell, and each cell is hiding in a tunnel or in a destroyed building, etc. waiting to ambush the IDF when soldiers get entrenched and lose alertness to their surroundings.

All it takes is Kalashnikovs and anti-tank missiles, which Hamas has an abundance of. That’s the distinction that is made now with decommissioning versus disarmament: it is that disarmament means surrender, breaking the sword, bending the knee. Decommissioning of offensive weaponry is Hamas committing to not produce any new rockets and handing over the few rockets that are remaining to the Palestinian Authority, or putting it in depots where it would not be used, something like in Northern Ireland. So that is on the military level.

On the political level, you see Hamas’s popularity outside Gaza has grown significantly — outside of Palestine in particular — has grown significantly, because they were the main insurgency actor. But inside Gaza itself, Hamas’s popularity, support for them has diminished significantly mainly because there’s the resentment towards October 7th. In hindsight, what did October 7th achieve? It was a throw of the dice, a miscalculation. It allowed Israel a pretext to unleash what it has always wanted to do.

There is resentment towards how they managed the negotiations, the ceasefire talks. The things they accepted under Trump now are things that they have previously resisted. It is doubtful that even if Hamas had shown more flexibility and resilience that the ceasefire would have been achieved earlier. There is that resentment that is very substantial in Gaza.

There’s also the understanding that if Hamas stays in power, Israel will use it as a pretext to keep Gaza as a permanent refugee camp in ruins, as CMCC put it. Hamas also understands this. That’s why they decided from December 2023, two years ago, to step down from government. It was a unanimous decision in the movement. They agreed to allow the Palestinian Authority in, or a technocratic committee, but what you have there is Netanyahu vetoing it until now. The administrative committee has been on the table of the Israelis and the Americans now for about a month. The names of the people who would fill it. I think about 40 names were submitted, or something like this, and 15 were selected, there were rounds, etc and then Trump never answered, Israel never answered.
It’s the same with this police force that was trained in Egypt and Jordan. They were supposed to go in, take over from Hamas. Netanyahu vetoed it immediately. So Netanyahu is very interested in keeping Hamas in power in West Gaza for as long as possible to use it as a pretext to annihilate Gaza. And that’s precisely part of the reason why Gazans don’t want Hamas to be in power anymore. They understand this very clearly, even Hamas’s own members.
In the West Bank, it remains to be seen if their support would go up and down. It fluctuates. A lot of the time it’s led by despair. I would always tell European diplomats or American diplomats that the support for armed resistance amongst Palestinians is not because of the moral appeal of violence. It’s not because we want our family members to get killed while fighting Israel’s occupation and apartheid. It is because of the failure of every single alternative. With non-violence, when Palestinians see that it failed, or it was let down, it was abandoned, betrayed, or when they see that diplomacy failed, that’s how Hamas was getting support from the West Bank way more than they do in Gaza.

Alaa Salama:
So I fear to say it, there’s Eastern Gaza, or the “Green Zone,” and then there’s Western Gaza, the “Red Zone,” where the majority of Gazans are now living in unimaginably difficult circumstances. Can you tell us from your friends, your family there, what does daily life there look like right now?

Mohammed Shehada:
Well, the most resonant, the most repeated theme, in my conversations with friends and family there is the loss of meaning. Nothing means anything anymore. You feel that everything has been said over and over and over again, and words — the human language — cannot convey the depth of depravity that Israel is inflicting on Gaza. Early on in the genocide, I would call family and family, we would cry, we would express to each other hope, despair, complain, we would discuss politics, whatever it is. I was very keen to talk to people as much as I could. I would scroll through my phone’s contacts list every day to call people because this could be the last time I hear their voice.
Then over time, you saw this developing into wishes of death. People saying that, “If I die, I might get relief from all of this.” You had people wishing for death, you had people uploading their last will and testament on social media. And at some point, that too lost meaning. I had friends who were asking me, a mother, a breastfeeding mother at the time, a colleague of mine, was asking me, “If we die, what would be the best scenario, that I die before my son or my son before me?” It was very technical, practical questions.

And at some point, that lost meaning as well. There was silence setting in because you’ve expressed those thoughts over and over and over and over again, over 750 days, over 800 days, whatever, and it doesn’t feel like it conveys any meaning anymore.

Now people are talking again, like I call friends and family there, but it’s mostly practical talk. So I called my friend Ibrahim, and he basically said, as soon as I started, I said, “How are you doing?” He said, “We’re drowning, we’re drowning. The tent is flooded, we’re drowning.” His son is about four years old. He’s getting seizures all the time. He’s getting night terrors at night. He’s wetting the bed. He’s not speaking. He’s displaying aggressive tendencies. He’s screaming and yelling and kicking all the time.

And I have other friends — I have one of my closest friends, Anas, I lost many close friends, I barely have a couple now left. Anas, his brother, Noor, has been blinded by Israeli shrapnel. He was supposed to be operated on at the European Hospital, then the IDF invaded it on the day of the operation. That was over a year ago. So now he’s just bedridden with lots of injuries, including the shrapnel that took away his sight. He can still be rescued, his sight can be salvaged, but there’s no way to do it. He needs to be evacuated from Gaza, and Israel has allowed so far about 4% of the list of evacuees to leave.

Anas is staying in a bombed building. Like the building is in ruins, it’s about to collapse at any second. And he’s staying in it anyways. And I’m begging him like, “Anas, it’s too dangerous. It can collapse on your head. You and your family might die.” And he says, “It’s way better than sleeping on the street. There’s no tents, there’s no shelter.” And you see a lot of people burrowing through the rubble of their destroyed homes to try to salvage whatever room is left that they can sleep in. It’s beyond description.

You have also the other element of Israel constantly keeping them under terror with those surveillance predator drones. It’s giant drones that are hovering above their heads 24/7, in addition to the small quadcopters that are armed with pistols, with machine guns, etc., with grenades, and Israel is flooding Gaza with those. So every time I talk to someone there, you hear this endless buzzing noise in the background, [buzzing sound] and it doesn’t leave you 24/7. Those drones are equipped to shoot to kill, they can bomb at any second, so death is above your head. You’re constantly in survival mode.

You had this adrenaline rush. Your brain is shutting down. It’s maintaining primitive functions to keep you alive. You don’t have the mental capacity to process what it means to lose every single member of your family. As soon as the ceasefire started, I expected that I would see a lot of mental collapse because I saw it with the first ceasefire, people expected that it would last — the one in November 2023 — and I didn’t see collapse this time in the magnitude that I expected.

I’m seeing people exhausted, burned out, collapsing, but the reason is because they believe the genocide is still continuous, so their minds are still in survival mode — they’re still on high adrenaline, trying to do whatever it takes to survive. Cortisol levels go up, they numb your sensitivity to pain, they increase your depression, they increase your aggressiveness, they increase a lot of negative traits, and it causes permanent damage to the body.
In addition to starvation, you have this combination of mental disorders that Israel is inflicting on Gaza: claustrophobia, PTSD, depression, OCD, etc. that are eating your mind alive. And then you have all of those diseases that Israel is engineering to spread in Gaza in accordance with Giora Eiland, the Israeli retired general who called for weaponizing disease and starvation against Gaza. The conditions that Israel maintains Gaza stuck into are perfectly suitable for the spread of disease and starvation. Every person that I know there has had intestinal diseases, illnesses, over a couple dozen times. It becomes like a weekly occurrence — kids in particular suffer the most. That’s the way that Israel wants Gaza to remain for the foreseeable future.

Alaa Salama:
Given all of this, there’s clearly a situation that is completely inhumane; that is very difficult to imagine for anyone who hasn’t lived through it. When talking to these friends and relatives in Gaza, how do they see the future in Gaza? Do they even see a future in Gaza?

Mohammed Shehada:
Well, it’s a mix. You have people that are constantly asking for help to leave, but not to leave permanently. Almost everybody that I spoke to, they want to leave for a period of time, a moment of respite — to get medical treatment, to get education, to save up, to be able to help their families on the ground.

And you have people like here in Egypt where I am at the moment, a lot of people that I met, a lot of people that I know that are waiting, counting every second, every minute to go back to Gaza. It was part of the ceasefire agreement that Netanyahu agreed to allow the opening of the Rafah border crossing for people to go back and people to go out.

He never opened the Rafah border crossing particularly for that reason, but you still have people that want to go back. I tried to think in positive terms, with all the devastation that you see in Gaza — all the ruins, the trauma, the pain, etc. — you still have people that are saying on the ground, I talk to friends and family there, and they’re saying, “No, we can rebuild it. It’s not the end of the world.”

They are trying to start life in every shape and form with whatever primitive tools they are left with. They are saying, like one person put it to me best, he said, “We’ve been through the Nakba. We’ve been through 1948, 1967 — in both, Israel tried to finish us off and we found our way from it.” Gaza after 1948 was predominantly tense because Gaza was not as densely populated as it is today. The Gaza native population is about a third of the population there, or less than a third. Two thirds or more are refugees and kids of refugees. So they saw the days where they lived in tents exactly like right now, and that they managed, they persevered. So there is this one element.

The other element is the hope that all of this had collapsed the notion of containing, pacifying, sort of shrinking the conflict — this Israeli notion that they can just manage Palestinians without ever finding a solution, or that they can live by the sword, or that there is a military solution to the Palestinian question. There is the hope that all of those have collapsed with October 7th, with the genocide, with Israel’s failure to destroy Gaza, with the humans in it and kick them all out. They destroyed the physical space, the infrastructure, but not the human part.

There’s been a lot of diplomatic backlash, a lot of isolation, economic, cultural, etc. but as soon as the ceasefire was announced, all of those European countries, all of those Western countries, dropped any talk on sanctions, any talk on consequences. They all pretend that there’s now peace, that we need to move on. But the only thing that gives me hope is that the populations in those countries have not given up, have not fallen into re-normalizing Israel. You have people that are still angry, that are still devastated, even after the ceasefire was signed. Things after this genocide are not gonna be the same as before because the mask has been removed — people saw the ugliness with their own eyes.

Alaa Salama:
I want to agree. I want to think that too. The day of the ceasefire, or a day after, I was in complete astonishment thinking that, “Okay, now what? Now what happens to all the war criminals who orchestrated all of this?” And it seems like Israel has found a better formula to keep going with the genocide. It seems like what you talked about in the beginning, with these new arrangements, Israel can continue its presence in Gaza, can continue trying to make life impossible in Gaza.

It seems that Israel cannot force out 2 million Palestinians without serious ramifications — it seems like that is just out of the question right now. But I don’t think that the idea of ethnically cleansing most of Gaza is off the table. A few days ago, Haaretz released an expose revealing that some shady organization in Europe is basically putting a few tens, maybe a few hundreds of Palestinians on airplanes and trafficking them to unsuspecting countries. The latest was to South Africa. Is this the reality we’re looking at in Gaza right now where life is just unbearable? Those who can leave will leave, even thinking it’s not permanent, but Israel will try to make it permanent. And are we looking at a stalemate? Something similar to what we’re seeing in the West Bank, where there is no solution, but there’s also no war.

Mohammed Shehada:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I fully agree with you there, Alaa. But I think on the ethnic cleansing front, Israel has been trying this, what they call voluntary migration. They tried with every country that you can think of to convince them to take in Gazans. Nobody agreed — zero. So that’s why they resorted to this front company that is being run by an Israeli businessman in coordination with Netanyahu’s government, to basically just shove Palestinians into a plane, send them to countries unannounced, and hope to shame those countries into taking them.

But it didn’t work either. Like the number of people that were sent out that way is barely in the hundreds. It’s a very slow process that way. But Israel has not given up on it. They’re still wanting to maintain this situation that was described all the way in 1967 by Moshe Dayan. He said, “We will tell Palestinians we have no solution. Whoever wants to stay here shall live like dogs, otherwise they should leave and we will see where this would lead us and maybe in five years a quarter million people would leave and that’s not insignificant.”

So it’s a broad consensus in Israeli mainstream politics today as it was back then. They will continue this — keeping Gaza caged in unbearable conditions, including East Gaza. As I said earlier, it’s not going to be paradise. It’s just going to be containers, caravans, that’s it. They would maintain it in this permanent state of non-life — people there without jobs, without purpose, without hope, whose only option to live — very highly educated, very talented, but without life at all — their only option to live is just to leave. That’s how Israel would want to maintain it.
But then there is another malevolent Israeli plan — basically this new Rafah idea. Israel is saying, “Okay it’s a win-win solution in either case: If people don’t move in there with substantial numbers we can just keep West Gaza uninhabitable and new Rafah is the Potemkin village, the facade, the excuse. If people move in there with substantial numbers, then it becomes Israel Katz’s humanitarian city idea — the concentration camp that he announced publicly, I think in July, August this year. Or, it becomes Yoav Galant’s idea of the security bubbles, the gated caged communities, where you would concentrate people on the Egyptian borders and then manufacture any pretext whatsoever for a huge, significant massacre that would push people to run towards Egypt because once you’re in New Rafah, there’s no way you would be allowed in West Gaza again. There’s a huge, huge, huge buffer zone cutting those areas from each other. So your only option of fleeing would be to flee towards Egypt.

Israel is still very much holding onto that mentality that they can see it happen. They want to do it in a way that just creates the conditions for people to flee rather than the army blowing up a hole in the Egyptian borders and forcing people at gunpoint, because the first option means it’s people doing it on their own. Israel would just say, “We have nothing to do with this, it’s Gazans fleeing, we didn’t orchestrate this.” That idea is still very much alive.
The idea of settlements in Gaza is still very much on the table. When I asked the experts, “Why is Israel building in East Gaza, only in Rafah? They didn’t start any building, but why did Israel plan a construction there and call it New Rafah? Why not New Beit Hanun or New Beit Lahya or New Jabalia on the Israeli border? Why on the Egyptian border?” The answer that I got repeatedly is because Israel in that area in the very north of Gaza is planning to move settlers in very imminently.

And on the other side, the Israelis think that it’s a win-win — this situation, no peace, no war, is working for them. If Hamas retaliates at any point, then back to genocide in full force. The only thing that gives me hope in all of this is you can count on the Israelis to go too far. That’s when you start to see some backlash on a significant scale. That’s the first scenario.

The other one is if we ourselves organize, not necessarily on an institutional level — Fatah, Hamas, etc, but if we can get ourselves to just start an initiative on the level of Palestinian intellectuals, the level of Palestinian civil society, it can draw Hamas and Fatah to join in. The idea of the Great March of Return in Gaza, it was not a Hamas idea. It started by a journalist, a writer — Ahmed Abu Artema — then implemented by a journalist, Muthanna al-Najjar. He just put one tent on the borders there, not even borders — Israel doesn’t have borders — but on the separation fence. And then more people joined, and then all Palestinian factions jumped in and joined. So it could be a similar scenario. You never know, change is always super slow until it’s not.

Alaa Salama:
Based on that, maybe one could argue that the lack of Palestinian leadership and the lack of Palestinian democracy would make such moves almost impossible because they will be retaliated against not only by Israel, but also by factions on the ground, including Hamas in Gaza and Fatah and in the West Bank. Do you see any room for maybe more open maneuvers in Gaza now? Do you see criticism of Hamas being more possible in Gaza right now? Do you see movements independent of Hamas possible there?

Mohammed Shehada:
Yeah, there is hope for this momentum building up organically by one of two things. Either the release of Marwan Barghouti, sort of like a national symbol, huge magnitude, etc. that people can revolve around. Or the other one is national Palestinian elections, which are supposed to be held within 12 months after the end of the genocide, according to Mahmoud Abbas’s own commitment to the countries that recognize Palestine and to the Trump administration. In elections, what it does, it’s not elections on their own that are significant, but what they can allow to happen is that it provides momentum, it provides pretext, for young Palestinians to organize themselves independently from Hamas and Fatah and run for office.

You saw it happening in the West Bank with the municipal elections. I think there were cities, if my memory is correct, something like El-Bireh, where it was young people that won over. It was not Hamas, it was not Fatah. You have the same scenario if elections are held on a parliamentary level or a presidential level, where you would have, last time it was supposed to happen in 2021, you had about 35 different slates, different campaigns. One of them was simply called “We Want to Live,” and it was critical-minded Palestinians, intellectuals, etc.
You would have the same momentum with elections that you cannot have at the moment, because if I start a new movement today, if Alaa and I decide, “Okay, we’re gonna start a new party,” without any elections on the horizon, people would ask, “Okay, why now? What are you offering differently? What kind of power do you have? What kind of influence would you have?” None. But if you have elections, it provides you with this momentum, provides you with this obligatory passage point towards your goal. I think there is some optimism there — that if elections are held within the next 12 months, neither Hamas nor Fatah would get a majority.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians have not voted once in their lives. Last time elections were held — 2005, 2006 — ever since Israel has been sabotaging every attempt, every talk about elections, and the U.S. as well, and Europe as well, because they would say, “Oh, we’re afraid about Hamas winning.” But it’s because they just want a leadership that is not elected, not representative, so that it doesn’t resonate with its own people, so that its own people would not have this connection with that leadership if that leadership calls on them to organize or to take to the street. So now with elections, if it happens, it could change a lot, or at least it could be the key for us to mobilize and change a lot.

Alaa Salama:
Thank you, Muhammad. Thank you so much, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. This has been incredibly interesting, though a bit difficult.

Mohammed Shehada:
Yeah, I know things seem ugly, but there’s this saying, “the night is darkest before the dawn.” But as we discussed, it depends on how you use your tools available at hand. People on the left or people in the Palestinian camp, our main weapon is truth and justice. We don’t have much lobbying influence, much monetary influence, and that is to be utilized to identify allies. It is always being said that the right always looks for allies, the left looks for traitors, and that is a tendency that needs to be worked on. Thanks so much again for having me.

Alaa Salama:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Mohammed Shehada:
Thanks. Have a good day.

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Alaa Salama:
This episode was produced by Jennifer Cutler, with help from the +972 Editorial Team. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find the show. Visit 972Mag.com for in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine, and don’t forget to download the +972 app and subscribe to our newsletters. +972 magazine is an independent nonprofit media outlet home to Palestinian and Israeli journalists committed to equity, justice, and freedom of information. Now more than ever, independent media is essential. Please visit 972Mag.com and “click support us” to become a member or make a one-time donation. Every contribution helps us continue to bring you reports and analysis from the ground — truthfully, critically, and without compromise. That’s it for the +972 podcast. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.

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